Breakfast Made By Jesus
“Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine” (John 21:12).
After the resurrection, Jesus ate.
Not because He needed to, but because he wanted to. He had passed through death and come out into a mode of bodily existence the curse had no hold on. When He ate broiled fish in the upper room, and when He made a charcoal fire on the beach at dawn and laid fish and bread upon it and called His disciples to come and dine, He did so because He chose to. Because it pleased Him. Because He could.
A man who eats because he must, is under necessity. The risen Christ at the breakfast fire is the Lord of life demonstrating, in the most ordinary way imaginable, that His body is real, the resurrection is physical (material), and that He is still, gloriously and freely, Himself.
He cooked for them.
With all authority in heaven and earth now His, with death conquered and the powers of the age to come fully resident in His person, the risen Son of God bent down in the early morning and made a fire, and put fish on it, and waited for His tired disciples to bring in the boat. He made them breakfast. “Come and dine,” He said.
The disciples had been fishing all night and caught nothing. They were cold and tired and had not yet found their footing in the new world Christ’s resurrection had made. Their Lord, who needed nothing from that fire, chose to meet them at the level of a warm meal on a cold morning.
That choice is grace distilled.
He stooped to the breakfast fire the way He stooped in the Jordan, the way He stooped to wash twelve pairs of dirty feet the night before He died. Everything in His character is inclined toward His people. The resurrection freed that desire in a new way.
The same Lord who fed five thousand, who turned water into wine because a family was embarrassed, who stopped a funeral procession because a widow was weeping, that Lord came out of the grave. And His first recorded act on that shore was to make sure cold and discouraged men had a warm, home cooked breakfast, before He said another word to them.
The fire was already burning when they arrived.
He had prepared it before they landed.
Every mercy that reaches us before we knew we needed it, every grace already waiting when you arrived at the hard place, every kindness burning on the shore before your boat came in, is the same risen Lord doing the same kind of work.
Come and dine, He says still.
Because it pleases Him to.