John 21:1-19
April 18, 2010: Third Sunday of Easter
The author of the gospel of John captures so much of what Jesus is about in this beautiful scene. The way Jesus engages the disciples is basically a recap of how Jesus dealt with people throughout his ministry.
The disciples are together – and they are suffering…and they are suffering on at least two different levels. First, there is the material or physical level. We have every day fishermen engaging in the every day struggle of trying to make a living. On this occasion, the fishermen are not catching anything – a problem that can lead directly to a lack of food and other necessary resources. This is not a trivial thing. The material level matters. Real people with real problems.
Second, they are suffering on a spiritual level. The disciples have been on a bit of a spiritual rollercoaster ever since Jesus died. His death was a huge blow, making them question everything that had gone before. Then, they didn’t know what to make of the empty tomb. It was maybe a glimmer of hope, but exactly what it meant was pretty much a giant mystery. Then, Jesus appears to them while they are locked in a room – twice. That, of course, had to be a spiritual upper. But it seems that spiritual high didn’t last too long. Soon after, they are back to where they started…back to the beginning. They are returning to their old lives of fishing. Their spirits, it seems, are diminished.
Peter, of course, had additional reason to be in spiritual turmoil. He had, in the end, betrayed his friend Jesus. He denied any connection to Jesus because he was afraid of what it would mean to be associated with him. He feared he would meet the same fate on the cross, so he lied about knowing him, about being a follower, about believing in what he stood for. It is not difficult to imagine what feelings that would engender. Shame, guilt, embarrassment.
And so here the disciples are, back at the sea of Galilee. After all that had happened, after the three-year whirlwind tour with Jesus, his crushing death, and the bewildering appearances, it’s almost like they just don’t know what to do next. It was probably a crisis of faith. But it was also an economic crisis. They needed to live, and for that they needed to work. So Peter, ever practical, ever concrete Peter, says, in a voice I imagine to be sullen and resigned, “I’m goin’ fishin’”. What else is there to do, he seems to be saying. That’s it, the dream has died, let’s get back to our real lives now.
So, here we are in the last chapter of the gospel of John, and after everything that had happened, we find the disciples defeated and in economic and spiritual disrepair …Peter having a double dose of the spiritual blues. And now, not even their tried and true lives were working – they weren’t catching any fish. It was, to put it mildly, a pretty low point.
Jesus comes to them in this time of need, and he ignores neither the material nor spiritual suffering. In classic Jesus style, he cares for the whole person. He attends to the material needs of the disciples, and he attends to their deep spiritual needs…with a double dose of healing for Peter. They weren’t catching fish, so he provides fish-o-plenty. “Do you have any food?” He asks. They don’t, so he feeds them. He meets them in their immediate, pressing, physical need – they need food. But he doesn’t just give them any meal, he sets a Eucharistic feast. Loaves and fishes he gives them. They would recognize these as the foods of miracles – the food that never stops feeding. It wasn’t just that he met their immediate need for food; this was a sign that he promised to keep feeding them forever.
Then, after they had eaten, Jesus faces Peter. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Even if Peter gets a little impatient with Jesus asking this question three times, we know how kind and compassionate it is. Here’s your chance, he says to Peter. Denying me is not the last thing you will do. You get to put that behind you and come back to the fold. Three times he denied, three times Jesus lets him declare his love for him.
So, Jesus feeds their bodies, Jesus feeds their souls, and then, because he’s Jesus, he invites them to do exactly the same thing for others. He’s not just comforting the disciples, he’s commissioning them. I have fed you, physically and spiritually; now, go feed my sheep. Jesus cares for the whole person – every aspect, and he sends us out to do the same.
From Jesus’ mouth to Paul Farmer’s ears. Paul Farmer feeds Jesus’ sheep. He cares for people, and like Jesus, he cares for them on every level, healing people in physical, material and spiritual ways.
Farmer graduated in anthropology from Harvard and went on to Harvard Medical School to become a doctor. He began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 when still a student, working with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau, determined to bring modern health care to the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere. Starting with a one-building clinic in the village of Cange, Farmer’s project has grown to a multiservice health complex that includes a primary school, an infirmary, a surgery wing, a training program for health outreach workers, a 104-bed hospital, a women’s clinic, and a pediatric care facility. It has become a model for health care for poor communities world wide.
I think it’s because of his dual perspectives of anthropologist and doctor that Farmer’s model in everything he does is to care for the whole person. He understands that illness is caused not just by biological forces, but by social, political, material and spiritual forces as well. He has cured many, many people of diseases…so much so that he has eradicated things like TB and malaria from entire regions in Haiti. But, he did not do this by attending to only the disease itself. To treat medically alone was not sufficient. To begin with, often people did not keep taking the medications once they left the clinic. This is a constant problem in treating curable diseases in the developing world. But Farmer was not deterred by this.
Many people, including those who set world health policy, assume the reasons for non-compliance with medical directions is because of things like lack of education, religious or cultic superstitions, primitive time keeping mechanisms or mistaken understandings of how medicine works. This has led many to assume some people are simply beyond help and it’s not worth putting resources into an effort that’s destined to fail. Farmer, however, conducted his own research into this problem. What he found was that compliance with complicated protocols of taking drugs to cure TB and manage symptoms of HIV and AIDS did not depend on level of education, religion, or how far out in the country someone lived. Instead, the main factor influencing compliance and cure rates was the availability of food and social support. Setting world medical policy, according to Paul Farmer, should not consist of ordering up research that justifies medical inaction. Rather, it should be directed at identifying the obstacles to care and removing them.
These obstacles include lack of housing, lack of clean water, no money, no food. In short, poverty. The World Health Organization now acknowledges that poverty is the world’s biggest killer. And the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely to have their suffering noticed. Farmer, and Partners in Health as a whole, recognize that treating disease and treating poverty must go hand in hand. Tracy Kidder, in a book he wrote on Farmer, describes how time and time again, Farmer and other doctors follow up with people who missed appointments or to see if they are taking their medications. They go to them – which often means hours-long hikes into the far reaches of rural Haiti to see just one person. And on these house calls, they deal with whatever they find when they got there. If they find them without money, they give them money. If they find them without a home, they build a home. In other words, they remove the obstacles to healing the whole person. And so Farmer’s patients comply perfectly with medical instructions, and they get better.
Farmer also attends to the spiritual needs of the patients who come to his clinic. He neither rejects as simplistic or farcical the local understandings of spirits and curses. Nor does he over romanticize or indulge things he sees as counter productive to someone’s health. He sees their religion for what it is – which is, of course, what religion is wherever you find it: a very complex mix of spiritual truths, myths and superstitions invented to cope with situations beyond our control. By treating a sophisticated system of beliefs sophisticatedly, Farmer allows people’s faith and beliefs to contribute to the healing of the person, something he sees as not just a nice add on, but essential to the whole picture of healing.
Farmer’s secret ingredient in all of this is that he listens to people. He accepts how people present their problem, even if it doesn’t fit his own way of understanding the world and science. He does not discount them, paternalistically asserting his own expertise. Instead, he helps people see that medication and religion can work side by side, helping each other.
Farmer is an Easter person, showing his love for Jesus and for God by feeding God’s people, physically, materially, and spiritually.
We, too, are called to love Jesus by feeding his sheep. But, let’s be clear about exactly what are we getting ourselves into when we try to feed those most in need? Paul Farmer’s story is inspirational. By any measure, he has done amazing things. No one would call him a failure, that’s for sure. But, step back and take another look at Haiti and we see, despite all that Partners in Health has done, a country that still looks beyond hope.
Even before the earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. 55% of people in Haiti are living below the poverty line. Haiti has an infant mortality rate of 60 babies out of every 1,000 live births, compared to 6 in the United State. Their economy has a negative growth rate year after year. And now, of course, those statistics are almost meaningless in the face of the recent earthquake. It’s hard to know what kind of difference something even as amazing as Partners in Health is making. People are becoming poor and sick at a much faster rate than Paul Farmer and the staff there can cure them. So here’s Paul Farmer, a great example of an Easter person, and yet even if we did what he did, just what kind of impact would it have?
Farmer finds the answer to this in his faith. By his own admission, Farmer’s religion most closely reflects Christian liberation theology. Liberation theology says we should care first and foremost for the poor –called a preferential option for the poor. His “conversion” to this religion came by talking and listening to many people in Haiti and other poverty stricken parts of the world. Almost all the peasants he was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: “Everybody else hates us,” they’d tell him, “but God loves the poor more.”
Farmer often talks about an imbalance of suffering. All suffering isn’t equal, he says. God has a preferential option for the poor, but Farmer is fond of saying that Tuberculosis also has a preferential option for the poor. Suffering is not equal. Liberation theology puts you squarely on the side of the losers in this world. Farmer believes we are called to feed the sheep – specifically the ones Jesus fed: the poor, marginalized and the outcast. But he admits this work is something that he calls, “the long defeat”.
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat,” he says. But that isn’t the end of the story for him. He goes on, “I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. But, [we Americans are] used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in Partners in Health is make common cause with the losers. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.” Then he explains, “I don’t care if we lose, I’m gonna try to do the right thing. And then all the victories are gravy. The other option is to be jaded because you’ve been fighting a defeat for so long.”
When Jesus says to Peter, “Feed my sheep,” he is both freeing him from his spiritual turmoil by restoring him to the community of disciples and he is inviting him into the long defeat. I’m sure the disciples’ spiritual rollercoaster continued over the years, but they didn’t go back to their old lives of fishing. In the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters we see the disciples and early followers of Jesus living out the ministry Jesus began. So why do people do this? Why do people join the long defeat? Remember, this life – this long defeat – is grounded not in obligation. It is not something we do because if we don’t God will punish us. It is grounded in love – in God’s love for humankind, seen so clearly in Jesus, and in our love for God. Faith is not a list of rules or a system of rewards and punishments, it’s love. And that love is manifest in our care for people – care for the whole person.
I love what Farmer says about his own faith. He has faith in the religious sense, he says, but then adds, “I also have faith in penicillin, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that HIV is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions. I have faith that those things are true too. So if I had to choose between liberation theology and science, I would go with science as long as service to the poor went along with it. But I don’t have to make that choice, do I?”
Faith is action, faith is love, faith is using every means we have to heal, feed, house and help one another. Faith is a preferential option for the poor. Faith is loving God so much that we feed God’s sheep with the bread of the earth and the bread of life. Amen.
