ROAST FISH, HONEYCOMB, AND RESURRECTION
Peter Steele SJ
About twenty-two thousand years ago, in a cave in Spain, somebody painted seven men fighting. All are armed with bows and arrows. The painting is simple enough—the figures are little more than stick-men—but the bows and arrows are enough to ‘badge’ them as fighters. We know of them only that they fought—their gestures and their instruments say it all.
In our own day, also, we have our attention caught by significant gestures, of friendship or hostility: and by objects and instruments which have an eloquence beyond themselves. Shaken hands are different from shaken fists: a smile or a scowl can make or break a relationship: a portrayed rainbow is invariably a token of good news: a cross scrawled across almost any picture annuls something, or warns us off. We are readers of images, hundreds of times at least each day.
Between the fighters in that archaic cave and the people we meet today there runs the Gospel story, and it too is rich in eloquent imagery. In Holy Week and with the oncoming of Easter, we are presented with major examples: the water and the fire, the bread and the wine, the reared cross and the emptied tomb.
Today’s gospel—the reading for the 3rd Sunday of Easter (Yr B): Lk 24: 35-48—gives us two more such images. When the raised Lord presents himself to some of his followers, they are, we are told, ‘still doubtful, and bewildered with joy’.
He asks for something to eat: they give him a piece of roast fish, and a honeycomb: he eats with them, speaks with them one last time, and leaves them until, as he says, they are to be ‘clothed with power from on high.’ Let me say something about the fish, and something about the honeycomb.
Fish can of course be delicacies, as many Australian restaurateurs know: but for millions of people over the centuries fish has just been part of the staple diet—the food of the forgotten majority, the rations of common humanity. This is the way it looks in the gospels.
When our Lord provides bread and fish enough for all his hearers on one occasion, it is as if he were providing fish and chips. Fair enough, too, since what he tries again and again to bring home to any who will listen is that what he offers is not some luxury but is life’s greatest necessity. The level of our being that he is here to address is absolutely primal. Without him, he says, life is not on.
When we turn away from his challenges and his promises, we are like people with the worst kind of eating disorders: and there is only one way that can turn out. At that last scrappy meal with his first followers, his sharing the fish with them says, ‘It’s a matter of life and death for you to take my call and my gifts seriously. I am not a luxury: I am your life-source.’
Some of them, certainly, believed him: perhaps not all of them persisted in that belief. After all, even in their comparatively simple society, there must have been plenty of distractions—among them that perpetual distraction, the thing we fall back on at least in our hearts almost every day, namely, fighting. But if they got distracted permanently, he was right and they were wrong; if we get distracted permanently, he is right and we are wrong. But if—and we all do it to a degree simply by being present, again and again, at Mass—if we do try to turn back to the life-giver and the life-replenisher, we will also be turning back to the life-sweetener.
That honeycomb, in the story, is the great emblem of God our sweetener, God our joy, and of Jesus the mediator of sweetness and joy. Life may or may not have been meant to be easy, but it certainly wasn’t meant to be, predominantly, sour.
The Psalms testify that, even for people beset and besieged by various disappointments and griefs, there is a taste of divinity which is the taste of sweetness. Each Mass testifies that, even though it also cites personal guilt, the pain of mortality, the afflictions of humanity, is that we are summoned to sweetness. The honeycomb itself is certainly the outcome of much hard work, but in God’s providence it is also freighted with nourishment and delight.
Those fighters on the cave’s wall must not be allowed to have the last word, any more than the Roman executioners at the cross were to have the last word. Perhaps, if we want to live as men and women of Easter, we might consider whether, with words of cynicism or gestures of indifference, we are doing anything to sour the hopes of others.
I know, I know, it is a complex world—people can be foolish, demands can be unreasonable, promises can go unkept, lies can be told, the whole catastrophe grind on. But if anybody knew about all that, it was Christ: and still, and still, he shared the honeycomb.
