Children's Liturgy Sunday April 22nd 2007

Third Sunday of Easter 2007

The Third Sunday of Easter

In today's liturgy, we heard how Jesus filled the fishermen's nets with fish.

Seven of the apostles had been fishing for some time, without catching anything, until Jesus appeared on the shore, telling them to cast their nets on the opposite side of the boat.

Saint John tells us that they then caught ONE HUNDRED and FIFTY THREE fish!
We saw last week that the Bible is often written in the style of a poem, where words and numbers have hidden or extra meaning. This story is full of numbers which have extra meaning. Here, if you divide the number of fish caught by the number of apostles present, they would each have 21 with six fish left over. In the times when the Bible was written, the middle-eastern peoples would realise that the number 6 did not fit, because they would look for the number 7, which had special meaning. Then they would realise that the seventh fish is also in the story; Saint John goes on to say that Jesus was already cooking a fish on a fire on the beach. 7 and 21 were numbers which told of something very important.

Jesus is encouraging the apostles to go out to the whole world to 'catch' people by telling them about him.
Saint Jerome says that 153 is the total number of kinds of fish known about at the time this Gospel was written. Jesus helps the apostles catch ALL fish...in other words he wants to be known to ALL peoples.