I love the bombastic hymns of Easter Sunday, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!,” and all the rest. But I have also long treasured what is for me, and for many other Easter celebrants, I believe: the post-Easter mellow. So I heartily welcomed the recent essay by Isaac S. Villegas, “Resurrection, Then Breakfast.” (Christian Century, May 2025, pp. 32f.) Villegas tells us that Jesus conquers death so that he can come back and enjoy another meal, lingering with his friends as long as he can.
Villegas captivatingly recalls one post-Easter detail leading up to that meal, the disciples counting the number of fish they had just caught, after a long night of fishing: one-hundred-and-fifty-three. Strange, eh? Villegas defers to the commentary of David James Duncan, in the latter’s 1983 novel, The River Why: “How was this digit discovered? Mustn’t it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile, painstakingly counting ‘one, two, three, four, five, six, seven…’ all the way up to a hundred and fifty and three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified. Such is the fisherman’s compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics!”
Villegas comments: “God’s revolution has begun. Resurrection changes everything. And we find the disciples back at the same old boat in the same old sea doing the same old thing… The Easter gospel is about that kind of ordinariness: Jesus, coming back from the dead to be with us as a gentle presence, nothing flashy, just there – here. Christ is a steady and quiet here-ness, usually taken for granted, like our heartbeat, which we hardly notice because it’s so dependable…. The crucified Jesus is now resurrected, and he wants nothing more than to feast with his friends.”
In my own mellifluous prosaicisity, I fishingly add: let’s hear it for the post-Easter mellow.