Sneak preview: Mealtime Habits of the Messiah

A few pages of of Conrad Gempf's soon-to-be-released book, Mealtime Habits of the Messiah, are now available at Conrad's web site. Here's a sample of that sample, about Jesus' cooking breakfast for the disciples in John 21:1-14:

When they get to shore, what do the disciples find? The risen Lord, master of time and space, who holds the galaxies in place and who knows all people’s hearts and will be both the judge and the criterion on the last day.

And he’s sitting there smoking ’em a few kippers for breakfast.

C’mon now, you’ve got to love him for that. If you read some of these so-called secret gospels, often written hundreds of years later by heretics who didn’t really know Jesus, you’ll find a risen Lord who is a glorious but ghostly oracle answering all their questions about the guardians of the seven heavens, the meaning of material reality and object-oriented programming languages. Not our Jesus. He’s concentrating on turning over the pita bread to keep it from burning, just the way he concentrated on drawing in the sand in the “cast the first stone” story in John 8—unconcerned with the people around him, apparently. Yeah, right.

And then, just when we think he’s going to look up and multiply his few fishes and loaves to feed all those disciples, we remember he’s already multiplied fishes: their nets are full.

What comes next is the most amazing and gracious thing, and the bit I love the best. Jesus is frying fish. He supplied a miraculous catch.What does he do and say next?

The excerpt is worth reading. And I look forward to reading the whole book.

Italicized text above is copyright 2005 by Conrad Gempf. Mealtime Habits of the Messiah is being published by Zondervan.