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Step 10: A step back for a step forward: ST. PETER’S PRIMACY
Restoration can be offered by one who is perfect and complete. Have you recently lost a loved one, been abandoned by a spouse, lost a job or been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness?
The realities of life do not need to become the story of your life. Make your mess your ministry. You may stumble and fall but the victory lies in outlasting the devil.
Rewrite the story of your life now!Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” –John 21:12
Inside the Primacy of Peter, in the apse before the altar, is a rock reputed to be the one on which the risen Jesus served breakfast to His disciples.
Mensa Christi (Table of Christ)
Known by its Latin name, Mensa Christi, the Table of Christ is not a freestanding rock but is part of an outcropping that extends outside the church onto the beach. Here Jesus would have placed the fish and the bread He had just cooked over an open fire. The fire itself would have been built on the rock, which by retaining heat would have formed a lovely hibachi.
Both the Last Breakfast and the Last Supper are marked by a disarming intimacy. But the latter, besides being much more somber, was a formal occasion as Jesus introduced a new liturgy into the old liturgy of Passover. The Last Breakfast is just the opposite: a relaxed, spontaneous gathering in a purely natural setting. This informality is all the more remarkable given that Jesus now appears in His resurrected form. How liberating this is—implying that the closer we come to heaven, the more free and easy we can be. Just the fact that this breakfast happens outdoors, rather than in a stuffy upper room, gives it a different ambience. The disciples must have been reminded of countless such open-air meals they had shared while traveling with the Jesus Road Show.
A further contrast: While supper happens toward the close of day, breakfast comes at the beginning. In several ways in this scene Christ Jesus sends a clear message that a new day has dawned: He reinstates Peter; He repeats a sign (the miraculous catch of fish) from the early days of His ministry; and He appears first thing in the morning, just as He did the week before on Easter Sunday.
Next door to The Primacy of Peter is the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes, rendering Tabgha a place well-remembered for the eating of bread and fish. Indeed perhaps it’s no accident that these two events are deemed to have happened in the same place.
Ancient cooking pots have been found at Tabgha, hinting that the early Christians may have periodically revisited this place to observe a continuing celebration of the Last Breakfast. As with the Last Supper, it may even have inspired a liturgy. It’s not hard to picture believers returning for generations to a site that held such strong associations with their Lord and His apostles, and where Christ Jesus created one of the most beautiful stories in the Bible.
