“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” John 6:35
We began our day with the typical buffet breakfast at the hotel. By 7:40 am we all met at the hotel lobby and we walked over to the marina to get on a boat. We sailed on the Sea of Galilee. Even though it’s called a “sea,” it’s actually a lake. It’s seven and a half miles long by thirteen miles wide.
Father Willie gave us a mass on the boat. How amazing, to listen to mass in the same place where so many of Jesus’ miracles took place. The gospel reading was the one found in Matthew 14:22-33 when Jesus walks on water. Father Willie asked us to close our eyes, and to place ourselves in that moment. It was easy imagine Jesus walking towards the boat, in the middle of the storm. Father Willie helped us put it into perspective by setting up the scene. Jesus had gone up the hill to pray by himself. He could see the lake from where He was, and He saw the storm approaching. He noticed that His friends are in trouble because their little boat is being tossed around by the winds. He goes to the shore, but can’t find any boat that is willing to go out on those conditions. So He decides to take matters into His own hands, and begins to walk towards the disciples. Of course, when they see Him, they are terrified because they think He is a ghost. When they realize that it’s the Lord, Peter asks Him to allow him to walk towards Him. Peter begins to walk on the water, but then gets scared, and begins to drown.
Father Willie then told us a story that we have heard a bunch of times, but we can hear it one hundred more because it’s pretty amazing. He told us about a time when He had been listening to confessions for a few hours. When He finally finished, outside in the parking lot a lady approached him, and asked him if he could hear her confession. His first intention was to say “no,” because after three hours, he couldn’t listen to another one. But of course, he said “yes.” The lady told him that she was pregnant, but her husband had lost his job, they already had a son, and they just couldn’t afford another baby, especially because they had found out that the baby would have Down Syndrome. She was on her way to the clinic to get an abortion, but decided to stop by the church first to ask God forgiveness for what she was about to do. Father Willie tried to convince her, but no matter what he said, he just couldn’t change her mind. She told him that the decision had been made and she was having the abortion. She asked him for absolution, and he said no. He told her that he could not give her absolution for a sin that she had not yet committed. He left feeling terrible. When he got to his house, one of the older priests was there and he began to sob. He told the other priest the story, and he said he felt like a failure because he had not been able to convince this lady not to have the abortion. The other priest told him that he could not feel responsible. He had done what he could, the rest was between the lady and God.
About a year later, he was giving mass in the same church. At the end of the mass, he was in the back talking to the parishioners, when the same lady approached him. He recognized her immediately because her face had been engraved in his mind. She told him that she had been trying to find him for a while to give him a picture of her baby girl. On her way to the abortion clinic, she thought of everything that he had said, and she changed her mind. She had her baby girl, and she was born completely healthy. She did not have Down Syndrome. Even though this happened more than a decade ago, Father Willie still carries a picture of the baby girl in his bible.
Father Willie tied the story to the fact that alone, we can’t do anything, but with Jesus, we can do everything. Father Willie thought that he had failed because he couldn’t change the lady’s mind. But he planted the seed, and Jesus did the rest. Peter began to drown when he lost his faith, and became scared, but when he called out to Jesus, Jesus extended His hand, and He kept Peter from drowning. We can do the same. If we turn to Jesus, nothing is impossible. If we plant seeds, Jesus, the eternal gardener, will provide the fertilizer, the water, and He will help them to grow.
Our next stop was the Church of the Multiplication in Tabgha. We read the gospel from Matthew 14:13-21 about the miracle that took place in this very spot, when Jesus multiplied the fish and the bread. Father Willie explained to us that Jesus empowered his disciples. He did not enable them. A huge difference. When we enable someone, we make them dependent on us. He said that he sees this all the time with the boys at Belen. We, the parents, enable them instead of empowering them. By trying to help them, and resolve so many of their problems, we are actually hurting them. Jesus performed the miracle, but He asked the disciples to feed the people. And even though many people downplay the miracle by saying that the miracle itself was being able to share very little with many, a miracle really took place because at the end they collected 12 baskets with the leftovers. That would not have been possible from just two loaves of bread and five fish, when more than 5,000 men, women and children were fed. Father Willie also told us that the fact that it was 12 baskets was significant. The number 12 is very important in the Bible: 12 apostles, 12 tribes of Israel, etc.
From there, we walked over to the Church of the Primacy of St. Peter. This is the spot where Jesus asks Peter do you love me three times. Ana, our guide, read Jeremiah 16:16, and Father Willie John 21:1-23. Jeremiah predicted that when the Messiah came, the word would be spread by fishermen, which was significant since at the time, there were more shepherds than fishermen. Father Willie talked about the different types of love. The Greek language in which John wrote the gospel, has three different words for love. We only have one. Jesus asks Peter, do you agape me? And Peter, twice responds, I phileo you. Phileo is the word used for brotherly love. But Jesus is not satisfied. He wants it all. So he keeps asking him until finally Peter, on the third time, answers I agape you. He had to love Jesus with an agape love in order to build his church, and give his life for Jesus.
Jesus asks the same of us. He wants everything from us. He wants our jobs, our homes, our spouses, our children. And we should not be afraid to entrust everything to Jesus because He will bless it and multiply it in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine it.
We then took off our shoes, and we got our feet wet in the Sea of Galilee. How awesome to get our feet wet in the same spot where Jesus walked on water, where He performed the miracle of the multiplication, and where He spent so much time with His disciples.
Our next stop was Capharnaum, known as the town of Jesus because it was the location of many events and miracles in Jesus’ life. Capharnaum is one of the towns in which Jesus did the majority of his teaching. Farmers, fishermen, tax collectors, and Roman soldiers lived together here and built their homes using basalt, the local stone with a volcanic past.
Capharnaum is the city where Jesus goes to when He is rejected in Nazareth, His own town. In this reading, taken from Luke 4:16-29, Jesus is in the synagogue and they ask Him to read the Scriptures. He reads the prophesy of Isaiah 61 about the coming of the Messiah. He tells the people, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). But the people could not accept Him because they knew Him as the carpenter, the son of Joseph, so they rejected Him. Jesus tells them, “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown” (Luke 4:24). He then departs from Nazareth and goes to Capharnaum (Luke 4:31).
We sat under the trees and we read John 6:24-59 which is the reading when Jesus proclaims “I am the bread of life...” Jesus here is talking about the Eucharist and the mass when He says eat my flesh. Once again, Father Willie made the distinction between the Greek language and the English language. In the Greek language, what Jesus is really saying is chew my flesh and drink my blood. No wonder the Jews were scandalized. Father Willie made the comparison between a “palomilla” steak that he eats in five minutes, and a Ruth Chris steak that he chews and savors in order to get all the juices out. When we go to Communion, we must do the same. We must chew and savor the Eucharist, in order to get all of Jesus into us. He also said that when we go to Communion, we don’t receive Jesus. He receives us. We become one with Jesus.
In Capharnaum, we visited the ruins of a synagogue from the 5th century. When the archaeologists dogged below it, they found only one layer of civilization that dated back to the time of Jesus. That building they unearthed from the first century could very well have been the very synagogue in which Jesus spent considerable time preaching and worshipping.
We also visited Peter’s house (Matthew 8:14). A modern Catholic Church was built over it in 1991. The church is designed to look like a ship sailing on the Sea of Galilee. In the middle of the sanctuary, there is a clear window on the floor that allowed us to look down into the single room of an insula compound identified as the home of Peter. Father Willie mentioned the gospel passage when the paralytic is being brought through the roof into the house (Mark 2:1-12). He said: “when you look down into the hall, you can see what those people that brought the man asking for a miracle were seeing.” He also mentioned the miracle of Peter’s mother-in-law’s healing. She was cured in this house, and then, she began to serve. We are supposed to do the same. We are supposed to be empowered by this trip to go and spread the gospel to others back in Miami.
Shuki and Ana also mentioned that the word Church means assembly. When we gather at a Church, we are assembling together to hear the word of God. They also read from Luke 4:31-37, which talks about another miracle that takes place in Capharnaum when Jesus cures a man that was possessed by a demon.
It was so special to linger where Jesus did. We could almost listen to His voice as He spoke words of comfort and encouragement into our ears.
After visiting Capharnaum, we went to have lunch to a restaurant inside a gas station. It turned out to be better than yesterday’s place, except for the dessert. We had a bunch of appetizers (corn, hummus with pita bread, different types of cabbage) and for the main course fish and chips. Dessert was dates. Maybe with cream cheese they would have been better but by themselves they were pretty plain.
After lunch, we drove very close to Syria on our way to the Golan Heights. We were so close that we could actually see Syria in the near distance. The Golan Heights used to belong to Syria but in 1967, on the 6-day war, Israel conquered it. We had a great view of the entire Sea of Galilee from the opposite side of Tiberias. We could see the town but it was not clear enough to distinguish the hotel.
Once again, we had dinner at the hotel. It was the same type of buffet as yesterday, with the only difference that today we could eat meat. After dinner, we went for a walk. There is a walkway behind the hotel, bordering the Sea of Galilee, which was packed with people. We are not sure if it’s permanent, or if it was just there because of Passover, but there were rides for the kids, booths selling food, a type of flea market selling all kinds of items... It was very lively. We walked over to another hotel that our guides had recommended, the Scot, which is... Scottish. It was not kosher so Rafael and Paul had a drink, and we sat outside in the gardens which were very nice, and the temperature was very comfortable. We ran into a few people from our group that had the same idea as us.
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