VISIT TO JAFFA

Saint Peter's Church in Jaffa

            On our final Sunday in the Holy Land, we took our final bus trip to the ancient port city of Joppa (now called Jaffa) where we visited St. Peter’s Catholic Church.  This beautiful church stands on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.  To the north are the towers of modern-day Tel Aviv. The church commemorates the passage in Acts in which Peter has a dream where he sees a sheet being lowered by its four corners; on the sheet are all the animals of creation (Acts 10:9-16).  The message Peter receives from the dream is that the new covenant Christ has established between God and man has abolished the old dietary restrictions of Judaism.  

It was right after this that Peter baptized a man named Cornelius along with his whole family, the first Gentiles to be baptized (Acts 10:17-33), showing how the new covenant was open to all.  Peter’s visit to Joppa in a way represents the beginning of the spread of the Gospel beyond Jerusalem, an expansion to the ends of the earth which continues to this day.  And it is a very fitting place for us to visit as we near the end of our pilgrimage, a pilgrimage that began in Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, continued to Galilee, where Jesus spent the hidden years of his life and conducted his public ministry, and then to Jerusalem, where he suffered, died, and rose from the dead.  In Joppa the Church established by Jesus began to spread to the Gentiles. We are not called to remain in Jerusalem but to return to the seminary and to our home dioceses where we will soon be ordained deacons. And each one of us has been given the same mission as the early Church, “Go, and make disciples of all nations (Mt. 28:19).”