Gallicantu

“Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him.” Luke 22:61.

Sunday we hiked up Mount Zion.  Cresting the eastern ridge you come to where the house of the High Priest would have been in Jesus’ day.  Here would be the first part of Jesus’ arrest and condemnation: after being captured in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was brought by night to Caiaphas’ house, where his impromptu trial began under cover of darkness.

Still extant today are the underground pits in the area used as prisons: you can still see the holes in the stones where chains were attached.  Here Jesus is believed to have been held as they waited for morning to take him to Pilate.

Our site for Mass, then, was the same place that Peter had followed Jesus, wanting to remain close to him, but ended by denying him while warming himself by the fire.

The church, bearing the mark of the rooster, preserves its memory in its name, Gallicantu.

A sweeping view toward the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives opens from the hillside there.

Archeological digs have uncovered the original stones of 2,000 years ago that made the road coming up from the direction of the Mount of Olives.

The Gospel of today’s Mass held Jesus’ warning that where he is going, his listeners cannot come.  Peter had tried to go with Jesus, but the rooster’s crow drove home how miserably he had failed.  Peter’s tears, commemorated at this hillside church, show the devastation at seeing the door to Christ slammed shut by weakness.  But at the same time those tears reconfirm that with Christ no door must remain closed when we allow him to reopen them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All photos courtesy of Father Johnson.