Presence and the Threshold Part 3 The Table Threshold. Breakfast After Collapse: Mission from the Fire

The third in the series by Heidi.

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Some of us have named our hunger through trauma. Others just know what it is to sit in front of a plate and feel… gone. But either way, Jesus doesn’t ask you to prove you’re ready. He cooks. He stays. He says, “Come and eat.” (John 21:12).

There are moments in the Gospels where Jesus breaks bread, grills fish, eats in front of people who are scared or ashamed or unsure He’s even real. We’ve often read those moments symbolically—as rituals or signs. But what if they’re not just metaphors? What if they are mission?

What if the fish was real, the bread was warm, and the taste itself was part of the healing?

Because hunger is never just physical. For many of us, food carries meaning. Some have lost trust in it. Some eat in silence. Some perform hunger. Some numb it. But Jesus doesn’t demand an explanation. He simply meets us where the appetite went quiet.

In Luke 24, Jesus appears to His friends after resurrection (Luke 24:36–43). They are frightened, disoriented, unsure. And He doesn’t begin with proof or theology. He says: “Do you have anything to eat?”

They give Him fish. He eats it. Slowly. In their presence (Luke 24:42–43).

This is not performance. This is co-regulation—what neuroscience calls the way one nervous system helps another feel safe and grounded. …a kind of Spirit-embodied anchoring Jesus performs not by teaching safety, but by becoming it It’s not just a trauma concept—it’s a human need. And Jesus does it not with lecture, but by chewing.

He eats to show: I’m here. I’m real. I’m not ashamed to be in a body.

In John 21, He builds a fire and cooks (John 21:9–13). The same friends who scattered, denied, and froze in fear are now being fed by the one they abandoned.

No lecture. No platform. Just breakfast.

This is table theology as mission. Jesus isn’t just offering a second chance. He’s rebuilding the world through a plate of fish.

Because the Gospel doesn’t rush. It doesn’t demand regulation before it gives nourishment. It simply asks: Can I sit with you while you eat? For some, that moment might feel impossible. Trusting taste again, trusting people again, trusting yourself to know what you need. But He doesn’t rush you. He stays. He chews slowly. He doesn’t need you to be healed to feed you. This is not just about trauma. This is about being human. We all carry echoes. Hunger for belonging. Mistrust around nourishment. The feeling that we should be further along than we are.

But the table Jesus sets is not performance.

It’s Presence.

And whether you’ve named your ache through therapy, theology, or you don’t have a name for it yet—He’s still cooking. And He says, even now: “Come and eat.” She went to find the body. And now, here He is—cooking.

Imposter tables 

But we need to speak plainly now.

Because not all tables that bear Jesus’ name reflect His presence. Some have become imposters.

Tables dressed in linen and hierarchy. Tables guarded by gatekeepers, measured by status, rationed by role. Tables that hand out silence instead of bread. Tables where control is passed off as community. Where the body is welcomed in theory but shamed in practice. These are not Jesus’ tables. They are replicas. Platforms in disguise. And people know the difference—especially the ones who flinch.

When a table tells you to perform hunger instead of name it, to suppress your need instead of bring it, to be grateful for what harms you—that’s not communion. That’s theatre. The real table—His table—feeds the body without demanding a performance. It doesn’t size you up. It doesn’t shame your hands. It doesn’t measure how well you’re chewing.

Jesus never said, “Organise this in remembrance of me.” He said, “Do this.” Feed. Break. Offer. Stay.

If the table you’re building makes people afraid to eat, start again.

Because the resurrection didn’t come with applause. It came with fish, fire, and a quiet voice saying, “Come and eat.”

And if you think this is soft or sentimental, remember Acts 6. They didn’t get stoned for eating lasagna. They got stoned because they insisted that everyone gets to eat. Because daily distribution mattered (Acts 6:1–6). Because widows were being overlooked. Because food became the frontline of justice (Acts 7:54–60).

This isn’t a side dish. This is mission.

The table is not just recovery. It’s not just restoration. The table is a threshold. It is the place where systems are interrupted. Where shame is refused. Where new ways of being are born. Where the Kingdom comes quietly, with bread still warm from the fire.

This is where the old scripts fall apart: You don’t have to perform here. You don’t have to win a seat. You don’t have to hide the ache. The table is the gate where Presence meets you. Where Jesus stands and says, “This is the door. Sit down. The door is open because I am already here.”

When Jesus says, “Feed my sheep,” it’s not metaphor first. It’s meal first. And if we skip that, we’ve skipped Him. So we sit. We serve. We stay. We re-learn what goodness tastes like. And we say to whoever comes: You’re not late. You’re not too much. You’re not behind. You’re not what they called you.

You’re hungry. That’s enough. Come. Eat.

Metabolised Glory: fish oil on the fingers of God

And this too must be said: when Jesus rose from the dead, it wasn’t just His spirit that returned. It was His body. And that body wasn’t metaphor. It wasn’t ghostly or soft-focus or theoretical. It was transformed. Jesus’ DNA was altered. Glorified. Tangible. This isn’t just poetic imagination—it’s what Paul calls the ‘first fruits’ of a new kind of body (1 Corinthians 15:20–49). He wasn’t just recognisable by faith. He could be touched. He could eat. He could cook.

And the food He ate didn’t disappear like magic. It was digested. Because the resurrected body is real. This matters. Because the resurrection was not an escape from the body—it was the return of a body that could still bear wounds, still prepare meals, still offer Presence. This is not a symbol. This is the future we are being remade into. And it begins with breakfast. It begins with fish. It begins with Him, sitting by the fire, and saying once again:

“Come. Eat.”

We are not just reframing Jesus’ resurrected DNA—we are reclaiming resurrected embodiment from the false spirituality that tries to float through the wall without a body.

Jesus didn’t gain access by leaving His body behind. He didn’t transcend into spirit to reach the locked room. He kept His body—and still entered anyway. This is not ghost theology. This is glorified materiality. He didn’t escape the physical. He reframed it. The body wasn’t discarded for access. It became access.

And what we are naming is this: the danger of resurrection without embodiment—when we try to reach people, rooms, ministry, even healing, without being fully present in our own body. The temptation to walk through walls by becoming hyper-spiritual, emotionally dissociated, or performatively holy. The quiet heresy of thinking we can reach people more powerfully by being less human.

But Jesus didn’t go through the wall by becoming less real. He entered the locked room in His glorified, wounded, digesting body (John 20:26–27). And His first words weren’t, “Bow down.” They were: “Do you have anything to eat?” (Luke 24:41)

Mary went hunting for a body (John 20:11–16). And now that the body has returned, we keep turning Him into mist. Between the tomb and the table, we found Him. But between the naming and the eating, we forget that He stayed human. The danger isn’t that we doubt the resurrection. It’s that we don’t let it stay flesh.

The resurrected Jesus didn’t preach the gospel. He embodied it. He cooked. He chewed. He stayed.

Resurrection doesn’t mean the wounds are erased. It means the wounds no longer banish the body. He walked through the wall with scars, with breath, with hunger—and He didn’t stop being human when the miracle came.

We are not meant to float into glory. We are meant to carry it in our skin.

And the room is still locked. But the body stays.

And He says again: Come. Eat.

Not as proof of power, but as a declaration of Presence. And not symbolic presence—somatic, cellular, sensory presence. Because resurrection is not a spectacle. It is not a special effect. It is the return of the body that was brutalised—not erased, not replaced, but restored into a new form of reality.

And that body doesn’t float. It doesn’t shimmer with untouchable light. It cooks. It eats. It stays. It chews.

Chewing is the slowest, most human thing He could do.

There is no urgency in chewing. No domination. No manipulation. Only breath. Texture. Timing. Nerve.

Because Luke doesn’t want us to miss it. He could’ve ended the story at “He appeared.” He could’ve written “They believed!” and closed the scroll.

But he didn’t.

He said:

“They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He took it and ate it in their presence.” (Luke 24:42–43)

This is how the Gospel ends: with fish oil on the fingers of God.

Because Jesus isn’t demonstrating a principle. He’s rethreading trust through digestion. He’s telling their nervous systems: It is safe to stay in the room. Not with argument. Not with miracle. But with food moving from His mouth to His stomach in front of them.

We were trained to look for fire from heaven, not co-regulation through charcoal smoke. We were trained to think proof comes in volume. But Jesus offers it in molecular quiet. We overlook it because it’s not dramatic. But that’s the point. The Kingdom doesn’t come with spectacle. It comes with breakfast.

Why is this missional?

Because if Jesus sends us from the table, then everything begins with how He ate.

He doesn’t say, “Go and perform miracles.” He says, “Feed my sheep.” (John 21:17).

And how did He feed?

By staying present long enough to chew.

We think His presence is the proof of resurrection. But it’s not just His arrival that changes them. It’s that He stays. That He eats. That the One who broke open death lets them watch Him swallow. This is not performance. This is the slow undoing of fear. One bite at a time.

Some of you are weak, sick, and asleep—not because you doubted God, but because you’ve been fed at tables where no one discerned the body. You were given rules instead of bread. Silence instead of Presence. And the table—meant to bring life—became a site of starvation (1 Corinthians 11:27–30).

Sick with unprocessed ache. Weak from over functioning in systems that never feed you. Asleep in the sense that your body stayed alive but your spirit went offline. Numb from too many meals where no one noticed your absence. Disembodied because no one ever said: “You are the body.”

So when Paul says, “You have not discerned the body”—you’re hearing that now with prophetic clarity. He’s not saying: “You should have behaved better.” He’s saying: “You forgot who was at the table.”

Some of you are weak, sick, and asleep—not because of sin, but because our nervous systems were overwhelmed at tables that handed out form instead of food. We tried to stay. We tried to be grateful. But the silence was loud. The pressure was cold. And no one discerned the ache beneath our hands. This is not punishment. This is trauma. And the table that should have held us—became a trigger for dissociation.

Go apostolic—but go breakfast-shaped

Peter’s last fire was the one where he denied. It was night. It was cold. The charcoal was burning. And the questions— “Aren’t you one of His?”—were met with: “I don’t know Him.” (John 18:17–18) That fire held failure, fear, fragments. The smell. The smoke. The sound. His body remembered. And Jesus doesn’t bypass that memory. He returns to it.

He builds a fire in the same way. But this time, He cooks. This time, He feeds. This time, He stays.

We know this as survivors: trauma reenacts. The body loops. The nervous system replays what it couldn’t resolve. Peter could have spiralled forever. From charcoal fire to shame to retreat. Fishing. Surviving. Naming himself by his failure. But Jesus interrupts the reenactment not with confrontation, but with co-regulation. He builds a parallel fire. He repeats the smell. He brings back the body. But this time—He doesn’t ask for loyalty. He asks, “Do you love Me?” Not to indict. To tether.

Peter isn’t just forgiven. He is repatterned. Jesus doesn’t say, “You need to revisit that night.” He says, “Come and eat.” And then: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17). He creates a new spiral: from shame, to Presence, to meal, to mission. This is not mission without Presence. This is Presence rewiring the wound into witness.

There are two fires. The first fire is rejection, denial, collapse. The second fire is Presence, warmth, recalibration. They could have kept reenacting the first. But Jesus offers a second. And yes—there will be a third fire in Acts. But not yet. Because you cannot carry flame until you have sat long enough in the one that feeds you.

This is the radical reframe. Jesus doesn’t rescue them from trauma with words. He rescues them through breakfast. He doesn’t give them clarity. He gives them warmth. He gives them food they didn’t catch. He says: “What you couldn’t find in the dark, I already prepared in the morning.”

This is trauma-informed apostolic fire. So when you go, go apostolic—but go breakfast-shaped. Not lightning. Not thunder. Fish and bread. By the shore. With the body that stayed.

And now we must say it plainly. The Church of Jesus Christ has been operating in a trauma it didn’t know it had. And this is Jesus’ antidote. Not performance. Not repetition. Not reenactment disguised as renewal. But co-regulated re-entry into the site of rupture—with breakfast, breath, and the fire already burning.

He doesn’t re-traumatise to restore. He re-threads the moment through food. He doesn’t ask us to prove anything. He just cooks. And stays. And for every Peter who still smells the charcoal in their lungs—He builds a new fire. He says, again: Come and eat. Mary went looking for the body—and now we find Him feeding ours.

And it is from this place that we are sent. Not from perfection. Not from performance. But from Presence. From a fire we did not light, from food we did not catch, from a moment of mercy that rewrote our memory.

The commission does not come after clarity. It comes in the coals. In the warmth. In the chewing.

We are sent not to repeat trauma in new packaging, but to carry the memory of a meal that undid the loop. We are sent as people who have sat by the fire and found we were not condemned. We are sent by the one who stayed.

And so we go—with the smell of smoke still on our clothes, with fish oil on our fingers, with the ache of having been known. We go from here. From breakfast. From Jesus. We don’t leave the table to perform. We carry the fire that fed us. I think I might go rummage in the freezer for some fish fingers and see who wants to eat with me. It’s not spectacle. But maybe it is a miracle. Because it’s how He did it. And maybe that’s enough today.