Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
The upper room: waiting together
Acts 1:12-14
12 Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mountain called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away. · WEB
Told to wait, they wait — and the three verses that describe how are the only description the church gets of itself before it has anything to report.
They return from the mountain called Olivet, a Sabbath day's journey from Jerusalem — a detail that measures the distance in a unit only a Jewish writer or a Jewish reader would use, and one that quietly places the ascension close enough to the city that the walk back took minutes rather than hours.
The eleven are then named, and the list repays attention because of who is in it. Thomas is there, who refused the report. Peter is there, who denied him three times in a courtyard. The list is not edited. A movement inventing its own origins does not begin by naming its leadership and leaving in the men whose failures its opponents could recite.
With them are the women, Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers. Each of those three groups carries weight. The women had been at the cross and the tomb when most of the men were not. Mary appears here for the last time in Scripture, present but not prominent, one name in a list rather than a figure at its head. And the brothers are there — the same brothers who did not believe in him during his ministry John 7:5. Something happened between that verse and this one, and the text lets the change stand without comment.
What they do is prayer, continued steadfastly and with one accord. The phrase describing their unity recurs through the early chapters and is not a compliment paid to their temperaments; it is a statement about a group that had recently argued over precedence Luke 22:24. Whatever the forty days accomplished, this is the visible result: about a hundred and twenty people who agree, in one room, asking.
The scene is short because there is nothing yet to narrate. That is precisely its value. Every institution's account of its own beginnings is tempted to fill the interval before its first success with preparation, planning and structure. Here the interval is filled with waiting and prayer, and the next thing that happens is done to them rather than by them.
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