Gathered in the Upper Room

Having described the ascension of Jesus (Acts 1:1–11), Luke in today’s passage tells us that the eleven Apostles returned to Jerusalem (v. 12). Our Savior had told them to remain in the city until the Holy Spirit came upon them (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:12–14). Thus we see that in the earliest days after our Lord’s bodily return to heaven, His followers were obeying His words.

Luke tells us that the disciples had seen the Lord ascend from Mount Olivet, or the Mount of Olives, and they returned to Jerusalem from there. The distance to Jerusalem from the point of ascension was “a Sabbath day’s journey” (Acts 1:12), or about six-tenths of a mile (1 km). This measurement cannot actually be found in the Old Testament, but it was a Jewish standard at the time and part of the rabbinic oral tradition that was “ingeniously reckoned,” as one commentator notes, from an interpretation of Exodus 16:29 and Numbers 35:5. The smaller city of Bethany, where Jesus spent time during the last week of His earthly life, was located on the east side of the Mount of Olives about the same distance away. So it is possible that our Lord’s ascension took place near Bethany.

The Apostles, when they came to Jerusalem, went to the upper room, possibly the same place where they had celebrated the Passover with Jesus only about seven weeks before (Acts 1:13; see Luke 22:7–13). Luke lists the eleven Apostles, giving us the same names that he did in Luke 6:12–16 but not in the same order, and he does not include Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed Jesus and then committed suicide (Acts 1:13; see vv. 18–19). Present with the disciples were the women who had accompanied the Apostles to Jerusalem and ministered to the dead body of Jesus after He died, the brothers of our Lord, and Mary, His mother (Acts 1:14; see Luke 23:55–56). Our Savior’s brothers, the children of Joseph and Mary, had not followed Jesus during His earthly ministry (Mark 3:20–21), but by this point they had become disciples, perhaps as a result of Christ’s postresurrection appearance to James (1 Cor. 15:7). Significantly, apart from a veiled reference in Galatians 4:4, this is the last time Mary appears in the New Testament. Her absence from the Epistles indicates that she was not an important figure in Apostolic piety and thus that the exaggerated claims about her in some theological traditions cannot be sustained. Though honored to be our Lord’s mother, she was a sinner saved by grace alone just like the rest of us.