Chapter V

Why No Vigil

Not doubt. Unbelief.

2 min · They Did Not Believe Him

Where were they in His descent? Why not wait at the grave? Why not call the city to watch God raise Him? Why no vigil?

Because they did not believe Him. Not doubt. Unbelief. Doubt still keeps the appointment. Doubt sits in the dark and hates its own questions and stays. Unbelief makes other plans. Unbelief has spices to grind and a Sabbath to keep and a life to resume. Unbelief is busy with the practical work of a world in which He does not get up.

Not doubt. Unbelief.

He told them again and again He would rise. They still treated the risen Lord as a ghost and made Him eat to prove He had flesh. The Emmaus road is not a romance. It is two men walking away from the promise, explaining to the Promise why the promise had failed. He has to break bread before they can see. Later He has to ask for fish. The body they had prepared for burial is standing in the room, and their first theology of the event is that they are seeing a spirit.

But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And He said to them, Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Touch Me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.

Luke 24:37–39

If they had believed the rising they would have been willing to die with Him in order to rise with Him. That is the only rational posture, once the thing is true. A man who will be raised has nothing left to bargain with death about. They bargained. They chose flight instead. Yeshua was too much for that generation — too much to be a teacher, too much to be a casualty, too much to be a ghost. He would not occupy the categories they had left Him.

A vigil would have been the first liturgy. No hymns required. Only men standing where they were told the glory would happen, at the hour they were told it would happen, in the place they had helped to seal. They were not there. The stone moved without an audience they were willing to be.