Day 3 – The Went Up Into the Upper Room
Ascension to Pentecost – A Season of Waiting
“Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” – St. Matthew 18:20
“The Church is not a society of the perfect. She is a community of those who wait together for the perfection that only the Spirit can bring.” – Late Lamented H. G. Paulos Mar Gregorios, Metropolitan – Cosmic Man: The Divine Presence (1980)
Dear brothers and sister in Christ
Christ is ascended! Let us glorify Him!
I have been thinking today about the number one hundred and twenty.
Acts 1:15 gives it to us almost in passing. Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples – and Luke adds, almost as an aside, that the number of names together was about one hundred and twenty. It is the kind of detail that a reader can skip over without noticing. But I find myself returning to it, because it seems to me to carry more weight than it first appears.
One hundred and twenty people. Not thousands. Not even hundreds, in the full sense of that word. After three years of ministry across Galilee and Judea, after feeding five thousand and healing countless others and preaching in the Temple courts, the community that gathered in the Upper Room to wait for the promise of the Father numbered one hundred and twenty souls.
That is a humbling number. And it is, I think, a deeply instructive one.
A Body, Not a Crowd
The first thing to notice about the Upper Room gathering is that it was not defined by its size. It was defined by its character.
Luke does not give us an audience. He gives us a body. He names specific people: the eleven apostles, listed by name. Then the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee, who had stood at the Cross when most of the men had fled, who had been the first witnesses of the Resurrection. Then the brothers of the Lord. And then Mary, named explicitly and separately, holding a place in this gathering that Luke clearly wants us to notice.
These people did not simply happen to be in the same room. They had made choices, each of them, to be there. They had returned from the Mount of Olives together. They had found this room together. They were continuing with one accord in prayer together. The one hundred and twenty were not a crowd in the modern sense, a collection of individuals who share a physical space. They were, already, a body. An organism. Something with a shared pulse.
Metropolitan H. G. Paulos Mar Gregorios of blessed memory, one of the finest theological minds the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church has produced, wrote about the Church as a community that is always in the process of becoming what it already is. He understood that Pentecost did not create the Church from nothing. Pentecost set on fire what the Ascension and the Upper Room had already gathered and shaped. The community that received the Spirit on the fiftieth day was the community that had been formed, day by day, through the nine days of waiting. The fire fell on prepared ground.12
This is a vision of the Church that our Indian Orthodox tradition holds with particular clarity. The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church has never understood herself primarily as an institution or an organisation, though she has both. She has understood herself as a gathered community, a body whose life is constituted by worship, by the Holy Qurbana, by prayer offered together in the name of the Lord. The Upper Room is not a distant historical precedent. It is the template of what the Church continues to be, in every generation, in every parish, in every small gathering of the faithful who come together in His name.
What One Hundred and Twenty Teaches Us
I want to stay with that number a little longer, because I think it speaks to something we need to hear.
We live in an age that measures significance by scale. A post that reaches millions matters. A movement that mobilises thousands makes headlines. A community of one hundred and twenty people gathering in an upper room to pray would not, by any metric of our time, be considered significant. It would not trend. It would not be noticed.
And yet. The fire that fell on those one hundred and twenty people changed the world more thoroughly than any empire, any army, any movement that history records. Three thousand souls were added in a single day. Within a generation, the Gospel had reached the edges of the known world. Within three centuries, the Roman Empire itself had been transformed. All of it began with one hundred and twenty people in a room, praying with one accord.
The lesson is not that small things sometimes become big things, though that is true enough. The lesson is deeper than that. It is that the quality of a community’s gathered life, its depth of prayer, its unity of purpose, its willingness to wait together for what only God can bring, is more determinative than its size. The Upper Room was not preparing a strategy. It was not developing a communications plan. It was doing the one thing that no human ingenuity could substitute for: it was waiting, together, in prayer.
For those of us who are part of small parish communities, or small prayer groups, or small circles of faithful friends trying to live the Christian life in the midst of a world that has largely forgotten what that means, this is a word of genuine encouragement. You do not need to be one hundred thousand to be the Upper Room. You need to be gathered, in His name, in prayer, with one accord.
The Role of the Laity in the Upper Room Church
There is an ecclesiological point here that our Syriac tradition has always held, and that the Malankara Orthodox Church has embodied in her particular way, which is worth drawing out explicitly.
The Upper Room community was not composed only of clergy. The eleven apostles were there, yes. But so were the women. So were the brothers of the Lord, who had not been among the Twelve. So were one hundred and twenty others whose names we do not know, who are simply described as disciples. The embryonic Church, gathered in that Upper Room, was a community in which the whole people of God were present and participating. Not as spectators of something the apostles were doing, but as genuine members of a Body that was, together, doing the one thing that mattered: waiting, praying, and holding together.
The Syriac tradition has always understood the baptised faithful as full participants in the life of the Church, not as a passive audience receiving ministry from above. This understanding is written into the very structure of the West Syriac Qurbana that is our liturgical inheritance. The people respond, they affirm, they intercede, they receive. There are moments in the anaphora where the priest’s prayer and the people’s response form a single act of worship, neither complete without the other. The liturgy is a dialogue, not a performance. And this dialogical, participatory character of worship reaches back precisely to this Upper Room moment, where the whole gathered community, apostles and women and unnamed disciples together, continued with one accord in prayer.3
This is not a modern democratising impulse read back into the tradition. It is the tradition itself. The great West Syriac theologians understood the Church as the Body of Christ in a fully organic sense, in which every member, by virtue of their baptism and chrismation, has been made a participant in the royal priesthood of which St. Peter speaks (1 Peter 2:9). The laypeople gathered in the Upper Room were not there by sufferance or by accident. They were there because the promise of the Father had been given to them too. The fire, when it came, did not fall only on the apostles. It fell on every person in that room.4
The Indian Orthodox Church has, in her own particular way, maintained and embodied this understanding across the centuries of her life in India. Our Sunday Schools, our parish councils, our prayer communities, our youth fellowships, the deacons and readers and chanters who carry the liturgical life of the parish, all of these are expressions of what the Upper Room established: that the whole people of God, gathered and formed and praying together, is the context in which the Spirit works and the place in which His fire falls.
No One Waited Alone
I want to draw out one final thread from the Upper Room gathering before we close today’s reflection.
The disciples did not wait alone.
This seems obvious when stated plainly, but it carries a weight that is easy to miss. The command to wait in Jerusalem was not given to individuals. It was given to a community. The promise of the Spirit was not a private promise to each of the eleven separately. It was a promise to the Church, to the gathered Body. And the fulfilment of that promise, when it came on Pentecost morning, came upon the whole assembly at once. Divided tongues of fire, yes, but one Spirit, one Body, one gathered people.
This has always been the Christian understanding of the spiritual life: it is, at its heart, a communal undertaking. We are not saved in isolation. We are not sanctified in isolation. We are not waiting for the Spirit in isolation. The great Syriac teachers, from Ephrem in the fourth century to Isaac the Syrian in the seventh, were clear that the solitary life of prayer, while honoured in the tradition, is never disconnected from the Body. Even the desert fathers, in their profound solitude, understood themselves as praying on behalf of the Church, as members of the Body who had gone apart to intercede for the whole.5
For those of us living ordinary parish lives, this means something very practical. The Upper Room is not merely a metaphor for our private prayer. It is a call to the gathered life of the community, to showing up when we would rather stay home, to praying with others when our own prayer feels dry, to being present in the Body even when we do not feel particularly spiritual. Because the Spirit, when He came, came to the gathered community. Not to the devout individual sitting alone in a corner. To the Body, assembled and waiting, with one accord.
Our prayer communities, our parish gatherings, our Sunday morning Qurbana – these are the Upper Room. They are where the waiting is meant to happen. They are where we discover, Sunday by Sunday, week by week, that we are not waiting alone.
For Reflection
- Is there a tendency in my own spiritual life to treat faith as primarily a private, individual matter? What would it mean to recover the Upper Room sense of the gathered community as the primary context of waiting and formation?
- Who are the “one hundred and twenty” in my own life – the community with whom I am waiting, praying, and preparing? Am I genuinely present to them, or am I present in body but absent in spirit?
- How does the participatory, dialogical character of the Holy Qurbana connect to the Upper Room principle that the whole people of God, together, is where the Spirit chooses to dwell and work?
A Closing Prayer
Lord, You gathered one hundred and twenty souls in an upper room and from that small, faithful community You changed the world. Forgive us for despising smallness, for measuring significance by scale, for treating our gathered life as less important than our private devotion. Teach us to return to the Upper Room, to show up for one another, to pray together with the kind of one-accord that is not uniformity of feeling but unity of direction. Make our parishes, our prayer communities, our small gatherings of the faithful, into places where the fire can fall. And where we have been absent, where we have waited alone when we were called to wait together, draw us back, gently, into the Body that is Your home on earth.
Through the intercessions of the Theotokos, Queen of the Apostles, who held the Upper Room together in prayer, have mercy on us.
Amen.
Day 3 of 9 reflections for the days between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost. Come, Holy Spirit.
Patristic References
- Mar Gregorios, Paulos. Cosmic Man: The Divine Presence. New Delhi: Sophia Publications, 1980. The passage quoted draws on his theology of the Church as a Pentecostal community always in the process of becoming what it already is, developed across chapters 3 and 4. ↩︎
- Mar Gregorios, Paulos. The Human Presence: An Orthodox View of Nature. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1978. Contains his broader theology of participation, community, and the Spirit’s work within creation and the Church. ↩︎
- Fr. Baby Varghese. West Syriac Liturgical Theology. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. The essential scholarly reference for the participatory character of the West Syriac Qurbana and the role of the gathered faithful. ↩︎
- Brock, Sebastian P. The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition. 2nd ed. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008. On the baptismal theology that underlies the understanding of the laity as full participants in the Body of Christ. ↩︎
- Kollamparampil, Thomas. Salvation in Christ according to Jacob of Serugh. Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2001. Addresses the corporate, communal dimension of salvation in the Syriac theological tradition. ↩︎
