Main news for 6 September 2025

As can be seen from the evangelist's words, the apostles were far from believing in the Savior's resurrection right away, even when it was testified to them. Of course, the distrust in this case may have been connected with the fact that women told them about such an important event: women's testimony, especially when it concerned spiritual and mystical experience, was not customarily trusted very much.

And the issue here was not so much distrust of women's testimony as such, as distrust of that emotionality and inclination toward fantasies often characteristic of women, which in spiritual life can easily play a cruel joke on a person. And still, the issue was probably not only this.

The apostles simply did not believe in the possibility of Jesus' resurrection from the dead. In part, perhaps, they were even afraid to believe. Only very recently they had been certain that they would become participants in grand events, in that messianic war everyone was waiting for and which, according to everyone's expectations, was supposed to end with the Messiah and His Kingdom immediately triumphing on earth. A Kingdom, of course, earthly, visible to all, strong, one whose reality no one would be able to doubt, not even its worst enemies.

And those enemies, of course, would be overthrown; they would lie in the dust, asking mercy from those whom they had so recently despised and considered nobodies and nothing. Now all dreams and hopes had collapsed, disappeared like a mirage in the desert, leaving behind an emptiness that seemed impossible to survive. Fear of this very emptiness first made the disciples scatter in Gethsemane at the moment of the Teacher's arrest, and then hide in houses, avoiding any contact with anyone except one another. And now there were some new stories, some continuation of the story that they did not want at all; what they wanted was for everything to end as soon as possible and somehow, if not be forgotten (such things are not forgotten), then at least settle down inside, and for the terrible emptiness to disappear somewhere.

Meanwhile, the continuation of the story seems to promise nothing good; in any case, there is no peace to expect, and the women's stories only reopen recent wounds. Most likely, of course, something had simply appeared to them; their hearts hurt too, and when there is pain, what does not appear?... Here lay the thing that kept them from believing the testimony. None of the disciples of the already risen Savior could fit into their consciousness that emptiness could be not pushed off somewhere it would not be seen, but filled, and filled precisely by the One who had just died on the cross.

And awareness of the new reality came to them far from immediately: after all, the consciousness of fallen man is not adapted to perceive it at all. But when (already after Pentecost) the apostles' consciousness changed, everything became clear to them. Not when their Teacher rose from the dead, but when they themselves came to share in the life of His Kingdom. But it cannot happen any other way: reality becomes reality for a person only when it becomes part of his own life. Or his very life, as the life of the Kingdom he seeks can become a Christian's own life.