Following the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ a completely new kind of life was opening for all His disciples. A new kind of relationship with Him, and yet not with Him as before, for He left them and returned home to Heaven. They will not see Him, nor will they hear Him anymore, it was that final, it certainly did not take a day or two to get used to it, for it will never be the same. So, living all these happenings, and without Jesus, the disciples left the Mount of Olives and returned to the upper room, the same room in which they spent few hours with the Lord, commemorating the Passover, as written in the Gospel of John chapters thirteen to seventeen. 

After the prayer that Jessus prayed, written in full by the apostle John in chapter seventeen of his Gospel; they left the room and entered the Garden of Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives, where Jesus so often spend precious, happy hours with the apostles. They were absolutely unawares of the emotional storm that was going to hit them! for there, as the dawn was breaking, Judas entered the Garden with His mob, to apprehended the Lord, and take him to the residence of the High Priest.; there began His questioning. The Sanhedrin met specially to see the end of Him. By nine a.m. on the Friday Jesus was crucified, but what was a terrible drama ended up with a most wonderful victory, for God raised Jesus from the dead, on the third day, according to the scriptures. Forty days they saw Him, heard Him, ate with Him, as quoted previously; it is written that they were overjoyed to see the Lord! But all that episode was over, and as commanded by the Lord they returned to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit! As it is written: ‘When they returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk, (about 1100 metres from the city). ‘When they arrived, they went upstairs, to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James, and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew; James, son of Alpheus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.’ (Acts 1: 13-14) 

What an astonishing thing, to find His siblings with their mother Mary, join the disciples in the upper room! It looks like all that they saw, all the wrath that the Jews poured out on Jesus, their innocent brother, seeing Him die this awful death on a roman cross, then, finding Him alive from the dead, it must have changed their hearts concerning Him. But we do not hear much about all of them later on, nor about Mary their mother, except James and Jude, for each wrote an epistle, which are included in the New Testament. As for James, later, he become a prominent figure in the Church in Jerusalem. It is evident that those present in that room, were still in fear of the Jews, for they bolted the doors again, as they begun to wait in prayer, for the coming of the Holy Spirit, as commanded by the Lord.

As they stayed together in that room, they must have thought, and talked, about all that 

happened during the forty-three days since the Lord’s arrest, followed by His crucifixion! In their deliberations they arrived at the conclusion, that Jesus, in the end was not the one that they waited for. Then suddenly, Mary Magdalene burst early that Sunday morning, into the presence of the apostles, and said to them that the grave was empty! all that happened on the morning of that day, heralded to them a new beginning of a mighty, new relationship with God. But even then, they did not remember that Jesus said that on the third day, he would rise from the dead. They proved that during that weekend, having seen the death of Christ and the trauma of it, among their deliberations, as they talked between themselves in the Upper Room, they ended up depressed, disappointed, dismayed, and concluded, just as we would have that it was the end. But it all changed and their forebodings change into great joy for the Lord Jesus Christ was alive, and an exiting life was about to begin.