door?  So she “ran”—­not with unwomanly haste, but with the quickened step of woman’s love—­“to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved.”  They were both loved, but not in the fuller sense elsewhere applied to John.  Astonished at her early call, startled at the wildness of her grief, sharing her anxiety, “they ran both together” “toward the tomb” from which she had so hastily come.  But it was an uneven race.  John, younger and nimbler, “outran Peter and came first to the tomb.”  “Yet entered he not in.”  Reverence and awe make him pause where love has brought him.  For a few moments he is alone.  His earnest gaze confirms the report of Mary that somebody has “taken away the Lord.”  He can only ask, Who?  Why?  Where?  No angel gives answer.  Still his gaze is rewarded.  “He seeth the linen cloths lying.”  These are silent witnesses that the precious body has not been hastily and rudely snatched away by unfriendly hands, such as had mangled it on the cross.

Peter arriving, everywhere and evermore impulsive, enters at once where John fears to tread.  He discovers what John had not seen,—­“the napkin that was upon His head, not lying with the linen cloths, but rolled up in a place by itself.”  John does not tell whose head, so full is he of the thought of his Lord.

“Then entered in therefore that other disciple also,” says John of himself, showing the influence of his bolder companion upon him.  Though the napkin escaped his notice from without the tomb, it found a prominent place in his memory after he saw it.  Who but an eye-witness would give us such details?  What does he mean us to infer from the “rolled” napkin put away, if not the calmness and carefulness and triumph of the Lord of Life as He tarried in His tomb long enough to lay aside the bandages of death.  When he saw the careful arrangement of the grave-cloths, “he believed” that Jesus had risen.  We are not to infer from his mention of himself only that Peter did not share in this belief.  We can believe that Luke does not complete the story when he says that Peter “departed to his home wondering at that which was come to pass.”  As they came down from the Mount of Transfiguration they were “questioning among themselves what the rising again from the dead should mean.”  As they came from the tomb they questioned no longer.

[Illustration:  THE DESCENT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT Old Engraving Page 224]

We long for a yet fuller record than that which John has given of what passed when he and Peter were within the tomb.  He frankly tells us that “as yet they knew not the Scriptures, that He must rise again from the dead.”  Neither prophecy, nor the Scriptures, nor the Lord’s repeated declarations, had prepared them for this hour of fulfilment.

We imagine them lingering in the tomb, talking of the past, recalling the words of their Lord, illumined in the very darkness of His sepulchre, and both wondering what the future might reveal.  At last they left the tomb together.  There was no occasion now for John to outrun Peter.  They were calm and joyful.  There was nothing more to see or to do.  “So the disciples went away again unto their own home.”