“The other
disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first.” Why? There are
two possible answers to that question. Both are probably true. First, “the
other disciple,” as he is called, was probably younger than Peter. That is what
most Bible scholars believe. This is the man we celebrate today: St. John , author of our fourth gospel, written, Scripture
scholars believe, between 90 and 100 A.D., well after Peter had been crucified
in Rome
In the gospel which bears his name he
is identified throughout as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Known therefore as
“the Beloved Disciple,” he alone of all the twelve apostles returned to stand
beside the Lord’s cross, along with Jesus’ mother Mary and the other faithful
women disciples, after the men “all deserted him and fled” at Jesus’ arrest the
night before in the garden of Gethsemane (Mk. 14:50).
And it is this special love which
gives us the second reason for John’s earlier arrival at the tomb. His love for
the Lord was more passionate than Peter’s. Once he heard that the tomb was
empty, the Beloved Disciple had to
get there, to see with his own eyes what had been reported. And it was
precisely this special bond of love between him and the Lord which explains the
closing verse of our gospel today: “Then the other disciple also went in … And
he saw and believed.” John is the only one of the Lord’s apostles who came to
belief in the resurrection on the basis of the empty tomb alone. The others
assumed that the Lord’s body had been stolen. They came to belief only when
they saw risen Lord – and then only after overcoming their initial skepticism.
The American biblical scholar Fr.
Raymond Brown, who died in 1998 at age 70, writes that John “was the disciple
who was bound closest to Jesus in love [and hence] the quickest to look for him
and the first to believe in him.” The Beloved Disciple was also the first to
recognize the risen Lord standing on the shore after a night of fruitless fishing
on the lake, and to tell Peter, “It is the Lord” (Jn. 21:7).
“Faith is possible for the Beloved
Disciple,” Fr. Brown writes, “because he has become very sensitive to Jesus
through love. … Love for Jesus gives one insight into his presence.” On this feast
of the Beloved Disciple what better gift could we ask of the Lord than an
abundant measure of the love that he has for us?
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