Last seen rising

Last seen rising | Daily Tribune

Nobody knows where Jesus ate his last supper. That’s the short, infuriating answer, the one you don’t get on a pilgrim’s tour because it kills the mood.

The room (Cenacle) they lead you to in Jerusalem is solemn and echoing, all Gothic stonework, raised, according to the best guesses, a thousand years after the supper it commemorates, by Europeans who wouldn’t have recognized Galilee on a map.

It sits above the tomb of a king and below the weight of fourteen centuries of argument, a stone room so spare it seems to wince under the weight of everything people insist happened here.

Here, the devout say Christ shared his final bread; here, others mark the birth of the Church itself; here, centuries later, the Ottomans turned toward Mecca in prayer. The cradle of histories, each a claim of faith and power over a space Israel holds and the Vatican still covets.

Tradition has gathered up there like the world’s most confident dust. If the original dining room survives, it could be anywhere beneath the Holy City, where you walk like you just realized every step could be a tomb.

You tiptoe, muttering apologies to apostles and think maybe this is the real miracle: that you survived walking here without bursting into tears or confessing every minor sin you ever committed.

Not far from that elusive supper room in the Old City lies a tomb smaller than the myth that surrounds it. That’s the first surprise. You expect something with cathedral acoustics or the gravitas of a pharaoh’s vault.

Instead, you find a cramped stone cell in the belly of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so low you could hit your head on salvation.

The faithful swear this is the bed of resurrection, disappearance, or whatever miracle strikes their fancy that day.

Most archeologists agree the location follows centuries of tradition. The stone has been scrubbed, repaired. Polished until doubt itself hesitates.

I laid my phone and my watch on the slab, trusting in its stories, if not the miracles. I imagined Jesus sighing at my poor sense of timing. (And worse sense of faith). Everyone else kissed the stone, murmured prayers. Wailed. I checked my notifications for God might have said hello.

Nothing. And yet I felt oddly satisfied, as if merely placing them there had earned me a small, private grace.

In any other setting, it would be logged as a cold case: a vanished body, no reliable witnesses, and a suspect list beginning with the Almighty. Here, it’s the load-bearing wall of the world’s largest faith.

In Jerusalem, certainty was as if it were a title deed to eternity. But absence is presence most difficult to hold.

Could it be a story constructed to evade the inconvenience of proof? Absolutely. But that’s where it gets complicated. It’s a void you cannot barricade, a glint in the record that dares you to inhabit a territory where evidence has no jurisdiction.

That trespass into the unprovable, against all good sense, against the grain of reason, is the miracle.

You don’t expect revelation to look like a slow wheel of birds hovering above the Jordan River, drawing deliberate glyphs in a script no living person could read, yet one I felt had manifested itself to be witnessed by me.

The Holy Land has a way to shake the ground beneath your certainty. It made doubt feel small, and belief terrifyingly possible.

Not a miracle. Science. Vultures "kelting" they said. Columns of sun-heated air lifting them high. They circled because death was near: Maybe a goat felled by the heat, maybe a fish gone still on the bank.

Or maybe the geometry of their dance was authored, as if an unseen hand had arranged them so it would land exactly where I was looking.