The Necessity of the Tomb

Roman Catholic essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, a man who impacted greatly the faith development of C.S. Lewis, brings striking clarity to the necessity and importance of the tomb of Christ in his classic work The Everlasting Man.

He writes:

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of an ancient eastern sepulcher and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase,they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.

The Apostle Paul reminds the Colossian believers that in Christ they are complete (Colossians 2:10) and that this completion had much to do with the fact that they had been “buried with Christ”, symbolized by their Christian baptism. Their old lives had once lived, but now “they could only die and they were dead.”

This too is the experience which we can claim for ourselves and upon which our faith stands. The old life with its sin, broken promises, failed relationships, heartaches, and profound emptiness has been buried with Christ and we have been raised to a new life in Him that is full and complete. The tomb is necessary. Death to the old life is essential but that old life must also be put away, buried, placed out of sight and beyond recall. Then we may acknowledge and embrace our completion in Christ.