Dear All,
In some of the churchyards across the UK, especially in Scotland, you may still see metal grills or cages dating back to the 18th and early 19th centuries. These are called mortsafes or mortcages and were designed to protect the graves from ‘body snatchers’ who stole recently buried bodies from their graves to supply medical schools with fresh corpses for students to learn anatomy. Bodies were in short supply, and surgeons were only too happy to pay someone for an extra one (or go dig it up themselves!). After the introduction of the Anatomy Act in 1832, surgeons started to receive more corpses and the practice of stealing bodies died out, but some graves have retained mortsafes as a reminder of those times. If you happen to be on a ghost tour of Glasgow, an enthusiastic guide, stopping at Ramshorn Cemetery, would even talk you through the process and demonstrate the tools used for extracting bodies out of graves! Grim business.
I imagine that coming to a grave of a loved one and finding it empty is one of the most distressing experiences one can have. If they are not there, it is probably safe to assume that they are not too likely to have risen from the dead (just yet) and instead are somewhere in a medical facility or, perhaps even worse, in someone’s house. There is only one grave, or rather a tomb, that is an exception; the sight of that one empty tomb brought joy and hope and not despair. It may not be the same one that is at the centre of the Anastasis in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (another site in Jerusalem may in fact be a more likely location), but every single person reading this knows exactly which tomb I am talking about.
‘He is not here; he has risen’, an angel says to the women who come to that tomb early in the morning. The fact that he is not there, miraculously, does not mean that he is somewhere in another location. He no longer has a location anywhere in this material realm; he is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. He is on the road to Emmaus speaking with two of his disciples, he is in a garden with Mary Magdalene, he is in Jerusalem showing his wounds to Thomas, he is on Via Appia just outside Rome where he encounters Peter. He is in Egypt, in Ukraine, in Brazil and in Japan, and he is here, exactly where you are reading this. Let us rejoice in his presence and give thanks for that one empty tomb.
Ana