Empty grave

Reflection

The empty tomb sits at the very foundation of Christian faith, since Paul is explicit that without the resurrection the whole structure collapses (1 Corinthians 15:14). The Gospel accounts describe women discovering the tomb empty on the first day of the week, met by messengers announcing that Jesus was not there because he had risen (Luke 24:1-6), a claim so central that the earliest Christian preaching returns to it again and again. Skeptics across the centuries have proposed various explanations for the empty tomb, from theft of the body to mistaken location, and Christians have engaged seriously with each. What has proven harder to explain away is the transformation in the disciples themselves, from fearful and scattered to bold public proclaimers of a resurrection they claimed to have witnessed, often at great personal cost. The empty grave is not simply a historical curiosity to be argued over; for believers, it is the guarantee that death does not have the final word.

Questions to sit with

• What do you make of the historical claims surrounding the empty tomb?
• How does the resurrection shape the way you think about your own mortality?
• If the tomb really was empty, what difference should that make to how you live?

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