Tuesday: The Body of Christ

In 1883 British General Charles Gordon gazed over the walls of Jerusalem near the Damascus gate. The cliff-face opposite struck his imagination: Two craggy pits in its upper portion, a jutting vertical shelf of rock below and between, and a jagged, vertical slash below gave the distinct impression of a grinning skull. Thus began the debate about "Gordon's Calvary" as the sight of the crucifixion of Christ.

We visited the site on Tuesday. Our guide, Dr. Jim Denison, laid out the case for this as Where It Really Happened: The hill does indeed front the viewer like the warning label on a bottle of iodine or a pirate ship's Jolly Roger. (Jo 19.17 et. al.) It sits a short-hop grounder's distance outside the undisputed sight of the ancient walls (the rival Church of the Holy Sepulcher lies beyond the natural path of the old fortifications), on the intersection of major roads coming from several directions. (Jo 19.20) Excavations revealed a garden nearby as witnessed by an ancient cistern and olive-press. (Jo19.41)

Then there's the tomb: Someone went to the enormous expense of excavating a burial cave and roughed out niches for three bodies. . .but only completed one, a possible indication that something happened after the first go-round that made the place too sacred to reuse. The layout fits first-century Jewish tombs. Cut blocks of Jerusalem stone repair a gap near the door and a crack fissures the upper cliff: deduction - an earthquake jolted the joint sometime in the past. (Mt 28.2) Someone carved an arch in the external rock-face, cut several niches into its surface, and inscribed an anchor-cross: deduction - this was an ancient church with the tomb door behind its altar.

Is this Where It Really Happened? The traditional sight has the better pedigree: The Roman emperor Hadrian, whose party platform included desecrating as many sacred Christian sites as possible, built a pagan temple there in the early second century: deduction - he was trying to stamp out veneration of the spot as Calvary. The cistern, olive-press and tomb at Gordon's Calvary may date a few centuries before the time of Christ. Bottom line: You makes your donation (neither site charges admission) and you takes your chances.

Then we shared the Lord's Supper.

I sat with my fellow travelers, most of whom I had not known before the trip, some of whom do not even have the good fortune to be Baptists and none of whom belongs to my own local church. . .and each of whom is a living stone in the eternal Temple (1 Pt 2.5), a limb of the Body of Christ (Ro 12.5). As we shared the bread and the cup I pondered again the lines from G. K. Chesterton with which I began this series of blogs: "There is something of the same mystery or majesty in the mob as in the monument. . . .The sightseer might almost as well travel to see the sightseers as to see the sights." I thought of what one of my students, Joshua Fuentes, recently wrote about the Eucharist: "The Lord's Supper isn't so much a reminder of what Christ did on the cross as it is a reminder of what we should be doing through Christ." I recalled that Paul's discourse to the Corinthians on the Lord's Supper is less a doctrinal statement than a book of etiquette: We fire blanks at the sacred table when we fail to see the marvel of our living Lord in each other. (1 Cor 11)

As I munched and sipped I gazed across the garden to the gaping door of the tomb. I thought of Mary Magdalene's Very Strange First Easter Sunday. (Jo 20.15) Mary's mistake was that she looked at Jesus and saw a gardener. Our mistake is that we look at a gardener and fail to see Jesus! What matters is not where Jesus isn't (in this tomb or that one), but where Jesus is (in the assembly of faith before me). What proves the resurrection is not the absence of a body in history but the presence of a body in this world. What the world needs to see is not where He lay, but where He lives.

The existence of the Christian faith presents a historical riddle which has no good answer except the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Sacred places can help us venerate this event (the Church of the Holy Sepulcher) and experience this event (Gordon's Calvary). But Where It Really Happened counts for far less than Where It Really Happens Sunday after Sunday, weekday after weekday - not in the sacralized stone of Jerusalem but in the living stones of the saints.