Church of the Week: The Garden Tomb

Today's "church of the week" is not a church, per se, but it is a place I have worshiped deeply on four different occasions, and it's appropriate for this first Monday of Easter.

About 100 yards from the site that is sometimes called, "Gordon's Calvary," after a British officer and amateur archaeologist who identified a skull in the side of a cliff (the place of Jesus' crucifixion was called, "Golgotha," which means "place of the skull"), the bottom half of which is obscured by recent construction for a bus station, though the eyes of the skull are still clearly visible....

...is the Garden Tomb, discovered in 1867. Though this place is almost certainly not the actual tomb of Christ, I tell folks who travel with us is that it is a great site to worship and meditate on the resurrection of Jesus:

Inside the door, which bears a plaque asserting, "He is not here; He is risen," is a rock-hewn bier, where apparently someone had once been buried. The rest of the tomb was never finished:

The lovely Robin and I most recently worshiped here--we sang "In the Garden" and "He Lives," read Luke 24:1-9, and shared communion--this past January:

It's a lovely place to worship, with many nooks and private arbors for gathering.