Church of the Week: The Garden Tomb, Jerusalem

Today, on the Monday of Holy Week, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit a place of worship that, while not a church, is a place I have worshiped deeply on four different occasions.

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, is the Garden Tomb, discovered in 1867. Though this place is definitely not the actual tomb of Christ, I tell folks who travel with us is that it is a great site to visualize, 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--in 2010:

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

We plan to return in 2014 to this beautiful spot, on our next tour of the Holy Land (after a 2012 "Journeys of Paul" cruise in the Aegean). If you like, you can read more about those planned trips here.