When the Grave Isn't the Final Word

None of us  like to talk about death. We live in a culture that spends enormous energy hiding from it. We smooth it over, we look away from aging, we fill our days so we do not have to sit with the fact that none of us get to stay here forever. And underneath all of that avoiding is a quiet question most of us are afraid to ask out loud. When I face the grave, my own or the graves of the people I love, do I actually have anything that holds?

I want to take you to a place that answers that question in a way I have never been able to shake.

Just outside the old city of Rome, beneath the ground, there are miles of narrow tunnels called the catacombs. They run level by level, sometimes four or five stories down, and if you laid them end to end they would stretch for hundreds of miles. They were the burial place of the early church. Tomb after tomb is carved into the rock, tens of thousands of the Christian dead, including many who were killed for their faith in Jesus. You may have heard that Christians used these tunnels as secret hideouts during persecution, but that is the movie version, and it does not really hold up. The truth is more moving. Believers in Rome were not allowed to bury their dead inside the city, and they did not want the common Roman practice of cremation, because they believed the body would one day rise again. So they went outside the city, and they dug down, and they made a resting place for the people they loved.

Here is what stops me every time. You would expect a place like that to feel hopeless. Instead, it is one of the most hope-soaked places I have ever stood. Because the early Christians did not leave those walls bare. They painted and carved symbols all through the graves, and when you learn what they mean, it undoes you.

The most common is a simple fish, scratched into the stone over and over. The Greek word for fish is ichthys, and each letter stood for a word in the phrase "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior." The whole gospel, packed into a symbol you could draw in a second. When a believer saw a fish on a tomb, they knew the person buried there belonged to Jesus. You also see an anchor again and again, and that one comes straight out of Hebrews.

This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and reliable and one which enters within the veil. (Hebrews 6:19)

Sit with what they were doing. They were burying someone they loved, someone who in some cases had died for their faith, and they were carving the word hope into the stone. They were writing hope in the one place the world says all hope ends. And over and over you see the Good Shepherd, a picture of a shepherd carrying a lamb across His shoulders. They put Jesus carrying a sheep on the walls of a graveyard because they did not believe death had snatched their people away. They believed the Shepherd was carrying them home.

These were not people in denial. They were surrounded by death. They had watched people they loved be killed for following Jesus. They dug those tunnels with their own hands and carried the bodies down themselves. They knew exactly how real and how permanent the grave was. And still they answered it with hope, because their hope was not a nice idea somebody told them as a child. Their hope was a risen Jesus. They had staked everything on the fact that He rose, and that because He rose, they would too. That is the anchor. That is why you can carve hope into a tomb and mean it.

I have to tell you something I had not planned to share. A couple of months ago my mom passed away. We had a complicated relationship, shaped by years of mental illness and a lot of hard things in our family. She believed in Jesus, but the illness left a gap between who she thought God was and who He really is, and she was never quite well enough to be the mom or grandma we all longed for. She passed the same night I celebrated seeing my book on the shelf at Walmart for the very first time. An enormous high and a deep loss on the same day, and it still does not make sense to me. In the weeks after, I wrestled with real doubt about whether I would see her again. And as I was praying, the Lord said to me, She's here and she's whole. She was not whole here. Not her body, not her mind. But her spirit is with Jesus, whole at last. And that is the Shepherd carrying His sheep all the way home.

That same hope is offered to you, friend. The empty tomb of Jesus is the reason for every little fish and anchor and shepherd down there in the dark. Death is real. The grief is real. But for those who belong to Jesus, the grave is not the end. It is not the final word. There is an anchor that holds, even in the dark, even in the moments that do not make sense, and it held for those early believers exactly the way it can hold for you and me.

Father, thank You for the hope we have in You, the anchor for our souls. Thank You that Your earliest people could stand in a place full of death and still cover the walls with hope, because they knew You had defeated the grave. I am thinking right now of the woman reading this who is afraid of death, or grieving someone she has lost, or quietly living as though the grave gets the final say. Would You give her this same anchor. Would You help her see that the risen Jesus is the Good Shepherd who carries His sheep all the way home, and that because of You, she can have hope. In Jesus' name, amen.

If this stirred something in you, listen to this week's episode of the Hearing Jesus podcast, where I walk you down into the catacombs and share the whole story. [Listen here → When the Grave Isn’t the Final Word]