Reading through the account of Jesus’ passion and resurrection in preparation for this year’s services, I was struck by a verse that I have not previously given much thought to:

          ‘Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid’ (John 19.41)

I had not really thought before about the place of Jesus’s burial being so close at hand to the place where he died. The reason that this tomb was used is spelt out in the following verse: it was the day of preparation for the Passover festival, the tomb was conveniently situated, and so they laid Jesus there. But at a deeper level – a symbolic and a spiritual level – this seems to me to illustrate a particularly important point, that the place of resurrection is one and the same as the place of crucifixion.

This is really important to know and understand whenever we find ourselves in difficult and unbearable circumstances. Our instinct might be to run away and leave our sadness behind, just as some of Jesus’ disciples did. But we would do best to revisit, as with the women on that first Easter Day, the site of burial set within the place of crucifixion.