FROM THE RECTORY STUDY
WINDOW MAY 2008

Do you know who Ebenezer Cobb MORLEY was? You don’t? Then you should do. Mr. MORLEY was a lawyer, the founding Secretary of the Football Association and the inventor of the F.A. Cup; that Victorian creation, which has come to dominate the lives, the finances and the beliefs of millions of people.

MORLEY and others met on October 26th, 1863 in the Freemasons’ Tavern, Lincolns Inn Fields and there devised the rules, which every referee, linesman and footie. fan have argued or fought over ever since.

He died in 1924. He had no children and no family. He lies buried in Barnes, south-west London, on the edge of the Common. Like many old graves, no-one bothered about it and it became overgrown. Some people thought that this was wrong and that something should be done. Others disagreed.

An F.A. spokesman told The Times “We gave the matter lots of consideration, but felt there would be no protection for the work done in not the best of areas. There would be syringes and condoms lying around. His grave is outside the boundaries of an official cemetery and so would be impossible to maintain. The grave could become the target for vandalism or graffiti, so there is nothing we could do. Maintaining it is not a viable proposition.”

The co-Chairman of the local Soccer Club was unhappy with this. They could see that having such an important, if forgotten figure, buried locally, could do them some good.

Graves are significant places. Archaeologists know that graves tell us about our ancestors; what they looked like, how they lived, what they ate, what diseases they suffered from, what they believed, how they died.

Graves are important places. It is to graves that people go to grieve. It is to graves that people go to remember, to be near the remains of the one they have known or loved, to pray, to argue, to wonder, to let go.

Graves are sensitive places. The Leicester Mercury or East Midlands Today carry reports of unhappy people; offended by health-and-safety regulations or rules about what they can or cannot do. People are easily distressed. Where the deceased is idealised, any obstacle is taken to mean an insult to their memory or insensitivity to the mourners. The greatest tact is required.  If you go down Leicester Lane in Desford, just passed the Bosworth College, you will see, on the left-hand side of the road, in a bend in the road, a tree. At the base of the trunk, the bark has been worn away. This is the spot, I understand, where, some years ago now, some young people were killed in a crash. From time to time, bunches of flowers appear.

More recently, my wife Jill. and I were on our way home from a shopping trip to Fosse Park. We were driving along Leicester Lane, Enderby and came to the spot where, a day or so earlier, some students had been killed in another car crash. The grass verge was covered with bunches of flowers. Messages had been taped to the lamppost. Some fellow-students were just standing around, standing around, standing around.

A few days later, I was invited to join others in the main hall of the Bosworth Community College. Grim-faced students sat in rows. Some were crying. Young students are not expected to die. What should I say? My wife Jill., as usual, had an idea. “Read them the Beatitudes” she said. I did. Afterwards, I was thanked for it. I had done nothing, except to bring some words of Jesus to people, at a moment of crisis, who may otherwise never think of Him.

Death is the most certain fact of life. Our culture is full of references to it and signs of it. It touches everyone. Yet denial is rife, because questions about meaning, purpose to life and how we will be remembered, if at all, are put to us in a most acute way.

The Bible contains many references and stories about graves and tombs, as you would expect from an ancient society. The Christian story in the New Testament takes us to a grave; the grave of Jesus. From that story, we are left in no doubt of the savagery of His death or of the fact of a burial.

What strikes me as interesting is not simply the Christian belief that Jesus was raised to life (crucial as it is), but what happened to the grave? It is not simply a grave that becomes neglected. It is a grave that is not remembered.  It is a grave that no-one needed. No cult or shrine appears.

The Bishop of Durham is one scholar who, in eight hundred pages, has set out to understand how death and graves were understood in the ancient world; both in The Bible and in the pagan societies around it. The Bishop has further shown how many ancient ideas have re-appeared in a twenty-first century guise and were on T.V. last night or the magazine article you read at the week-end.

For decades, scholars have told us that the Resurrection stories cannot be taken at their face value. They mean something else and it is the scholars, not the writers of the New Testament, who will tell us what the current theories are, for us to select, for further discussion. I read just such an article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement a month ago.

That leaves me with the crucified corpse of Jesus. For over thirty years, I have watched what people do with corpses and the ashes of corpses. I know from my son Christopher’s studies that, in warfare, human bodies can be completely destroyed, often by their enemies. I have seen from the roadside what the animal world does with carrion. It is a source of food, in an inanimate food chain, to be picked over and then left to rot away. I am left to conclude that the disciples of Jesus abandoned the body of Jesus to a similar fate, whilst, at the same time, becoming part of a movement in which the Resurrection of Jesus was the central (and totally-implausible) claim. I don’t get it.

When you read the messages people write at graves or put in the newspaper, you are struck by the human consequences of loss and by expressions of hope that someone has gone to a better place or that their soul is with Godor that we will see them again. This is comforting, but, I suspect, treated as wishful-thinking or a cruel (self) deception by many unbelievers. Why can’t we simply accept that death is the end and that’s that and that we must either move on or die ourselves?

Eight hundred pages is too much for most readers of the Parish News to get through, which is why I was interested in a book review of another, slimmer book by the Bishop, called “Surprised by Hope”; written, so the review says, in an easy, acceptable style, which, in my book, is not a sign of the simple-minded, but of one who has thought long and hard about a subject.

The key to the Bishop’s argument is the key to what we think about graves. The key is not just the hereafter or that all will be well in the end but what the Resurrection of Jesus does for us now. The Resurrection of Jesus is a surprise; not what we expect at all. Secondly, the Creator God has set in train, by raising Jesus, the rescue of the created world from futility.  To live with futility is to give up. To live in hope is to live well. To believe the Resurrection of Jesus is to say, in the words of the hymn: “Christ is risen;