Under a temple and a hill of dirt: Christ's tomb

JERUSALEM, 326 AD — Two hundred years ago, men who hated Christianity hauled in earth from a long way off. They covered the whole place where Christ had been buried, and paved the top of it flat. Ever since Christ was crucified, Christians had been coming to that tomb to pray. On the new platform the men built a shrine to the goddess Venus and stood her statue inside it. Now anyone who came to pray at the tomb of Christ would look as if they were bowing to Venus. Golgotha, the little hill where the Lord was crucified, stood a short way from the tomb, and it went under the same earth.

The temple was not a ruin. People were still making offerings on its altars. In all the time it had stood, no governor, no army commander and no emperor had touched it.

Then, this year, Saint Helena came east. She was the mother of the emperor, and about eighty years old. A journey like that was hard at her age. She went fast anyway.

Her son, Constantine, had beaten his last rival, Licinius, in 324 AD. From then on he ruled the whole empire by himself, and his was the only power that could lift a temple of Venus off its platform. St. Helena decided to make the journey after that victory, to honour God. And she went to look for the cross Christ was crucified on.

What she found was a wreck. Jerusalem, or what was left of it, lay in ruins. The ground Christians cared about was buried under all that earth. Saint Macarius, the bishop of the city, already had men digging to work out where the holy places lay. When St. Helena was shown the site she decided to make it a Christian shrine again, and she ordered the temple pulled down at once. St. Macarius worked beside her from then on.

Every soldier in the city, digging

Her son’s order supplied the workers, and that was every soldier stationed in Jerusalem. They were sent to clear away the temple and the platform it stood on. They threw the shrine down to the ground, and the statues inside it with it. Then they hauled the stone and the timber well away from the site.

Knocking the temple down still did not reach the tomb. The ground it had stood on was the hill of earth itself, two hundred years of soil carted in to bury the place. So Constantine ordered the soldiers to dig that ground out deep and cart the soil far away.

So the soldiers dug. They went down through the earth that had been hauled in, and they kept going until the old surface of the ground came up. The tomb was in it. It was a hollow cut into the rock, the place where Christ rose from the dead. Nobody had expected to find it there. St. Helena had been looking hard for this tomb, and the digging had taken a long time. By God’s help she found it.

According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, the digging turned up something else as well. Three crosses lay buried near the tomb, and with them the tablet Pilate had written on, saying that the crucified Christ was king of the Jews. One of the three was the Cross of Christ. The other two belonged to the thieves crucified beside him. Nobody at the site could tell which was which, and it troubled St. Helena. So St. Macarius had all three carried to a woman of rank who had been ill a long time and was close to dying. He had each cross touched to her in turn while he prayed. The first two changed nothing. When the third one touched her, she was healed, and she got up.

Word that the tomb had been found reached Constantine, and he wrote to St. Macarius. Nothing he knew of was as amazing as this. “The grace of our Saviour is so wonderful,” Constantine wrote, “that no words are adequate to express the present marvel.”