Mystery and memory at Easter

In fact John says that the beloved disciple – perhaps John himself – is the first to see and believe what he finds in the empty tomb, even if what he understands is not explained.

Mary hangs back and has the more dramatic experience, the first face-to-face encounter with the risen Jesus in the garden around the tomb.

My Easter moment came not in the heart of the Jerusalem, where the major churches mark the Holy Sepulchre in a gaudy, crowded basilica. It came at the garden tomb, an alternative site outside the city walls; a simple hollow in a rock within a carefully maintained garden which overlooks a skull-shaped cliff face.

Curiously the garden is closed on a Sunday morning – the last day of our visit – but being illogically determined to challenge the establishment, I went to take a final photograph. The gate was indeed locked, but around the corner, below the cliff face, is a public bus station.

Crucifixion generally happened on busy roads so all should see and be intimidated by the horrific scene of slow, agonising death and subsequent decay. Some scholars argue that the body would have been left to rot and so there would be no burial, no stone and no miraculously empty tomb.

But in place of the horror was a strange reassurance: buses depart from that place of the skull for Bethlehem and the journey home.

That one detail put the whole story in perspective for me. All was possible in that place; the hopes and fears of many years met in that moment.

In an era of instant karma, when multiple news channels attest the same events in what broadcasters call "reality", it pays to remember that the ancients had only memory, a frail and fragile thing.

Yet at Easter all memory points to the same conclusion: He is risen indeed.