The Only Tomb That Matters is Empty

27 August 2025  Matthew 23:27-32

“You build the tombs of the prophets, and adorn the memorials of the righteous….”Matthew 23:29

We don’t really know where the tombs of the prophets are. The Bible doesn’t mention the deaths of any of the major prophets, and only one of the minor prophets, and it is a matter of great dispute where any of them are buried.

Why is that exactly?

Tombs are very important to us. We know where George Washington is buried, and Abraham Lincoln, and all the presidents. There is the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington, the tombs of many British worthies at Westminster Abbey, Egyptian Pharaohs at Giza, and Lenin in Red Square. So, why don’t we know where the great prophets are buried, or Moses, or John the Baptist? Why didn’t the authors of the Bible write that down?

Maybe it is because we are not supposed to get worked up about tombs. There is only one tomb that Christians should really care about, and that one is empty.

The problem with a lot of tombs is that so many of them enshrine stories of death and vengeance. They tell us in reassuring, intoxicating tones that our violence is OK, and only the violence of our enemies is a crime. It is the same story at war memorials in Richmond and Philadelphia, Moscow and Berlin, Washington and Hanoi, Gaza and Tel Aviv. Taken all together, the stories told at tombs say that all the violence, revenge and hate was noble. And even though that makes no sense, we are tempted to believe it.  

Maybe that’s why we’re not supposed to get worked up about tombs.

Maybe that’s why the only tomb we should get worked up about is the one that’s empty.

It is troubling to think of what kind of world we would live in if we hadn’t fought and won the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. We arestill morally certain that tyranny and slavery must be opposed, and it would be the grossest ingratitude not to be grateful to the ones who opposed it.But if you ask those who had to do the fighting, bleeding, and dying, you know that there was nothing holy about the slaughter of Fredericksburg, or the mud and disease of Andersonville. There was nothing holy about the terror of Normandy, the blood of Okinawa, or the cruelty of Bataan. Like General Sherman said, it was all hell, and it was a hell we made with meticulous care.

The problem with a lot of tombs is that they keep us from remembering that. The Scribes and Pharisees honored and decorated the tombs of the prophets, wherever they were, to keep from feeling moral agony, the ways they had been complicit in the economy of death: “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” (Matthew 23:30). Jesus knew that those same Scribes and Pharisees were getting ready to kill again, and kill someone far greater than all the prophets. That we don’t know where the tombs of the prophets are is perhaps divine providence to keep us from that sweet hypocrisy.

We need to remember the hell that we have caused so that we repent. Maybe we’re not supposed to know where the prophets are buried. Maybe we’re not supposed to get worked up about tombs, because the only one that matters is the one that is empty. We can still find our way there if we want – the road is marked by repentance.