A Grave Situation

What do we do when a body goes missing?

Imagine the shock of visiting a loved one’s grave, only to find incontrovertible evidence that the grave has been tampered with and the body is nowhere to be found.

This is essentially Mary’s situation in the opening verses of the gospel text, and it was also the experience of Sherene Johnson.

Ten members of the Johnson family are buried in Brighton Cemetery in Alabama. It’s a town that gets a lot of rain, and it is not unusual for the cemetery to be completely underwater. This is a problem because when graves are submerged, especially those on hillsides, the deluge can literally raise the dead and send them floating away. After a particularly heavy rainfall, Johnson went out to the cemetery with flowers to remember her sister’s birthday. She noticed several of her family members’ headstones had been “rearranged” by the flooding. She had to pay someone about $75 per grave to reset the stones in concrete again.

Others are not so fortunate....