The Virgin Tomb of Christ

I had never thought of this before.  From "Shameless Popery".

Both St. Matthew and St. John take pains to specify that Christ’s Tomb was never-before used. Matthew 27:59-61 says,

And Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock; and he rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb, and departed. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the sepulchre.

And John 19:41 is even more explicit: “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid.”  But why do they both specify this seemingly-mundane detail?

Because it shows that the Tomb is holy. Certain things are given to God alone, and we don’t touch them. That’s the original meaning of the Greek word hagios, used nearly 100 times in the New Testament. Strong’s Concordance defines it as meaning “set apart by (or for) God, holy, sacred.” A thing is holy by being given over to God in a unique way. There’s a good example of this in Ezekiel 44:1-3, in a prophetic vision of the New Temple:

Then he brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, which faces east; and it was shut. And he said to me, “This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut. Only the prince may sit in it to eat bread before the Lord; he shall enter by way of the vestibule of the gate, and shall go out by the same way.”

The Temple Gate is God’s alone – nobody else gets to pass through it, because God has passed through it. The Tomb of Christ is similarly God’s alone. Nobody else is buried there because it was set aside by God (even if not by Joseph of Arimathea) for His Son Jesus. And of course, the Apostles are able to continue to point to the reality of the Empty Tomb (Acts 2:29-31, 13:29-31) precisely because no one would ever be laid in that Tomb again.

If you understand this – if you can see why it mattered to the Jews that nobody else had gone (or would go) through the Temple Gate, and why it mattered to the Evangelists that nobody else had been buried (or would be buried) in the Tomb – then you should be able to see why the early Christians were so insistent upon the Virgin Birth and upon the perpetual virginity of Mary.
It’s not about marital sex being sinful or dirty. Matthew & John aren’t insulting burials when they emphasize the newness of the Tomb. Ezekiel isn’t demeaning entering the Temple. And the early Christians aren’t bashing the union between husband and wife. All of those things, in contrast, are good and holy. What all of them are instead emphasizing is that some things are holy, in that they belong utterly and only to God. In fact, some of the earliest Christian commentary on Ezekiel 44 makes it clear that the Virgin Mary is the Temple Gate of Ezekiel 44. For example, St. Gregory the Wonderworker (213-270) proclaims:

The Holy Virgin is herself both an honourable temple of God and a shrine made pure, and a golden altar of whole burnt offerings. By reason of her surpassing purity [she is] the Divine incense of oblation, and oil of the holy grace, and a precious vase bearing in itself the true nard; [yea and] the priestly diadem revealing the good pleasure of God, whom she alone approacheth holy in body and soul. [She is] the door which looks eastward, and by the comings in and goings forth the whole earth is illuminated.

That language makes some Protestants uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t. St. Gregory is saying is that the Virgin Mary, like the Temple of Old, or the Tomb in which Christ lay, is wholly and permanently consecrated to God. And who can deny this? Or who can imagine that this sort of total consecration to God somehow dishonors or diminishes His Glory?

The perpetually-virgin Tomb & the perpetually-Virgin Womb run parallel to one another, and they both tell us something about Who Jesus Is: namely, that He is God, Who alone can command these sorts of radical consecrations. In both His Incarnation and His Resurrection, Jesus emerges into the world in a radical way, and these “portals” between time and eternity are consecrated to Him absolutely and completely.