All Saints' Church, Harewood

All Saints' Church at Harewood near Leeds is an impressive and airy fifteenth-century building. Although now redundant (not least because the Earls of Harewood moved the village further away from their great house), it contains an unnerving though magnificent collection of ancient alabaster tombs. A dozen individuals are carved, life-size, in lying posture, as though they have fallen asleep. All are lords or knights and ladies; their still, silent features are rather eery. Were it a Hollywood film set rather than an old, English church, these cold, eye-less effigies would surely rise at night and walk about. Thankfully, it was not such a scene from a moving picture, and the doors remained reassuringly open.

Those who constructed and positioned these tombs anticipated the day of resurrection in which all shall rise, re-embodied, to hear sentence of God Almighty. Also in these grounds are buried thousands of commoner folk, for whom no sculpture or even marker was deemed necessary or affordable. They too, shall rise; they too shall share in Christ’s Kingdom if in Christ’s finished work they truly trusted. God is no respecter of persons; it is not the best graves and tombs which draw His favour, but those who shelter in the salvation of His Son.

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever. Daniel 12:2-3