Digging for Answers! 10/18/2012

Digging for Answers -- Why Are Christians Always Buried with Their Feet to the East?

By Randy Seaver

 
Welcome to the Digging for Answers column on the Graveyard Rabbit Online Journal.

This column will depend on your submission of questions about cemeteries, gravestones, burial practices, and other topics that concern a Graveyard Rabbit (other than where his next carrot is coming from!). So please send some questions to the editor, who will pass them along and keep the columnist hopping.

Question:  Why Are Christians Always Buried with Their Feet to the East?

Answer:  The short answer is "They aren't always now, but they used to be." 

A survey taken of cemeteries started before 1900 in Europe and America shows that the burial plots have an east-west orientation.  The person is buried face up, and the headstone at the west end of the burial plot faces east.  If a cross is displayed, the cross is located at the east end of the burial plot.  For cemeteries started after about 1900, the orientation of the graves seem to be random.

Why was this a tradition in the past?  The answer seems to be that, in the Bible, Jesus spoke to his disciples about his second coming in detail. In Mathew 24:27, he told them “For as the lightning flashes from the East and is seen even in the West, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

This tradition is based on the belief that the dead slept in death until the "last day", and as such they waited on a future Redeemer, so that when Jesus returns, the departed would rise from the grave (be resurrected for the final summons to Judgment) already facing His direction.

There was an exception for Christian clergy:  Although Christians are traditionally buried facing east, clergy members are generally buried facing west. The belief behind this is that when the dead are risen, clergy will rise facing their congregations, ready to lead their people once again.

Traditionally, facing east was not exclusively for the dead, but for the living as well. Christian churches were built with their entrances facing west so that worshipers faced east during the services as they looked toward the altar.

Many older churchyards in England have graves on the east, south and west sides of the church, but few if any on the north side of the church.  Tradition was that outcasts (murderers, suicides, unknowns, etc.) were buried, often without markers, on the north side of the church.

That said, not every old cemetery is oriented in this manner due to the necessity of finding places for more recent burials.