The detail a relic-hunter would hate. Every other holy thing in this book can be kept — the bone, the painted image, the doorpost, the gilded Ark — and every one of them can curdle from a pointer into an idol the instant you begin to ground in the object instead of through it. But you cannot make a relic of an empty tomb. There is nothing left to cage.
It is the relic-operation taken to its absolute limit: a pointer with no object remaining to be boxed, which forces the eye to travel through it — up the chain to the only reference with no outside at all. Whatever else an empty grave may be, it is the one venerable thing on earth that cannot be turned into an idol — because the body that would have become the idol is the precise thing that is gone.
And it forecloses the counterfeit from the other side: the thing the mourners would cling to is absent, so there is nothing to manufacture a created reference out of. The emptiness does the work.
Sources. The Gospel empty-tomb accounts — Mark 16:1–8 and parallels (Matthew 28, Luke 24, John 20). Search: empty tomb Mark 16 gospel accounts women.
Appears in: Resurrection · The Relic · The Apophatic Apex · rhymes with the empty mercy-seat · and is the exact inverse of the empty temple (structure the Presence left — the idol-risk, where this is the anti-idol).