When the Grave Isn't the Final Word: Hope in the Roman Catacombs

What the early church carved into a place of death, and the anchor that still holds in grief

Just outside the old city of Rome, beneath the ground, there are miles of narrow tunnels called the catacombs, and they were the burial place of the early church. Going down into them is one of the stops on our Rome trip, and it may be the most powerful place you can stand to understand the faith of the first Christians. We have already gone into a prison and walked an ancient road in this series. Today we go back underground, but into a very different kind of dark, and what the early believers left on these walls is not despair. It is hope.

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In this episode

00:08 Welcome and the bonus series

00:34 Back underground: what the catacombs really are

03:00 The early church's cemetery and the underground church

04:53 The symbols on the walls: the fish

06:44 The anchor and the Good Shepherd

08:41 Hope in the middle of death

10:31 Refusing to let the grave have the last word

12:31 What standing there does to your faith

14:39 Losing my mom, and "she's here and she's whole"

18:24 A prayer and an invitation

What Are the Roman Catacombs?

The catacombs are miles of narrow tunnels dug into soft rock beneath the outskirts of Rome, running level by level, sometimes four or five stories deep, and in places even deeper. Laid end to end they would stretch for hundreds of miles. Carved into the walls are tomb after tomb, resting places for tens of thousands of the Christian dead, including many martyrs who died for their faith in Jesus. In simple terms, the catacombs are the cemetery of the early church.

Why Did the Early Christians Build the Catacombs?

Not to hide. You may have heard that Christians used the catacombs as secret hideouts to escape persecution, but that is the movie version, and it does not hold up. If believers had gone down there to hide, the guards would simply have waited for them to come back up. The real reason is more moving than that. Christians in Rome were not allowed to bury their dead inside the city, and they did not want the common Roman practice of cremation, because they believed the body would rise again one day. So they needed ground. They went outside the city, dug down, and over the years carved out a vast underground network where they laid their loved ones to rest.

Where the "Underground Church" Worshiped

When believers were forbidden to worship during times of persecution, they would go down into the catacombs under the cover of visiting their dead, and they would worship there among the graves. There were rooms for gathering and even for teaching, and you can still see what is left on the walls. It is part of why we still speak of the "underground church" today. In some parts of the world it remains dangerous or illegal to follow Jesus, and believers gather in back rooms and behind storefronts under the appearance of something else, just to worship the Lord. Some of Rachael's own missionary friends lead underground churches now.

Hope Carved in Stone: The Fish, the Anchor, and the Good Shepherd

Among all those graves, the early Christians painted and carved symbols that still undo you when you learn what they mean. The most common is a simple fish, scratched into the stone again and again. The Greek word for fish is ichthys, and each letter stood for a word in the phrase "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior," the whole gospel packed into a symbol you could draw in a second. When a believer saw a fish on a tomb, they knew the person buried there belonged to Jesus. You also see the anchor, which comes straight out of Hebrews.

This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and reliable and one which enters within the veil. (Hebrews 6:19)

Think about carving that on the grave of someone you loved and lost, someone who may have died for their faith. They were carving the word hope into the stone. And over and over you see the Good Shepherd, a painted image of a shepherd carrying a lamb across His shoulders. They put Jesus carrying a sheep on the walls of a graveyard because they believed death had not snatched their loved ones away. The Shepherd was carrying them home.

Refusing to Let the Grave Have the Last Word

These were not people in denial about death. They were surrounded by it. They had watched people they loved be killed for following Jesus. They dug these tunnels with their own hands and carried the bodies down themselves. They knew exactly how real and how permanent death was. And in the middle of it, they wrote hope on the walls. They did not simply bury their dead and leave, either. They came back, especially to the tombs of the martyrs, to remember them and share meals together in their memory. They came down into a place of death to eat together and hold on to the hope they had, and sometimes hope was all they had. It was the early church refusing to let the grave have the last word.

Standing down there does something to your faith that is hard to put into words. We live in a culture terrified of death, doing everything it can to hide from it, unwilling even to look at aging. But when you stand among these ancient graves and learn about people who stared death in the face and stayed committed to the gospel anyway, answering death with hope, it forces a question. Do I actually believe what they believed? When I face the grave, my own or the graves of the people I love, do I have an anchor that holds? Those believers were not hoping in a nice idea. They were hoping in a risen Jesus. They had staked everything, their lives in some cases, on the fact that He rose from the dead, and that because He rose, they would too. That is the anchor. That is why they could carve hope into a tomb. It was not wishful thinking. It was resurrection.

Rachael shares something on this episode she had not planned to. A couple of months ago her mom passed away, after a complicated relationship marked by mental illness and years of hard things in the family. Her mom believed in Jesus, but the illness left a gap between who she thought God was and who God really is, and she was never quite well enough to be safe or fully present in the way everyone longed for. Her mom passed the same night Rachael celebrated seeing her book on the shelf at Walmart for the first time, an emotional high and a deep loss on the same day, and it still does not make simple sense. In the weeks of grief and doubt that followed, wondering whether she would see her mom again, Rachael was praying, and the Lord said, "She's here and she's whole." Her mom was not whole here, not in body or mind, but her spirit is with Jesus. That is the image of the Shepherd carrying His sheep all the way home, and the anchor that holds in the dark, in the grief, in the moments we do not understand.

The same hope those early believers carved into stone is offered to you. The empty tomb of Jesus is the reason for every little fish and anchor and shepherd down in the dark. Death is real, but for those who belong to Jesus, it is not the end. It is not the final word. The Shepherd carries His sheep all the way home.

Father, thank You for the hope we have in You, a hope that is the anchor for our souls. Thank You that the earliest believers could stand in a place full of death and still cover the walls with hope, because they knew You had defeated the grave and that death would not be the end for them. I pray right now for the person who is afraid of death, or grieving someone they have lost, or living as though the grave gets the final say. Would You give them this same anchor. Would You let them see that the risen Jesus is the Good Shepherd who carries His sheep all the way home, and that because of You, we can have hope. In Jesus' name, amen.

What translation does Rachael use on the podcast? The written study materials use the New American Standard Bible (NASB).

Can you actually go down into the catacombs on the Rome trip? Yes. Visiting the catacombs is one of the stops. Different sites have different levels open at different times, so some let you descend two floors and others go down five.

Does Rachael have anything on the early church martyrs? Yes. She has a book on the martyrs called Never Unseen, expected in 2027, where she tells more of their stories.

When does registration for this year's Rome trip close? Registration closes July 29, and there are only a few spots left.

What is coming next in this bonus series? Next week goes somewhere completely different, a city frozen in a single moment two thousand years ago, the place that shows more vividly than almost anywhere on earth what the world looked like in the days of the New Testament.

If something is stirring in you, come down into that place of hope with us in November. See it with your own eyes, feel the cold stone, and trace the fish with your finger. It will change how you think about both life and death. Registration closes July 29 and only a few spots remain.

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