THE GLASTONBURY THORN

Easter, of course, usually falls before May, but there is one famous hawthorn which always blossomed well before Easter - the Glastonbury Thorn. On Weary-All Hill, just south of Glastonbury in Somerset, there once grew a thorn which miraculously blossomed twice a year, once in mid-winter at around Christmas time, and once in Spring, close to Easter. All sorts of stories developed to explain this mystery. All of them involved Joseph of Arimathea.

Joseph was the rich disciple of Jesus who went to Pilate and asked for Jesus' body after the crucifixion (see Matthew 27: 57-60). He placed the body in his own tomb. The Bible doesn't say anything else about him, but all sorts of legends developed. In Britain it was said that he was the uncle of the Virgin Mary and came to this country as the first missionary. Some said that the Glastonbury Thorn grew when he planted his staff in the ground. Another explanation involved the Crown of Thorns, put on Jesus' head before he was killed (Matthew 27: 29). People said a piece had been brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea and planted, growing into the hawthorn tree.

THINKING ABOUT THE HAWTHORN

The hawthorn tree, with its flowers and thorns, can stand as an emblem of both the beauty and the suffering within the created world. Many ancient religions include a god who suffers. Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of death and vegetation, has his body broken, and then the fragments restored and resurrected. Other, less mythical religions, have martyrs (people who die for their faith) - Sikhism's Guru Arjan, for example. The special idea in Christianity is that through Jesus' death, God shares in the suffering of all humankind and through Jesus' rising again God gives new hope to the world.