Burial of the Lord

Burial customs vary from nation to nation and culture to culture. In the town where I grew up, Nagercoil, they buried dead people within a day because they didn’t have the facilities to keep the body cool and stop it from decaying. I was in Dallas when my mom died on a Wednesday in India. By the time I came on Saturday, they had buried her and built a tomb.

The Hebrews usually took their dead, washed them, removed inner organs, anointed the body with several spices and left the body in a rocky tomb for the carcass to mummify first and then turn into only bones. After this, they took the bones and put them in their ancestral ossuaries (boxes containing bones of their ancestors).

Jesus’s death occurred on the eve of the Passover festival in Jerusalem, leaving little time for them to bury him. They didn’t have time for ritual washing, removal of organs, embalming with species, etc. Joseph of Arimathea, the righteous and good ruler of the people and a member of the Council, stepped forward to do what was necessary. (Earlier, a lady had already anointed him with nard, preparing him for his burial, Luke 7:37.)

Joseph went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’s body (Luke 23:52). After receiving the body, he wrapped it in linen cloth and laid it in a stony tomb in which no other carcasses had been laid before (23:53). That day was Friday, the dawn of Sabbath (23:54) when no one should work, not even to bury a body.

Ironically, this was the Lord of the Sabbath (Luke 6:5). Yet, before the Sabbath, death defeated him, and he was laid to rest. We know the rest of the story—his rest followed by a triumphal resurrection. C. S. Lewis picturesquely described this:

Aslan, the personification of Jesus, said, “It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack, and Death would start working backward.”

Nevertheless, Joseph, the apostles, and the ladies would have thought it was the end. Sometimes, we, too, can feel that we are at the end of a situation with no hope for the future. But that’s only half the story. The Lord of the Sabbath always triumphs!