“We Were There: Lenten Edition,” Week Six
That tomb was meant for me. Not Him. Never Him.
I am getting on in my years, and responsible estate planning counts for a lot, regardless of the century in which you live.
So I began to make preparations for my own death and burial, so that my family would not have to.
But then He happened. He swept into Jerusalem on the back of that donkey, and the empire could not countenance such a display, such claims of kingship and divinity from someone who is not Caesar. So He had to be dealt with. And He was, over my own objections.
This burial, then, with spices meant for me and a tomb that was meant to hold my body, seems then the very least I can do for so remarkable a being. Even if I will not be able to finish the burial before the Sabbath begins, I can at least get it started. Itinerant laborers are not typically given such lavish sending-offs, but perhaps they should. Perhaps we all should be afforded such displays of devotion.
After all, we all only die once. Yet thanks to this Messiah whom I have buried in my tomb, I strongly suspect that we will all have the chance to live again for a second time.
This is the penultimate installment of this sermon series for our first Lenten season together. Across the board, feedback concerning Valley’s Advent devotional series, We Were There, was extremely positive, especially for the first-person voice it was composed in by its many contributors. Buoyed by this feedback, Dr. Lola Kiser and I crafted a similar focus for both our upcoming Holy Week devotional book and this sermon series as a way to lead up to that devotional. This meant that each Sunday through Lent, all the way up to Easter Sunday, my message began in the first-person, through the eyes of someone who would have experienced Holy Week, just as we did with Advent.
We kicked off this series five weeks ago with Lazarus, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead earlier in John 11, and since then we have visited the stories—and possible words—of Caiaphas the high priest by continuing verse-by-verse through John 11 before hopping over to Mark 15. There, we heard from Simon of Cyrene before arriving at two different eyewitnesses to the crucifixion: the centurion responsible for the crucifixion who then recognizes Christ’s divine status, and one of the female disciples of Jesus from Galilee, Mary the mother of James and Joses. Today, we briefly return to John’s Gospel to hear from the men who buried Jesus: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke attribute Jesus’s burial primarily to Joseph of Arimathea, but John’s Gospel includes Nicodemus, whom Jesus first met in John 3, and Nicodemus must have remained an admirer of Jesus. In John, the two men arrive on the scene with Jesus’s body and seventy-five pounds of aloe and spices, a truly extravagant amount. If you recall from the scene in John 12 where Mary, the sister of Martha, anoints Jesus with a single pound of spikenard, Judas notes that this one pound of aloe was worth ten months’ wages for an unskilled manual laborer, or three hundred denarii. This is seventy-five times that amount. Jesus is being given the burial of a king.
And a man who can afford to go in halfsies on seventy-five pounds of myrrh and spices can certainly afford a brand-spanking-new tomb for himself. Rock-hewn tombs in the ancient Near East were utilized as places to put bodies for them to safely decompose before another body would be moved in. Single tombs, of the sorts that you might see ancient Egyptian royalty buried in, were the exception and not the rule owing to their expense and, in some cases, the amount of time required to prepare the burial site to receive a body.
So both the tomb and the trappings represent considerable financial sacrifices on the part of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. The act of burying Jesus was one not only of spiritual devotion, but of stewardship and sacrificial giving. It is a response to sacrifice of sacrifice.
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus help tie together a common thread of the past few weeks in this series, which is, quite simply, how do we respond to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth?
The centurion who executed Jesus responded with a confession of faith—and, implicitly, a confession of his own complicity in the crucifixion.
Mary, the mother of James and Joses and the other female disciples of Jesus responded with a strength of presence and determination the male apostles did not afford.
Joseph and Nicodemus respond with both their sacrificial giving up of an expensive burial site and prohibitively expensive burial supplies and their willingness to take the time to prepare Christ’s body for that burial.
Each of these characters have been moved by the crucifixion—even before we get to resurrection, the crucifixion has already begun to have an impact. By itself, the crucifixion would not be sufficient for humanity—Jesus would very likely have gone down in history as yet another Israelite crucified for inciting insurrection against the empire. The resurrection was absolutely necessary.
But part of the benefit of looking at the Passion story through the eyes of the people who experienced it in real time is that we can see, in real time, how the events impacted them—and that they produced fruit of the spirit even before the resurrection took place.
The challenge for us is a bit different—Christ’s resurrection has already taken place. Ours has not, though—ours awaits us in the next life. But the core of it is the same: how do we produce fruit of the spirit before our own resurrection takes place after we die?
That is why the ways in which each of these characters respond to the crucifixion matter so much to us—they show us that faithful response to God before there is any resurrection is not only possible, but essential.
Christianity is not, and has never been, in the business of simply counting down the days until resurrection, vital though it is to our entire faith. Christianity is, and has always been about, acting out of faith that resurrection is around the corner, awaiting us, all of us, and outwardly displaying confidence, benevolence, charity, and goodness as a result.
When we do that, the resurrection changes us not only when we experience it in real time, it changes us before we experience it. The very anticipation of it is life-changing, that is part of the magic of it.
There is an irony, then, in the linens, spices, and the other expensive trappings of burial that Joseph and Nicodemus bring forth to honor Jesus with. He simply will not need them for very long and will discard them as soon as that need expires. On Easter, the shroud is left behind in the tomb. In a way, it makes that outward display of sacrificial charity even more sacrificial, even more charitable, because it was so lavish a gift that was required for so short a period of time.
But even if the two men knew that Christ would resurrect, that knowledge did not dissuade them from responding to sacrifice with sacrifice, to atonement with devotion, and to injustice with bravery by having the courage to even go to Pontius Pilate to ask for the body—often, Roman prefects would simply let the corpses of crucifixion victims remain exposed to the elements as a further deterrent to potential rebels and to ensure that there would be no remains to buried with the sort of reverence with which Joseph and Nicodemus bury Jesus.
The only thing that stops them in their burial of Jesus is that same sense of sacrificial devotion—to the Passover holiday and Sabbath day of rest. They enter the story out of faithfulness, and they retire from it out of faithfulness.
Let that be true for us—we enter the life of the Body of Christ, the church, out of faithfulness, making our professions of faith before baptism. May we one day, whenever that day may be, also retire out of faithfulness, confident in our belief that the resurrection which awaits us has already transformed us into new creations.
We are one week away from that resurrection…*the* resurrection that molded us into those new creations for all time. May we await it with the faith displayed by Joseph and Nicodemus, by Mary the mother of James and Joses, and all those for whom the resurrection was much more than a superstition or prohibitively distant hope.
One week from now, that hope will not be distant.
One week from now, salvation will be put within our grasps.
One week from now, everything changes.
Are you ready, beloveds?
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 28, 2021