This week I was struck by a couple of thoughts that brought clarity to a few more things shifting my perspectives in this series. One thought was on Easter, which marks Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection on the Christian calendar that I haven’t yet written about. The other brings the resurrection itself in line with our short experience in the mystery of life that transcends all categories of human thought.
The first was initiated by reading John 19 after Christ died on the cross and what takes place immediately thereafter. I’ve found the story of Christ’s crucifixion short and what happens after described as Jesus being taken down from the cross and buried in a tomb, only to rise on the third day. Little, it seems to me, is remembered or maybe understood from the time of his actual death and being buried in the tomb or anything about the tomb for that matter. But Jesus had been charged with sedition, or treason, the most serious of crimes to be charged with, so burial was not expected. At the time, by Roman Law, after a criminal was convicted of such offences they were crucified and left to die and rot on the crucifix, after which the corpses were pulled down and discarded like rubbish, left for scavenger animals outside the Esquiline Gate. But Jesus was Jewish, and according to my pastor, criminals convicted of treason, were crucified in a similar way to that of the Romans but their corpses were disposed of in the Valley of Gehenna, where the fire does not go out. But despite Jesus’s conviction, the corpse of Jesus was not discarded.
Enter Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.
In the other Gospels, as in John 19, Joseph of Arimathea, steps forward to claim Jesus’s body from Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Though we’re introduced to this Joseph earlier in the preceding Gospels, Nicodemus doesn’t appear until the Gospel of John. Both men are Pharisee and members of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high council. We know from Luke 23:50-51 that “Joseph [was] from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man, who had not consented to their decision and action.” This Joseph, who I’m amazed is not more celebrated, seemed to be a secret Jesus follower. In John 19: 38-39, “secretly for fear of the Jews, [Joseph] asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus, and Pilate gave him permission.” Then Nicodemus, who had visited with Jesus earlier in John, returned to the chief priests and Pharisees and questioned their proposed actions against Jesus in John 7:50-51, “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” In John 19:39, Nicodemus, after Joseph had secured the body of Jesus from Pontius Pilate, brought “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds in weight,” which was an amount similar to what would have been used for the burial of a king. Together, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, are the champions of the Isaiah 53:9 prophecy, “And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.” In a way they appear to be the enablers of Jesus’s resurrection.
Why do I see this as significant?
That’s connected with my other thought this week and Jesus’s resurrection, which in its essence may signify our own.
We are brought into this existence through no account of our own. Each of us—our flesh and blood—are made up of all elements found in the earth. Likewise, when our lives come to an end in this world, our decomposed flesh and blood, return to the earth. This is biblical as in Genesis 3:19, “Till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Science has demonstrated this to us as well—once dead our bodies decompose. But then the question comes: What makes us, us? What is it that turns the elements of the earth into our bodies that then returns to the earth on its end? Whatever that it is, it is not of this earth. It is not of flesh or blood. It is not of our material world. And as apostle Paul deduced in 1 Corinthians 15:50, “I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”
Jesus was crucified and died on the cross to save us from our sins. Those who identify as Christians know this. Few saw Him, but some did see him. He did live. But more importantly, He came to us to help us believe in Him. To believe in something larger than ourselves. To believe in that which created us and for us to realize we are not our own creators. Jesus is here not by works of man or the law. As Paul wrote in Galatians 2:16, “A person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” Jesus’s resurrection is for us: to save us from our sins due to our sinful nature. But we also see through his resurrection that we are not material beings in a spiritual experience but rather spiritual beings miraculously gifted with this material experience—for a time. Through Jesus rising from the dead, we see something more at work—God’s work—something of a non-material nature at work. Also, to know that we are sinful creatures, sinful because the works of the law have shown us to be, as written in Galatians 3:10, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” Faith in Christ is the only thing that can save us—and we can’t do it alone; we didn’t create ourselves.
Further to this in 1 Corinthians 15:52-53, “The dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” Paul seems to be telling us that that part of us, our perishable or mortal flesh and blood "shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye—1 Corinthians 15:52” and become “imperishable” or “immortal” when we die. As if whatever that it that makes the material elements from which we are made of come to life once conceived in this material world, continues on after this material world life ends for each of us. What’s interesting here is that science has attempted to demonstrate this experimentally in the separate work of Duncan MacDougall and Lewis Hollander. Not conclusive but interesting, they’ve discovered that a change in weight of the body appears to take place at the instant of death. This idea transcends the Christian belief of the soul living on into eternity when accepting salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, as this would happen to all human beings. I’m hard pressed not to think there’s some truth here, however. We come into this world through no fault of our own. Material elements, all of which come from the earth, come to life through this spirit that comes into us from somewhere to make us. Those same material elements decompose back into the earth at the end of our lives, when that spirit leaves us. Does that spirit return back to where it came from when we were conceived? Seen another way, does that spirit, while in us, return to where it came from while we sleep in the unconscious? Further still, does Christ’s resurrection not give us insight into that from which we came in both Him telling us so, and God’s demonstration that His Son would rise from the dead, fulfilling the prophecy in Isaiah 25:8, “He will swallow up death forever”?
Death could not hold Jesus as Luke writes in Acts 2:24, “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” Luke writes as death not being an end as we like to think of it in our material world but instead a return, maybe into that eternity, maybe that place we call the unconscious, that invisible and mostly undetectable place that science has given the names of dark matter and dark energy, which makes up ninety-five percent of existence.
This returns me to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and their courage to prevent Jesus’s corpse from being dumped in the garbage and scavenged by animals, by instead having Him buried in a tomb and honoured as a king. Possibly, without knowing the staggering extent of their actions, and despite the potential threats to their welfare, they fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy from Isaiah 53:9. Jesus said in Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Jesus spoke that through belief in Him we will find eternal life, and helps us to believe it. But maybe God has set the unseen part of existence—eternity—where we all return to upon our material death, as that is where we came from. And though Joseph of Arimathea is the third Joseph we are introduced to in the Bible, in being the last may make him the most important. Through his actions with Nicodemus, he gave Christ a proper burial for resurrection. And more fully, a way for us to see that our material world is only a special part of the eternity in this existence of which only one man, Jesus Christ, has truly experienced.
Another great read Doug. I would add, life as in our life lived out in faith that there is a God has its gifts starting now. He extends life as He defines it, eternal, to us when we believe. When we accept Him into our lives as Lord and Savoir here on earth, He by way of His Spirit living in us connects with our spirit to teach us His eternal way. Our spirit is His possession when we accept Him, eternity starts here on earth. Our body shells as we know them might perish but our spirit is His, He will not let go.