Saturday <3

There is not much reading for today.

So little in fact, I decided to include the short portions of Scripture that tell how Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus got brave and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. 

How they wrapped His broken and beaten frame in fine linen, layered and treated with myrrh and aloes…a hundred pounds, mind you…and then laid Him in a tomb just as the sun was slipping away so that they could be home for the Sabbath. 

I think about these two men gently and lovingly tending the remains of this man they had loved who had touched lepers and healed the blind, had welcomed the unlovely and the outcast and invited them into His family. 

I think of the physical labor involved in lifting the spices, carrying Him, wrapping Him and then lifting Him onto the place made for the corpse and the weight of the pain in their hearts and souls.

I think of Nicodemus and how he once snuck off in the dark of night to talk to Jesus full of fear to be associated with Him and now boldly going to Pilate and asking if he can give Him a proper Jewish burial. 

I think of the women and the disciples, raw with grief and lack of sleep.

In the first stages of shock and completely broken, they observed the Sabbath rest.

We have been there haven’t we all to a certain degree?

The day after the worst possible thing we could imagine happening and we wonder how we are still breathing as the crushing of immeasurable sorrow presses every ounce of joy and hope and life out of us. 

Activities and conversations that used to be normal and automatic now seem strained and pointless because we are sure our heart, soul and spirit have been irreparably shattered.

 But our mind won’t stop.

It keeps going over the details and the what if’s and what now’s.

It is like life has become a cruel joke as we go through the motions of regular routines knowing that everything has changed drastically and yet the world is moving along just as it did every day before we lost something dear to us.

We do not even know where to place our feet to move forward into what tomorrow will now look like for us. 

Surely it was like this for them.

And even more so.

But they rested. 

Because it was the Sabbath. 

Because they knew one thing…if He was still with them, He would have rested. 

And so in the familiar place of obedience and the resolve to follow Him they did nothing except rest and wait <3

• Scriptures:

• Matthew 27: 62-66

• Mark 15:42-47

• Luke 23:56