Remembering the Story:

A Devotional Guide for Holy Week--2013

Saturday:  Burial and Sabbath

Sing:    Were you there when they laid him in the tomb? 

Were you there when they laid him in the tomb? 

Oh! sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. 

Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?

“Were You There,”—verse 5, Afro-American Spiritual.  Hymn No. 288 in The United Methodist Hymnal.

Read:  Luke 23:50-56

Reflect on the Biblical Story:

Someone had to do it.  The mandates of the Torah were clear:  “the corpse of one who is executed and hung on a tree must not remain all night upon the tree; you shall bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God's curse. You must not defile the land that the LORD your God is giving you for possession” (Deuteronomy 21:22).  Was Joseph was acting out of reverence for the crucified Jesus?  Was he acting to remove an unpleasant sight during the Passover Festival?  Was he simply doing his job to satisfy the mandates of the law?  To be sure, the whole process bothered him.  He had not agreed with the Council’s plan to get rid of Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel states even more explicitly that Joseph was a disciple of Jesus (Matthew 27:57), and John’s Gospel adds the detail that Joseph was a disciple “in secret” (John 19:38).  But what was done was done.  Joseph had to act quickly before sundown and the observance of Sabbath.  He placed the lifeless body in a tomb, carved from the soft rock.

The women from Galilee followed Joseph and watched where he placed the body.  They too had plans—they gathered spices to use, after the Sabbath was over, in anointing the body.  They would do what they could to give Jesus a proper burial.

But as the sun left the sky, they rested.  It was the Sabbath.  Part of what defined them as the children of God was their observance of Sabbath.  The Lord established this precedent on the seventh day of creation; on that day, God rested from the work of creation and blessed the seventh day (Genesis 2:3).  The commandment to keep the Sabbath holy was not simply a law; it was “a perpetual covenant” (Exodus 31:16).  In the topsy-turvy world they lived in, they still remembered who they were.  So they rested.  And they waited.

Reflect on Your Story:

1.      Think of times of great tragedy in your life.  How do you respond to traumatic events?  Do you disrupt your normal patterns of living, or do you find comfort in the familiar?

2.      How do you spend the Sabbaths in your life?  What does the way you spend your Sabbath say about who you are as a person?

3.      For some people, times of grief are times of waiting—waiting for the rituals of funerals, waiting for grief to fade away.  For others, times of grief are times of action—receiving friends, cleaning out closets, probating estates.  For yet other people, times of grief are times of forgetting—trying to block the pain out of our memories.  How do you respond to grief?

Pray:    “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope” (Psalm 130:5).