Joseph of Arimathea held death in his arms

Joseph of Arimathea is, by all four gospel accounts, the one who cared for Jesus’ body when he was crucified. According to Luke and Mark, he’s a member of the same council that put Jesus to death (with Luke clarifying he did not agree with that decision). Everyone agrees he was a disciple; Matthew adds a detail that he was rich. He offered up a tomb he happened to have access to or it was one where he himself planned to be buried.

The details are trivia. As are the legends: he traveled to England where he built a church, he carried a vial of Jesus’ sweat (and possibly blood) there, he was Jesus’ uncle. Or maybe Mary’s. Here is what strikes me about Joseph: rich or not, he is probably someone whose life circumstances insulated him from the rougher edges of reality. He wasn’t especially public about his faith, given Jesus’ place among polite Jewish society. If he was, in fact, a member of the Sanhedrin Council, he definitely had a lot to lose.

What is most vivid for me about Joseph is how he is moved by Jesus’ death. The love, kindness, and dedication that brought him to the cross after everyone else had left. Most powerfully, I imagine the intimacy of the act. The weight of Jesus’ body. The blood. The evidence of such human fragility. Joseph held the body of a man who had suffered and died, who could have been anyone.

Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away.” —Matthew 27:59-60

The wrapping. The careful laying down.

In John’s Gospel, Nicodemus comes, too, with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloe. The tenderness.

The rolled stone.

And then he went away. Joseph went away; he had to go away at some point.

I wonder how that sense of closeness to Jesus lingered. I wonder if he felt peace or only despair.

My own belief in the resurrection comes from a lot of different things.

I have come to believe in the resurrection through encounters in my own life, and in the church: love, joy, grief, sacrament.  A significant aspect of my belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is my belief in the death of Jesus Christ. For hope to be genuine, our assessment of the situation has to be accurate: yes, it really is that bad! You can pick your crisis—nationalism, climate crisis, suicidal teenagers, racism, bigotry of all kinds seemingly ascendant. Joseph of Arimathea held death in his own arms. He sealed it in a cave, rolled a big stone on top of it, and walked away.

And it was not the end of the story.

Jesus was raised and went to Galilee, telling the women he would go ahead of them. I hope Joseph saw him and felt a lightness in his chest where there had been the heaviest lead weight. I hope he felt the holiness of his own body as he kept the memory of the one he loved. I hope Joseph knew that even as Jesus’ own death could not keep him from the world he loved, so our deaths can’t keep us from the Christ who went there for us.

 

Image Credit: Joseph of Arimathea Lowers Christ from the Cross, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.