Holy Week - Saturday

We'll be having our dinner celebration a day early this year. I have a cancer-screening test on Monday and have to cleanse my system all day Easter Sunday. So, we're having 26 guests over for a special dinner Saturday evening.

I've been thinking about an appropriate meditation. What happened on the Saturday of Holy Week? What do we commemorate about it? Jesus was in the tomb. He had been buried the previous evening. What can I say about Saturday?

Paul summarizes the earliest oral tradition he had received: "For I delivered to you as of first important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15:3,4 ESV, my emph). So, "he was buried" is almost incidental; it's sandwiched between the two important events that occurred "in accordance with the Scriptures."

But, wasn't Jesus also buried "in accordance with the Scriptures?"

Yes, he was. An easily-overlooked statement in the great Suffering Servant passage of Isaiah 53 is this: "And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death" (v.9). "With the wicked" and "with a rich man," how would that work out? Would his grave be with criminals or with a rich man? Which is it?

Jesus was crucified with criminals. His body would normally have been cast off somewhere with theirs. But, "when it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean shroud and laid it in his own new tomb" (Matt 27:57-60 ESV). So, Jesus' grave had been made before his death to be with "the wicked" but Joseph of Arimathea overturned that plan, but not until after Jesus' death. Jesus was laid in a rich man's tomb instead of in a criminal's grave, and Isaiah's strange sentence fits the event exactly.

Now, conservative scholars would argue that the prophecy was written by Isaiah in the 8th century before Christ, over 700 years before the events recorded; critical scholars attribute this to Deutero-Isaiah, who addresses the Jews in exile, still about 500 years before the event. Either way, the burial was "in accordance with the Scriptures" in a surprising way. Isaiah's is a stunning prediction hundreds of years before the event.

This is what we'll meditate on this Saturday.