The Death and Burial of Jesus

The Death and Burial

“It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour,  
for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.  
Jesus called out with a loud voice,“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. 
The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous man.”  
When all the people who had gathered to witness this sight saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away.  
But all those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things. 
Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright man,  who had not consented to their decision and action. He came from the Judean town of Arimathea and he was waiting for the kingdom of God.  
Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body.  
Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid.  
It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin. 
The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it.  
Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment.” 
                                       Luke 23:44-56.
The death and burial of Jesus. Here we have those who loved Jesus watching him die and what the other people around were doing.
The sky went black for three hours. Jesus gives his own spirit up. The Roman soldier stating “Surely this was a righteous man.”
Joseph of  Arimathea a member of the council who was not at the council when it voted to have Jesus put to death asked Pilate for the body of Jesus and place him in a new unused tomb. While the women prepared the spices and perfumes to embalm the body. They could not however embalm it because of the Sabbath on which they rested in obedience to the commandments.
This was the lowest point I think in the life of Christ’s followers. Jesus was in the grave. He was dead.
Death has come to every leader of every faith throughout history.
Jesus however would stand out, in that death did not hold him. For on the Sunday morning he arose from the grave to walk the earth for a short while before ascending into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father.
This is what makes Christianity and Christians different from all other faiths. We serve a risen Lord that during the three years he ministered on this earth claimed to be the One and only Son of God. He made the statement,
“Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” 
John 14:6
A potentially dangerous statement in the time of Jesus.
C. S. Lewis wrote of Jesus,
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 
                                                                                                       C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Please think about it.