April 19

We were therefore buried with him… - ROMANS 6:3

We celebrate the death of Christ on Good Friday and the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday but attach little significance to his day in the tomb on Saturday. We talk very little about the significance of his burial.

The body of Jesus would normally have been incinerated in the valley of Gehenna outside Jerusalem along with the two men crucified with him. This was the customary practice for victims of capital punishment in Jerusalem under Roman rule. But two men had intervened, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who requested of Pilate permission to bury his body in a private tomb. This had been prophesied centuries before in Isaiah, 53:8, where one translation says, ‘His grave was appointed with the wicked; but with the rich man was his tomb’. He would die as a criminal but be buried as a rich man would – and so he was. This was no accident, foretold long in advance.

Is there significance to his burial? Paul clearly thinks so, for he states, ‘we were buried with him’. The time between a death and burial can be very difficult. We are still interacting with them, attending to affairs relating to them. Do we speak of the deceased person in the past tense or present? But there is a finality once buried. After burial the person is spoken of only in the past tense. That must be the significance here. We not only died with Christ to the power and consequence of sin, but we were also buried with him, our sins placed in the tomb, a final resting place. There need be no more interacting with them, they are relegated to the past. There is a finality to our death to sin which this points to. The life of Jesus was to be resurrected and shared with us, but not our sin. Micah 7:19 uses a metaphor to describe something similar, ‘…you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea’. Corrie ten Boom wrote that having thrown them into the depths of the sea, he puts up a sign, ‘No Fishing’! Yet our tendency is to fish, to go back over our sins and relive our guilt. To open the tomb again, to interact with our failings. Easter Saturday tells us our sins are now in the grave. Leave them there.

Prayer: Help me Lord to silence my uneasy or nagging conscience and Satan’s lying and accusing voice in my ear, when the fact is, my repentance and trust in Jesus has buried my sins with Him in the tomb to be remembered no more.

Reflection: Today on Easter Saturday, think about Jesus carrying with him into the tomb all your sin so that it is no longer a burden on your back but has rolled away.