Luke 23:50-56

There is a scene in The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, as Jack sails into the entrance of Port Royal, where he passes three hanging skeletons, meant as a warning to pirates. When the Romans crucified someone, it was a common practice to leave the dead bodies on the cross to be scavenged by birds and wild animals. This was a warning to anyone who dared defy the Empire.

Sometimes, however, if there was someone bold enough, and well-connected and/or wealthy, that they could plead to take the body to be entombed. Enter Joseph of Arimathea. He happened to be a member of the Sanhedrin who had been against their decision to have Jesus killed. He risks his reputation and position to take the body and have it buried in a tomb. Since it was late in the afternoon on Friday, and the Sabbath began at sundown, there was no time to embalm the body. The women from Galilee saw this, and quickly made preparations of the spices and perfumes they would need, but they would have to wait until the Sabbath was over to do the work.

Even though Jesus had repeated confrontations with the Jewish leaders over the Sabbath, He had never been against the Sabbath--only their interpretation of it. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. What a blessing for them that they were able to rest after such a dreadful ordeal.

The Rest of the Disciples by Mark Allen Sommer

Joy will come in the morning,
But not today,
After we have wept all the day
Before. The women
Got the spices and graveclothes ready
Before the sun set, but the
Rest of us just wandered or hid.

Joy will come in the morning,
But today we just mourn and
Rest. God must have known
We would need this day when
He worked it all out with Moses.
Weeping followed by rest
Is what was needed.

Fall down on us mountains
He had said we would say
Someday when things are much worse.
But we wish for the mountains today.
For how could it *be* any worse?

Joy comes in the morning,
But not today.

This is the day for mourning.

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...do not let us be fooled.

The idea that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing - one huge organism, like a tree - must not be confused with the idea that individual differences do not matter or that real people, Tom and Nobby and Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like classes, races, and so forth. Indeed the two ideas are opposites. Things which are parts of a single organism may be very different from one another: things which are not, may be very alike. Six pennies are quite separate and very alike; my nose and my lungs are very different but they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share its common life.

Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. On the other hand when you are tempted not to bother about someone else’s troubles because they are ‘no business of yours,’ remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.

I feel a strong desire to tell you - and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me-which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs-pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, note 2 to chapter 28

"The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: 'I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust it will emerge as I write.' Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, trusting that they will multiply in the giving." —Henri Nouwen