Mark 15:42 Commentary and Bible Study

We learn here what happened while Christ lay dead. It is a passage which always produces questions. Where was Christ? Once he yielded up the Holy Spirit and his spirit to God, where was he? Did he descend into hell, as the Apostle's Creed seems to suggest? There is a teaching that there are two places for the dead, short of the eternal heavens where God the Father dwells. There are these two departments of Sheol, the Hebrew word for the place of the dead: one where the lost go, and the other where the souls of believers go, once they have left their bodies at death. Is that correct? Is there something which is not quite heaven, where the dead go? It is commonly taught, even among Bible believers, that there is a paradise of Christ, which in a mysterious way is not quite heaven. That is the abode of the dead until his return, when access to heaven is opened up. Then there is the simpler, practical question: what provision was made for the body of Christ at his death? There appears to have been no provision, except that anyone executed under Roman law as a criminal would go to a criminal’s plot. There was such a plot well outside the city of Jerusalem for the malefactors, for the felons. There was a place where they were ignominiously buried. Those who were crucified on the cross were usually left, nailed to those crosses until their bodies decomposed. It was supposed to be a tremendous humiliation for them. But in Christ’s case, that was not to happen because the next day was a holy day. What then was arranged for Christ’s burial? Was there any alternative? The disciples had fled. Perhaps some of them had come back and were at the very fringe of the crowd like the women. Only one was near the foot of the cross, and that was John. But who would provide for the burial of Christ, if he was not to be left to corrupt on the cross in the normal way, and then cast into a criminal’s grave well outside the town? We read about it here. It is 3 o'clock in the afternoon – that was when the Jewish evening was said to begin. The evening hours started about three in the afternoon, and deepened after six hours. ‘Because it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath’ – the sabbath would begin at 6 o'clock that night, and Christ died at 3 o'clock. If anything was to be done decently to bury the body, which was what would normally be done to people who were not dying on a cross, it had to be arranged quickly. Who was going to do it? There was no provision in sight. But God had his provision, and God always has his provision for his people.