Mark 15:46 Commentary and Bible Study

As the old Puritans used to love to observe, man fell in a garden and man would be raised to immortality and life from a tomb in a garden also. But there was only Joseph and Nicodemus there, John’s Gospel tells us. They had obviously talked together – though the Gospels don’t tell us this – because one bought the bandages, the linen sheets, and the other bought one hundred pounds of spices. The experts tell us that that is seventy-two pounds of our weight. That was vastly more than the Jews would normally use. That was the amount of myrrh and spices that you would use for a royal burial. That’s how much they thought of the Lord. That’s how much they believed in him and loved him. Nicodemus was an old man. Doubtless he had someone deliver or bring it for him, but they used that amount and they would wrap the body in the sheets with all the ointments in between. Any servants or assistants that they may have had are not mentioned. The women are also mentioned; only two women are particularly named, and they weren’t there on the spot; they watched from a distance. The women came from Galilee. They didn’t know the Jewish councillors; they didn’t know Joseph or Nicodemus. ‘Who are these people?’, the women would have asked. ‘They seem to be doing everything reverently.’ But this was the end of Christ’s humiliation. No crowd, no mourners, no formalities, thing, just the two men and anybody who may have been assisting them, and the women noting everything that happened from a distance.What wonderful things took place around the cross. A dying thief led to put his trust in Christ; a centurion and his detail, just incidentally moved to a mighty profession of faith by the death of Jesus Christ; Joseph, woken up to understand that God’s people must act for him and respond to this mighty privilege. The women, not understanding but with sound intellectual faith and trust. It wasn’t just sentimental love for them. When their world could have fallen apart, it was deep, intelligent trust. ‘He is Messiah; we have seen it; we have proved it and therefore something will happen that we do not understand, or that we do not expect.’ What about Joseph? Why don’t you hear of him again? Did he do something wrong? No, it is because only Christ counts here. This is no time to vaunt Joseph and his deed. He disappears having received the mightiest privilege imaginable, and retires from the written record.