March 30, 2024, Behind the Scenes, John 19:38-42 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ March 31, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

No recording of this sermon is available.

It’s hard to know what to say tonight, or what to think. Nothing much seems to be happening. Tonight the stone blocks the mouth of the tomb. And just to make sure it stays that way, the religious authorities that be have set a guard to prevent any funny business on the part of Jesus’s followers.

With the coming of the Sabbath; things have quieted down. The clamoring crowds went home last night to light their Shabbat candles, to break bread, to chant the prayers. The Roman soldiers finished their grim duties and returned to their barracks to eat and drink, to play a game of chance, to rest. John took Jesus’s weary, grieving mother back to his home. He has tried to comfort her, but they are both heartbroken and there is nothing anyone can say that brings any comfort. Judas‘s body has been taken from the field where he took his own life; no corpse can be left unburied on the Sabbath, but as a suicide, he won’t receive an honorable burial. The rest of the disciples are hiding themselves in shameful sorrow, keeping a low profile behind locked doors. All in all, things are pretty quiet in Jerusalem.

And not everyone is sorrowful. The High Priest and the Council, the Scribes and the Pharisees, are uneasily triumphant. Their plotting and scheming has paid off, and the man who had troubled them for so long is finally gone, once and for all. But there are some among them who have begun to have second thoughts. Now that the dust is beginning to settle the righteous success of the religious authorities is shadowed a little bit by doubts and uncertainty. Pilate, I think, is still struggling to reassure himself that he only did what he had to do. At this point, he’s just ready to put the whole mess behind him.

There is unmixed and unadulterated rejoicing, however, among the powers and principalities of spiritual darkness. Their enemy is dead, gone for good. They were there on the hill at Golgotha, watching, listening. They saw him die. He might have been sent by God, but now that fragile human body of his is battered and lifeless and cold, left to rot in that tomb, and he will never again be there to torment and overpower them. In life, the man, Jesus, was terrifyingly strong, no doubt about it, but as it turns out, they won in the end.

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But things are happening on the other side of the stone, too, on this very long Sabbath Day. In the silence and absolute darkness of the tomb, Jesus is wrenching open the gates of hell and setting free every soul that had for so long been suffering in lonely separation from God. A mystery is at work.

In the tomb, death itself is faltering and losing its grip.

Dawn is on the way.

The long night of mankind is coming to an end.