Scripture reading us from Matthew chapter 27 and verses 45
through 61 as we continue this series on seeing Jesus through
the eyes of those who assembled round the cross on near to it.
And we come this afternoon to think a little of Joseph of
Arimathea. This is God's word.
Now from the 6th hour there was darkness over all the land until
the 9th hour. And about the 9th hour Jesus
cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, Lama
Sabachthani, that is my God. My God, why have you forsaken
me? And some of the bystanders
hearing it, said, This man is calling Elijah.
And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with
sour wine and put it on a Reed and gave it to him to drink.
But the other said, wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to
save him. And Jesus cried out again with a
loud voice, and yielded up his Spirit.
And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top
to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split.
The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the Saints who
had fallen asleep were raised. And coming out of the tombs.
After His resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared
to many, and when the centurion and those who were with him,
keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took
place, they were filled with awe and said truly this was the Son
of God. There were also many women
there, looking on from a distance, who had followed Jesus
from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary
Magdalene, and that Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and
the mother of the sons of Zebedee.
When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea named
Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus.
He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.
Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him, And Joseph took
the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, and laid it
in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock.
And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and
went away. Mary Magdalene and the other
Mary were there sitting opposite the tomb.
This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated.
Privilege to think with you for a few minutes about this
passage. And when I was reflecting on it
this morning, that crossed my mind that because there are
actually many scholars who believe that Jesus was born
before the traditional dating of his birth.
It is just possible since the sun has now gone down in
Jerusalem, that this day is the 200th, 2 thousandth anniversary
of this event that's described here about this otherwise
unknown man, Joseph of Arimathea.
And my suspicion is, if you've been at all the meditations in
this series, but one of the things that may strike you about
the way in which the gospel writers tell this story is that
on the one hand they tell the facts of the matter, but on the
other hand, they characteristically tell the
story with clues embedded into the way they tell the story.
They help us not only to understand what happened, but to
understand why it happened. In many ways, this section of
the Gospel is like those puzzles that children enjoy, where they
are to spot the clues in the picture.
And this particular picture is set in the midst of two very
significant earlier passages of Scripture that shed very
considerable light on it. The first I want to mention for
the moment and hope thinking of what the second might be will
not actually distract you from what I say in between.
The first passage that gives us an insight into this passage is
the one other passage in the Gospels in which a rich man
meets with the Lord Jesus, the man with whom we are familiar,
who also like Joseph of Arimathea, was a ruler.
Perhaps like Joseph of Arimathea, actually a member of
the 70 rulers who governed Israel, member of the Sanhedrin
who came to Jesus looking for the Kingdom of God.
And when Jesus preached the Kingdom of God to him, he went
away with a sad heart because he was so very rich and the Super
glue of his riches made it impossible for him to embrace
the Lord Jesus. It would be wonderful, wouldn't
it, if this actually was the same man.
But there's no way that we can prove whether that is true or
not. But here comes another rich man
to Jesus, and all of the gospel writers, with the different
reflections they have as they put together the story of this
man, Joseph of Arimathea, give us a profound sense of what God
was actually doing if this man's life.
He was not the only rich ruler in the Gospels, but he is a rich
ruler who clearly by the end of this passage has come to a
living faith in the Lord Jesus. And I want to reflect with you
just for a moment or two this afternoon on three really
significant clues as to the way God is working in his life.
The 1st is this. But the Gospel writers tell us
he was a disciple, but they make it very clear that he was not a
confessor. He was a disciple of Jesus in
the sense that in the Gospels there are many disciples of
Jesus, that is, people who are willing to learn from Jesus but
have not yet come to the point of confessing Jesus as their
saviour and their Lord. It wouldn't at all surprise me,
even assuming that Joseph is a very different man from the rich
young ruler earlier on in the Gospels, that because that man
was a ruler, word spread among the rulers that Jesus, after
meeting him, had said how hard it is for a rich man to enter
the Kingdom of God. And the Gospel writers tell us
that this in fact was Joseph's position.
He was a disciple of Jesus who had learned from Jesus and was
even waiting for the Kingdom. But it seems, at least until
this point, he was not yet himself in the Kingdom, in the
very position that many people find themselves in.
Isn't it disciples of Jesus in many respects, but not yet
confessors of Jesus? I think one of my favorite
memories from pastoral ministry in the United States was a day a
very small lady came and snuggled up beside me.
I think she was well into her 70s, looked up, straining her
neck to look up into my face, and said in a very
conspiratorial fashion, You know, everyone around here
thinks I've been a Christian almost all my life, but I only
really became a Christian two years ago.
I think I could have picked her up, hugged her, put her in my
pocket and taken her home because she had discovered what
Joseph of Arimathea had obviously been longing to
discover, the Kingdom of God breaking in in his life.
And yet, for whatever reason, he had apparently not quite taken
the step of entering the Kingdom.
He was near the Kingdom like other people in the Gospels, but
not yet in it. And God was graciously bringing
him that day 2000 years ago from outside the Kingdom into it.
So he was a disciple, but not yet a confessor.
The second clue that's so interesting, and especially we
get it in John's account of this story, is that Joseph of
Arimathea was a very close friend to someone who had spoken
to Jesus about the Kingdom. Remember how in John's Gospel
we're told that Joseph of Arimathea did not do this on his
own? That's such a lovely touch when
we put the Gospels together. You are not alone if you enter
the Kingdom of God. And he did all this through the
friendship and company of Nicodemus, so famous in John's
Gospel. He appears on three different
occasions, and on the 1st occasion he is engaged in
conversation with Jesus about how you enter the Kingdom of
God. So here is Joseph looking for
the Kingdom of God, as the Gospel writers tell us, friends
of Nicodemus. And one cannot but imagine that
there were many conversations between them.
Exactly what did Jesus say to you about entering the Kingdom
of God, Nicodemus? Well, they were on a long slow
pilgrimage together. And Nicodemus no doubt said to
him, he said something very strange, I didn't really
understand it. He said, Nicodemus, you don't
actually have the capacity in yourself to enter the Kingdom of
God because unless God himself works upon your life, you can
neither see, you will be blind and you certainly cannot enter
the Kingdom of God. It's such a lovely illustration
to us that it can take a long time for the truth of God's Word
to penetrate into our hearts. I met a young man once who told
me he had been converted. Listening to it must have been a
long time ago, a cassette tape of Assam and I'd preached
immediately afterwards. I met his father and his father
said, did he tell you his story? I said you must be so thrilled
that he's come to faith. But he said, did he tell you the
whole story? Lowe's story was that the boy
was spiritually nowhere, Came into the utility room late one
night where the parents had stacked various cassette tapes
of salmons they'd listened to, casually picked her up.
And his father said, you know, he listened to that salmon of
yours every single night for a whole month.
And on the last night of the month, he came to faith.
Now I tend to respond to these things as modestly as I can and
said I didn't realise it was such a difficult sermon to
understand. But that's how God works, isn't
it? And on this day, it's clear from
the significant step that Joseph of Arimathea takes with his
friend Nicodemus that he is actually entering now into the
Kingdom of God. I wonder if what they standing
on the outskirts watching what had happened.
Did somebody relay the message to him?
Jesus has died. He goes to Pontius Pilate to ask
for the body of Jesus. Did he perhaps remember that
Jesus had said it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of
God, but it's not impossible for God to bring that rich man into
his Kingdom? And so if it's true that Joseph
of Arimathea was a disciple of Jesus, but apparently not yet a
confessor of Jesus, and in God's kindness he had a friend who had
had this intimate conversation with Jesus about how to get into
the Kingdom. The gospel writers tell us in
well chosen words, actually, in Mark's gospel, because Mark's
Gospel is almost certainly Peter's recollection of the
gospel, that Joseph of Arimathea took courage and went to confess
Jesus to Pontius Pilate and the world.
It's a juxtaposition, isn't it? Because that was the very thing
that Peter in retrospect knew he lacked.
And he's writing in a sense out of admiration for the grace of
God in this man's life that Joseph of Arimathea took
courage. And now in asking for the body
of Jesus from conscious pilot, siding openly with Jesus, siding
with Jesus over against the Sanhedrin, siding with Jesus,
whatever it would cost him, siding with Jesus, he binds
himself to his crucified master. And the Gospel writers tell us
that he and Nicodemus did this in a very remarkable way.
And I think it's significant for us to notice.
We're told that they purchased 75 lbs of Mir and Alois.
That's not 75 British pounds, but 75 lbs of weight, and people
who rummage about to try and put that into modern terms say that
that was probably somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 of
ointment and perfume for the burial of Jesus, and say that is
a conservative estimate. What is this saying?
It's well, one thing it's saying is the riches are not stuck to
him any longer with super glue. But the really important thing
it's saying is they wanted to give Jesus a burial fit for the
king. They had both thought about
entering the Kingdom. They both had a longing to see
the Kingdom, and now what they were doing was recognizing that
the crucified Jesus was actually that king, that he reigned from
the cross, that he was as much a king to them as he was to the
thief whose words they may well also have heard.
Remember Me, Jesus, when you come into your Kingdom.
And in the process, they sacrificed their reputations, as
well as certainly some degree of their riches in order to embrace
the Lord Jesus Christ. And if at the back of this whole
picture is the memory of the young ruler who went away
sorrowful rather than entering the Kingdom, there's an even
older passage in the Scriptures that we find fulfilled here.
Isn't there at the end of the great prophecy of Isaiah about
the coming suffering servant, When Isaiah understands that
when he pours out his soul to death, he will be numbered with
the transgressors for the sake of our forgiveness, and he will
make his grave with a rich man in his death because he bore the
sins of both? So what a wonderful picture this
is for us on this Good Friday, and perhaps for some of us
particularly relevant, We see the Kingdom of God.
We are disciples of the Lord Jesus in some sense, but we have
never confessed him. And we know it takes courage,
and we learn here that the Lord will give us that courage to
embrace him and to tell others by deed and by word that this
one is our Saviour too. And when that happens, we've not
only seen the Kingdom and entered the Kingdom, but we've
seen Jesus through the eyes of Joseph of Arimathea.
And so let's this afternoon take a moment prayerfully to see
Jesus together. Amen.