Reflection on the Burial of Christ (Mark 15:42-47)

When my young children are finished with their meals and ask to leave the table, I usually check to see if their plates are clean. I want to make sure that the food is really gone. The Heidelberg Catechism tells us that Jesus was buried “to prove that he was really dead” (Q.41). Mark takes these six, dense verses in his gospel to insist to the reader that Jesus was truly dead.

Pilate was not willing to surrender the body of Christ over to Joseph until the soldier confirmed his kill. Pilate was checking the plate of his soldiers, we might say, to make sure that the job was done. Remember that the Romans were notorious for their effectiveness in administering death. Only after Pilate and his soldiers were convinced of the death of Christ was Joseph permitted to bury him.

We have no practice of burying the living. For this reason, Mark paints a vivid and earthy picture of Christ’s burial procedure. The “corpse” was “wrapped in linen” that was “bought” by “Joseph of Arimathea.” A tomb that was “cut out of the rock” was made the resting place of Christ’s body, as the women watched with eager care. 

Why does Mark insist to the reader, through the burial of Jesus, that Christ was truly dead? My friends, when considering the humiliation of Christ, there is no lower point than the grave. While the spirit of Jesus ascended to paradise (Luke 23:43), his body descended into the abode of the dead, Sheol in the Hebrew or Hades in the Greek. In the burial of Christ’s body we are surely authorized to say that Jesus tasted the fullness of human death for us (Hebrews 2:9). Mark is giving us license to rejoice in the atoning death of Jesus.

At some point during an open casket funeral, I know that my mind will drift to my own impending death and burial. I will have those eerie thoughts of my soulless body being put on display for mourners and eventually lowered into the depths of the earth. In the burial of Jesus we find triumph and hope in the darkest regions of human experience. The Father refused to abandon Christ's body to the grave for long (Psalm 16:10). Christ is risen indeed! 

As one dutch theologian wrote, “A believing child of God may thus anticipate his burial with peace and joy, for by His burial, the Lord Jesus fully removed for them all the terror and curse of the grave.” Jesus was planted in the ground only to burst forth from the grave as the first fruits of a coming resurrection for his beloved people (1 Corinthians 15:20).