Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, sacrifice courage and kindness.

Hopeful by Howard Zinn

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasise in this complex history will determine our lives.

If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus

It was already late on Friday afternoon, and the body had to be taken down from the cross, before the start of Passover. All the fear that had haunted them before about supporting Jesus had gone. They were disgusted at the illegal secret trial held on Thursday night, which they knew nothing about, and so they arrived too late on Friday morning, when Jesus had already been delivered over to Pilate with a cruel howling mob baying for His death. There was nothing that they could have done in that horrible moment when Jesus, already bloody from a beating, was led out to be crucified, but there was still one thing they could do now. That was to stop His body being thrown into some anonymous pit with the other criminals who had been executed. 

Joseph was no youngster, and in fact he had only recently thought about preparing a tomb for his own burial, it had been newly completed, and was there, empty and available to be used, it would be an honour to share his own tomb with such a wise rabbi, or was Jesus more than that? Joseph had thought that He could have been the Messiah long expected but the body hanging on Roman cross looked nothing like an all-conquering king.

Being a member of the council, it was not a problem for Joseph to get an audience with Pilate, who gave the necessary permission after sending a centurion to make  doubly sure that Jesus was really dead.

Getting the body down from the cross was quite a  struggle for two elderly and usually  very dignified men who were not used to physical work. 

Handling a body the night before Passover was going to make them ritually unclean, something any self respecting religious man would never do. However, they were driven by compassion and a strange inner compulsion that this was their destiny: to fulfill that one line in the prophecy of Isaiah:

And they made his grave with the wicked
    and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
    and there was no deceit in his mouth.

So, as gently as they could, they bandaged the body, interspersed with the few spices they could find; Mary and the other women would have to come and do the job more thoroughly in the morning, so  as night fell they left with a strange new  confidence that they had not just buried a body, but planted a seed.