Nicodemus + Joseph of Arimathea: Models of grief

the following homily was offered to the community of st. luke’s episcopal church in seattle on Good Friday:

“after these things,” john writes, summing up everything that has just happened before moving to Jesus’ burial. “After these things,” which is as swift of a transition as any you’ll find.

at the end of John’s lengthy account of Jesus’ betrayal, sham trial, and public execution, a story brimming with characters and dramatic dialogue, the narrative slows, it gets quiet.

after the Word of God was silenced on the cross, john’s passion narrative goes silent. no words are spoken here.

there are no longer crowds of characters gathered. no longer dozens of disciples, even.

at the end of john’s account of Jesus’s execution, only two characters remain. and these two characters have, up to this point, kept their faith closeted.

joseph of arimathea, john tells us, was a follower of Jesus—a secret one. matthew’s gospel describes joseph as a rich man (matt 27). mark’s gospel tells us that he was a member of the council, who was himself “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God” (mark 15). luke is careful to note that joseph “had not consented to their decision and action” (luke 23).

the fact that joseph has access to the governor, can request Jesus’s dead body, and the fact that Pilate allows him to do so, likely saving Jesus’s body from being discarded in a mass grave, all of this suggests that joseph of arimathea was an influential follower of Jesus. but up until this point, he has avoided going public with his faith, out of fear.

the same was true of nicodemus. he was a pharisee, and a member of the sanhedrin.
he had taken an interest in Jesus’ teachings, and he had his own questions. several months before this scene, he showed up again in john’s gospel, reminding his colleagues that the law requires that a person be heard before being judged—for which he was publicly rebuked (john 7).

but nicodemus also had a professional reputation to keep. if word got out that he was actually interested in following Jesus, it could cost him his livelihood, or more. so he learned to keep quiet, to keep his faith in the dark.

until the end of John’s story, when he reappears, carrying linens and heaps of expensive spices for Jesus’s burial.

“about a hundred pounds,” we’re told.

just a week earlier, six days before the passover feast, Jesus was sitting down to share a meal with friends in bethany, a couple miles outside of jerusalem. lazarus was there, who Jesus had recently raised from the dead. as was his sister martha, who was serving the meal. and mary, you might remember, who did something very odd: she began pouring expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, using her own hair to wipe them.

you might also remember the response. this perfume “was worth a year’s pay,” judas says, shunning mary’s lavish act. but Jesus speaks up: “leave her alone,” He says. “the perfume was meant for the day I am buried.” other gospel writers put it more bluntly: “she did it to prepare me for burial” (Matt 26:12).

what mary does to begin preparing Jesus for His burial, nicodemus picks up and carries out many times over. this is “extravagance in the extreme” one commentator notes (witherington, 312). if anyone was upset by a pint of perfume being poured on Jesus’ feet, imagine the response when nicodemus shows up with a hundred times the expensive spices and aloe to care for Jesus!

this kind of burial was reserved for royalty, for a king.

two men, both closeted in their faith, now coming out—the only two, we’re told, who had the courage to attend to Jesus’ dead body.

with pilate’s permission, Joseph carefully removed Jesus’ body from the cross.

with the linens and spices and aloe that nicodemus brought, the two men prepared Jesus’ body for burial, as was custom.

and then they laid Jesus’ body in an empty tomb in a nearby garden—on the day of preparation, john is careful to note, the very day when lambs were slaughtered for passover.

the story of humanity, as told in the book of genesis, begins in a garden, with the first humans being brought up from the earth.

john’s story of Jesus ends in a garden, with the Son of Man being placed back into the earth.

these two men showed up for Jesus in the moment of his death not because they suddenly overcame their fears; they came out in spite of them.

who knows what prompted these two to go public with their faith in this moment.

perhaps whispers of the evening news caught their ear, and their guilt in keeping their faith hidden for so long got the best of them.

perhaps it was a sideways glance from a partner who told them, without saying a word, you know what you need to do.

perhaps they were compelled by the very same Spirit.

whatever it was, these men were not who we’d expect at Jesus’ burial—they’re not family, not part of Jesus’ inner circle—but they’re the only ones who showed up.

sometimes, in moments of grief, we’re surprised by those who show up—and by those who don’t.

joseph of arimathea and nicodemus suggest that there are times when the most faithful thing we can do, as followers of Christ, is to attentively show up for the deaths in our midst.

do not rush past this loss, they tell us. do not hide yourself in despair.

sit here. take your time. take great care.

a romance in reverse

we all learned to take our time during the pandemic, when it seemed, for so many months, that there was nothing but time.

one of the most meaningful books I read during that time is the undertaking by thomas lynch.

in addition to being an exceptionally eloquent and hilarious writer, lynch runs a family-owned funeral home in rural michigan. the undertaking is a moving book on the poignant experiences and hard-won wisdom lynch has gained from a lifetime spent caring for those at their moment of deepest loss.

Lynch writes this on those who take the time to sit with the deaths that inevitably show up in life:

“They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death: that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions—only those who do it well and those who don’t. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment.”

thomas lynch, the undertaking

the model of joseph of arimathea and nicodemus suggest that we rush past the grief of good friday to get to the comfort of easter sunday at great cost—to ourselves and to others.

good friday or God’s friday

so we gather here, on good friday, to do just that, to sit with this death.

but why, why do we insist on calling this darkest of days ‘good’?

in a way, the answer is obvious: we call it good because of the perspective we now have, here on this side of this death. we know that, in Jesus’s death, death is not the final word. not for Jesus, and, because of Jesus, not for us.

but this day, this experience of Jesus’ death, in itself, is not good. it’s a tragedy.

“By a perversion of justice he was taken away,” the prophet isaiah declares, in a text written centuries earlier and later applied to Jesus’ own death by early christians.

writing not long before john’s gospel, the roman statesman and philosopher cicero noted that the horrors of public execution by crucifixion is beyond description—so terrible, in fact, that it wasn’t even fitting for a roman citizen’s thoughts. “The ultimate mirror of what fallen humanity is like and is capable of is the cross,” ben witherington iii notes, reflecting on the depth of horror and tragedy of this event (witherington, 317).

here, at the cross, we’re reminded that the gospel of Jesus Christ is bad news before it is good news.

even as we know that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ—not life nor death, nothing in heaven nor on earth—in our hurry to call Jesus’ death “good” for what it accomplishes, in our rush to get to the comfort of God’s embarrassingly good news, we can miss the injustice at the center of this story. and then we can become blind to the depth of tragedies of all sorts in our own midst.

good friday, patiently undertaken, helps guard us against a kind of spiritual blindness and emotional tone deafness.

in his book, living the christian year, bobby gross notes that the term “good friday” may in fact be a corruption of an earlier english phrase: “God’s friday,” similar to how our contemporary “goodbye” is a contraction of the earlier phrase: “God be with ye” from the sixteenth century.

“God’s Friday” suggests something different than “Good Friday,” doesn’t it? without rushing to call it good for what it later came to mean or accomplish, calling this day “God’s Friday” serves as a reminder: even this tragic experience of despair, death, and abandonment is not outside of God’s presence, purview or, finally, God’s love.

“God’s Friday” reminds us that the whole of this story—all the grief, all the loss—is all God’s.

my temptation: centering my own grief

that’s why good friday is one of my favorite days in the Christian calendar, which always feels a bit morbid to confess outloud.

i appreciate the space this day gives for our grief—in a culture that’s not always very good about making room for grief, or putting words to our experiences of loss.

but my temptation when it comes to good friday is this…

in my eagerness for the space good friday offers for grief, i’m tempted to start with the grief i’m carrying—either in my own life or in the lives of my loved ones. and then, maybe i’ll get to the grief and significance of Jesus’ death.

perhaps you can relate.

we are all of us carrying around our own burdens of grief, usually much more than any of our neighbors realize. and so perhaps this is only to be expected: we start with what we know, with our experience of grief, in general, to get to Jesus’ experience of death, in particular.

the problem with this temptation, however, is that it puts Jesus’ death in service of my grief, it centers my grief, rather than the other way around.

when my old theology professor dr. willie jennings preached on this text from duke divinity school, his typically soft-spoken, warm voice took on a very serious tone. it became stern and pointed—in a way i had never heard before, and have never heard from him since.

in a way that I’ll never forget, dr. Jennings said this in response to john’s story of Jesus’ death:

“It’s not about you! I’m sorry, but it’s not about you,” he repeated.

and then, after a pause, he continued.

“The only space that looks into death and does not blink is the space created by Jesus.”

“It is a space that will never close,” he insisted, “never collapse.”

“In it, and through it, death the wall becomes death the door.”

in our own experience of grief and loss, death only exists as the wall, as the final word. but in Jesus’ death, death is not the final word.

which is why we must begin not with our own grief—real as it is!— but here, at Jesus’ death.

good friday is the most particular, most acute expression of God’s sorrow and grief. it is only through this point that our vision widens to contain all griefs and all hopes.

our hope will not stand unless we begin with Jesus’ death.

the particular contains the universal

the irish poet and novelist james joyce made a similar point when he spoke of how he always begins with dublin, his most beloved of cities, whenever he is trying to write a portrait of any other city.

“In the particular is contained the universal,” joyce writes.

as in writing, so too in other areas of life. when we begin with the particular, then we can move to the universal. not the other way around.

carried toward, not carried away by grief

like the other disciples, joseph of arimathea and nicodemus carried with them great fears, alongside their own grief. but unlike the other disciples, their fears and their grief didn’t carry them away. joseph and nicodemus allow their grief to draw them closer to Jesus, rather than further.

i have learned from experience that when i’m overly focused on my own grief, i don’t have room for anything else. left alone, my grief contracts, it constricts. in despair, my heart, my mind, and my vision all turn inward on itself.

but when we attend to Jesus’s death, when we patiently care for the injustice and grief here, we find all the room we need for our own and, indeed, for all the griefs, all the fears that ever have been and ever will be—and more.

Jesus’ death opens us up.

when we start here, if we wait for it, we find room for all our hopes, too.