The Quiet, Sad Saturday

The soldier who had said, "Truly, this man was the Son of God," was still standing at the foot of the cross when the afternoon shadows began to stretch.

Jesus was dead, and at sunset the Sabbath, the day of rest, would begin. (In those days a new day started at sundown, so the Sabbath began around Friday suppertime, and then all work stopped, even burying.)

A rich man named Joseph, from the town of Arimathea, sat on the council that had handed Jesus over. He had not agreed with them. He believed in Jesus, but in secret, because he was afraid of the other leaders. That afternoon he stopped hiding and walked straight into the governor's palace.

"Please," he said to Pilate, "let me have the body of Jesus."

Pilate raised his eyebrows. "Dead already?" Men on crosses often lasted for days. He sent for that same soldier, the officer in charge.

"He is dead, sir," the officer said.

So Pilate gave Joseph the body.

Joseph bought clean linen cloth and hurried back. Someone else was climbing the hill too: Nicodemus, the teacher who had once come to Jesus at night with his questions. He was carrying myrrh and aloes, sweet-smelling burial spices, about seventy-five pounds of them. (That is heavier than most nine-year-olds. It was the kind of heap people brought for a king.)

Together they took Jesus down from the cross. They wrapped his body in strips of linen with the spices folded in, round and round, the way their people buried the ones they loved.

Close by was a garden, and in it a new tomb that Joseph had cut into the rock for himself. No one had ever been laid there. They carried Jesus inside. Then they rolled a great round stone across the door. It settled into place with a deep, heavy thud.

Mary Magdalene and another Mary sat across from the tomb and watched, then hurried home to get more spices ready.

Saturday was the Sabbath, and the whole city stopped: no hammering, no shouting in the market. Somewhere behind locked doors, Peter and the other disciples sat and said very little. Jesus had told them more than once that he would be killed and rise again on the third day. Not one of them seemed to remember.

But some people did. That morning the chief priests marched to Pilate.

"Sir, that liar said he would rise again," they said. "Order the tomb guarded until the third day, or his disciples will steal the body and tell everyone he is alive!"

"You have soldiers," said Pilate. "Go and make it as secure as you can."

So they pressed a seal onto the stone and set soldiers beside it. (The people who hated Jesus remembered his promise better than his friends did.)

Joseph and Nicodemus had done the last kind thing friends can do. The chief priests had done the last careful thing enemies can do. Everyone agreed that Jesus would stay where they had laid him.

But Jesus had once talked about a grain of wheat. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies," he said, "it stays just one seed. But if it dies, it grows into a great harvest."

A seed goes down into the dark and gets covered over, and from above it looks finished. All Saturday the garden looked finished too. The Son of God lay wrapped in linen behind a sealed stone, and the hours crept toward the third day.

All that night the soldiers stood beside the stone, keeping watch over a seed.