Life-and-Death Stakes at Joseph's Tomb (Matt. 27:57-28:15)

Call to worship:

Exodus 19:3–6 RSV

3 And Moses went up to God, and the Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: 4 You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the children of Israel.”

Reading 1, for perspective:

Psalm 121 RSV

A Song of Ascents. 1 I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? 2 My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. 3 He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you will not slumber. 4 Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. 6 The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night. 7 The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. 8 The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and for evermore.

Reading 2, main text:

Matthew 27:57–28:15 RSV

57 When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus. 58 He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. 59 And Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, 60 and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock; and he rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb, and departed. 61 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the sepulchre. 62 Next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate 63 and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ 64 Therefore order the sepulchre to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away, and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” 65 Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.” 66 So they went and made the sepulchre secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard. 1 Now after the sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulchre. 2 And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. 4 And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. Lo, I have told you.” 8 So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9 And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Hail!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” 11 While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. 12 And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sum of money to the soldiers 13 and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14 And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” 15 So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.

I.

There’s a riddle probably made most famous by Groucho Marx that asks, “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?”

Today it seems fitting then, on this Easter Sunday, that we ask the question,

Who is buried in Joseph’s tomb??

What’s your answer to THAT riddle?

It’s the question that meets us this day, every Sunday, and every day! It’s important to know...

II.

So it makes sense to point out right away, that our two passages share a very important link: and the link is there in the word “guard.”

You see the link of course in the guards of the Gospel reading in Matthew. These guards, who stand at the mouth of Joseph’s tomb. They guard the stone, they watch, and they are “made like dead men” at the sight of the angel who opens the tomb and allows the resurrected Jesus to come out.

And finally, it’s the guards who go into town with the report of all that’s happened—and they’re told to hush it. (Spread the word that the disciples stole the body!)

The guard is there in our Psalm passage as well—though it doesn’t show itself immediately. You have to look at the word in the RSV, “keep.” And there, the Hebrew word “keep” in Psalm 121 is also the word for “watch,” or “guard.” We hear it repeated all of six times in those verses—Psalm 121:3,4,5,7,8. Wherever the psalm uses the word “keep,” an equally fitting translation is just as well “guard.”

So there is the tie between our Old Testament- and our New Testament readings this morning.

That is the tie between our readings—and it is also the tension and the strain.

III.

What is the tension?? Psalm 121 of course places the LORD as the keeper, even (Psalm 121:7) “he will keep your life.” — But in Matthew 27 and Matthew 28, this Lord—the Lord Jesus—has been put to death! He has been hanged: he was bloodied, beaten, bruised, and then crucified on a cross. He has, Matthew tells us, a “guard” placed around him, in a borrowed tomb, a sepulchre place of the buried dead.

Who is the keeper, and who is the guard?

Is the LORD the keeper of life, as he is in Psalm 121:7? Or will the guards win out, keeping watch over the body—keeping guard over this Jesus, who has been sealed and stuffed away into Joseph’s garden tomb?

There is the tension. There is the strain.

IV.

Do you come here and feel the tension this morning, too?

Cemeteries. Crematoriums. Funeral homes.

Obituaries. Grief support groups.

On my way here this morning, I drove by a cemetery on the corner of 165th & Hohman. That should remind us of the tension! Those graves are still sitting there. And new arrivals continue coming for placement in those graves.

A world of sickness and disease:

Maybe a family member or friend even this morning you’re not sure if, or how, they’re going to “make it”...

Children who die and precede their parents into death...

Children killed in schools.

My brother is in line perhaps to adopt three children who are in an orphanage in Bulgaria. Three children. Totally parent-less. Waiting in an orphanage. And one is about to age out of the orphanage system, where he otherwise faces going into an adult life of homelessness, dependency, and poverty.

Orphans. Miscarriages. Stillbirths.

The list goes on.

Death, disease, famine.

V.

Imagine the psalmist arriving at the “guard” scenes we read this morning in Matthew’s Gospel. What would be the reaction, do you think?

To consider, let’s just take the psalm, Psalm 121, line by line to see:

The psalmist wrote a psalm of ascent, a psalm of stairs.

It’s a pilgrim song, a joyful song for the journey. A song for the ascent to the feast and to the temple. The psalmist wrote a song for celebration. What Matthew gives though is a place of death and mourning, a graveyard, a cemetery.

Psalm 121 lifts the psalmist’s eyes “to the hills.”

Matthew’s Gospel’s only hill is a rocky mound, a crag. It is the hill of Joseph’s borrowed tomb and grave. And this hill follows the bloody and gruesome hill of Golgotha and the Place of the Skull.

Psalm 121 looks for help. It wants assurance and blessed hope. The psalmist claims the LORD, YHWH, as that hope and that help.

Jesus though, Yehoshua, had a body there under guard and under wraps. So not much hope there or help...

Then moving along, Psalm 121 suggests the one whose foot will “not be moved,” and “he will not slumber,” “he will not sleep.” Jesus went into the grave and appeared…sleeping. On the cross he had “yielded up his spirit” (Matt. 27:50). His feet (there again Psalm 121:3) didn’t just stumble—they were nailed to a tree!

Indeed, Psalm 121 says “he will guard you”—he will keep you.

Jesus himself is under guard. Guards surround his place of burial. And there appears no way out, no path for escape.

Jesus has been “smitten” by day (see Psalm 121:6), and by night he was speared and laid in the grave before the Sabbath start.

Where is the hope there??

And the kicker: Psalm 121:7 says, The LORD will keep you from all evil (every bad thing); he will keep your life.

The word there for life is also the word for soul—and Jesus gave that up on the cross and breathed his last (Matt. 27:50). He couldn’t keep his own life, it appeared! Jesus was gone, and dead, and buried!

It appeared a betrayer had won out. The high priests and their henchmen seem to have won. The crowds with their false accusations. Pilate who wanted to let Jesus free, but was overwhelmed. Herod.

Beatings, whippings, humiliation upon humiliation. Spitting. Carrying a cross weakly through streets of jeering crowds. Dropping the cross and having it handed over to a black African (Simon from Cyrene), who was made for that moment to carry the cross the rest of the way.

All the evil that day!

Then being nailed and left to die. Jeered and mocked by the crowds down below. Mourned by his own mother and friend, who were left to stand helpless and watch the bloody massacre. Deserted by his friends, and denied by his closest disciple.

Jeered and mocked by the criminals that were hung nearby, too.

No respect, no dignity, no decency left at all to him.

Just hanging there. Left to die in a horribly and terribly brutal manner.

And he was buried in a borrowed tomb.

WHO will keep your life? Who will keep your soul?

VI.

We come to Joseph’s tomb this morning, and we must answer the question:

Who is buried in Joseph’s tomb?

If it is Joseph, then Joseph’s tomb will be widely regarded as most any other tomb. Nothing significant, perhaps except to family and to people who had known him.

But: if it is Jesus still buried in Joseph’s tomb—then we are to be most pitied. We are to be scoffed and ridiculed and left without any hope.

If it is Jesus in Joseph’s tomb, then we have no business being here this morning. If it is Jesus in Joseph’s tomb, then we have no business claiming ourselves as Christians or telling others at all of our Christian faith.

In fact, if it is Jesus in Joseph’s tomb—or if his body was stolen by his disciples in a great and terrible hoax(!), then we are without hope and we are most to be mourned and sorrowed. We may as well pack everything up, forget about being here, and just turn off the lights as we leave and walk out the door, never to come back again.

1 Corinthians 15:17 “17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

1 Corinthians 15:19 “19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

VII.

But--

If it is Jesus who walked out of the tomb...

Who had an angel appear to roll away a stone...

…A stone that would have needed oxen and an operation of people to move it otherwise...

And trained, elite guards were so shocked and overwhelmed to fall over as if “dead”

If his disciples and many others didn’t just steal him away in a ruse, but these disciples saw him and witnessed him with many others—including a Paul who would be so transformed by the experience that he would go from a persecutor to become a chief “apostle to the Gentiles”

Then you and I must meet these facts today.

These are here for us to consider. And they are here to grip us and to call us to faith:

Faith in the one who overcame death, who gives (and guards) life

Who grants justification and forgiveness of sins

Who pours out his Spirit even now, and delivers the saints from out of the snatches of sin, and death, and sadness, and hell

We must meet him at the mouth of an empty garden tomb this morning.

And with his disciples who did it so long ago, we must join them, and Matthew 28:15, we must come up to him, take him by his feet, and worship him.

THIS is why we are here this morning. And this is why we continue coming back.

“He is not here. He is risen.”

We lift our eyes to the hills—the beautiful mountains of the Rockies…the sad hill of Calvary…the empty hill of Joseph’s tomb…and the outcome of it all turns our eyes to the heavenly One who created it all! We find our help, our hope, our assurance, and our blessed peace.

We find our everything: for this life and the next.

We find the one who guards us, for eternity.

So go and tell. Tell the message, far and wide. Ring the bells, blast the organ. Fling open the doors!

Psalm 121:7 RSV

7 The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.

His dead body was under Roman guard.

But his risen body is very much alive and well—and he sits at the very right hand of God on high.

Amen.

Parting blessing

Numbers 6:24–26 NIV84

24 “ ‘ “The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; 26 the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” ’