Through the Grieving Eyes of Joseph (Matthew 27:45-61) - Holy Week Noon Sermon

Scripture reading us from Matthew chapter 27 and verses 45

Matthew 27 · chapter mention

through 61 as we continue this series on seeing Jesus through

the eyes of those who assembled round the cross on near to it.

And we come this afternoon to think a little of Joseph of

Arimathea. This is God's word.

Now from the 6th hour there was darkness over all the land until

the 9th hour. And about the 9th hour Jesus

cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, Lama

Sabachthani, that is my God. My God, why have you forsaken

me? And some of the bystanders

hearing it, said, This man is calling Elijah.

And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with

sour wine and put it on a Reed and gave it to him to drink.

But the other said, wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to

save him. And Jesus cried out again with a

loud voice, and yielded up his Spirit.

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top

to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split.

The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the Saints who

had fallen asleep were raised. And coming out of the tombs.

After His resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared

to many, and when the centurion and those who were with him,

keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took

place, they were filled with awe and said truly this was the Son

of God. There were also many women

there, looking on from a distance, who had followed Jesus

from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary

Magdalene, and that Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and

the mother of the sons of Zebedee.

When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea named

Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus.

He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.

Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him, And Joseph took

the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, and laid it

in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock.

And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and

went away. Mary Magdalene and the other

Mary were there sitting opposite the tomb.

This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated.

Privilege to think with you for a few minutes about this

passage. And when I was reflecting on it

this morning, that crossed my mind that because there are

actually many scholars who believe that Jesus was born

before the traditional dating of his birth.

It is just possible since the sun has now gone down in

Jerusalem, that this day is the 200th, 2 thousandth anniversary

of this event that's described here about this otherwise

unknown man, Joseph of Arimathea.

And my suspicion is, if you've been at all the meditations in

this series, but one of the things that may strike you about

the way in which the gospel writers tell this story is that

on the one hand they tell the facts of the matter, but on the

other hand, they characteristically tell the

story with clues embedded into the way they tell the story.

They help us not only to understand what happened, but to

understand why it happened. In many ways, this section of

the Gospel is like those puzzles that children enjoy, where they

are to spot the clues in the picture.

And this particular picture is set in the midst of two very

significant earlier passages of Scripture that shed very

considerable light on it. The first I want to mention for

the moment and hope thinking of what the second might be will

not actually distract you from what I say in between.

The first passage that gives us an insight into this passage is

the one other passage in the Gospels in which a rich man

meets with the Lord Jesus, the man with whom we are familiar,

who also like Joseph of Arimathea, was a ruler.

Perhaps like Joseph of Arimathea, actually a member of

the 70 rulers who governed Israel, member of the Sanhedrin

who came to Jesus looking for the Kingdom of God.

And when Jesus preached the Kingdom of God to him, he went

away with a sad heart because he was so very rich and the Super

glue of his riches made it impossible for him to embrace

the Lord Jesus. It would be wonderful, wouldn't

it, if this actually was the same man.

But there's no way that we can prove whether that is true or

not. But here comes another rich man

to Jesus, and all of the gospel writers, with the different

reflections they have as they put together the story of this

man, Joseph of Arimathea, give us a profound sense of what God

was actually doing if this man's life.

He was not the only rich ruler in the Gospels, but he is a rich

ruler who clearly by the end of this passage has come to a

living faith in the Lord Jesus. And I want to reflect with you

just for a moment or two this afternoon on three really

significant clues as to the way God is working in his life.

The 1st is this. But the Gospel writers tell us

he was a disciple, but they make it very clear that he was not a

confessor. He was a disciple of Jesus in

the sense that in the Gospels there are many disciples of

Jesus, that is, people who are willing to learn from Jesus but

have not yet come to the point of confessing Jesus as their

saviour and their Lord. It wouldn't at all surprise me,

even assuming that Joseph is a very different man from the rich

young ruler earlier on in the Gospels, that because that man

was a ruler, word spread among the rulers that Jesus, after

meeting him, had said how hard it is for a rich man to enter

the Kingdom of God. And the Gospel writers tell us

that this in fact was Joseph's position.

He was a disciple of Jesus who had learned from Jesus and was

even waiting for the Kingdom. But it seems, at least until

this point, he was not yet himself in the Kingdom, in the

very position that many people find themselves in.

Isn't it disciples of Jesus in many respects, but not yet

confessors of Jesus? I think one of my favorite

memories from pastoral ministry in the United States was a day a

very small lady came and snuggled up beside me.

I think she was well into her 70s, looked up, straining her

neck to look up into my face, and said in a very

conspiratorial fashion, You know, everyone around here

thinks I've been a Christian almost all my life, but I only

really became a Christian two years ago.

I think I could have picked her up, hugged her, put her in my

pocket and taken her home because she had discovered what

Joseph of Arimathea had obviously been longing to

discover, the Kingdom of God breaking in in his life.

And yet, for whatever reason, he had apparently not quite taken

the step of entering the Kingdom.

He was near the Kingdom like other people in the Gospels, but

not yet in it. And God was graciously bringing

him that day 2000 years ago from outside the Kingdom into it.

So he was a disciple, but not yet a confessor.

The second clue that's so interesting, and especially we

get it in John's account of this story, is that Joseph of

Arimathea was a very close friend to someone who had spoken

to Jesus about the Kingdom. Remember how in John's Gospel

we're told that Joseph of Arimathea did not do this on his

own? That's such a lovely touch when

we put the Gospels together. You are not alone if you enter

the Kingdom of God. And he did all this through the

friendship and company of Nicodemus, so famous in John's

Gospel. He appears on three different

occasions, and on the 1st occasion he is engaged in

conversation with Jesus about how you enter the Kingdom of

God. So here is Joseph looking for

the Kingdom of God, as the Gospel writers tell us, friends

of Nicodemus. And one cannot but imagine that

there were many conversations between them.

Exactly what did Jesus say to you about entering the Kingdom

of God, Nicodemus? Well, they were on a long slow

pilgrimage together. And Nicodemus no doubt said to

him, he said something very strange, I didn't really

understand it. He said, Nicodemus, you don't

actually have the capacity in yourself to enter the Kingdom of

God because unless God himself works upon your life, you can

neither see, you will be blind and you certainly cannot enter

the Kingdom of God. It's such a lovely illustration

to us that it can take a long time for the truth of God's Word

to penetrate into our hearts. I met a young man once who told

me he had been converted. Listening to it must have been a

long time ago, a cassette tape of Assam and I'd preached

immediately afterwards. I met his father and his father

said, did he tell you his story? I said you must be so thrilled

that he's come to faith. But he said, did he tell you the

whole story? Lowe's story was that the boy

was spiritually nowhere, Came into the utility room late one

night where the parents had stacked various cassette tapes

of salmons they'd listened to, casually picked her up.

And his father said, you know, he listened to that salmon of

yours every single night for a whole month.

And on the last night of the month, he came to faith.

Now I tend to respond to these things as modestly as I can and

said I didn't realise it was such a difficult sermon to

understand. But that's how God works, isn't

it? And on this day, it's clear from

the significant step that Joseph of Arimathea takes with his

friend Nicodemus that he is actually entering now into the

Kingdom of God. I wonder if what they standing

on the outskirts watching what had happened.

Did somebody relay the message to him?

Jesus has died. He goes to Pontius Pilate to ask

for the body of Jesus. Did he perhaps remember that

Jesus had said it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of

God, but it's not impossible for God to bring that rich man into

his Kingdom? And so if it's true that Joseph

of Arimathea was a disciple of Jesus, but apparently not yet a

confessor of Jesus, and in God's kindness he had a friend who had

had this intimate conversation with Jesus about how to get into

the Kingdom. The gospel writers tell us in

well chosen words, actually, in Mark's gospel, because Mark's

Gospel is almost certainly Peter's recollection of the

gospel, that Joseph of Arimathea took courage and went to confess

Jesus to Pontius Pilate and the world.

It's a juxtaposition, isn't it? Because that was the very thing

that Peter in retrospect knew he lacked.

And he's writing in a sense out of admiration for the grace of

God in this man's life that Joseph of Arimathea took

courage. And now in asking for the body

of Jesus from conscious pilot, siding openly with Jesus, siding

with Jesus over against the Sanhedrin, siding with Jesus,

whatever it would cost him, siding with Jesus, he binds

himself to his crucified master. And the Gospel writers tell us

that he and Nicodemus did this in a very remarkable way.

And I think it's significant for us to notice.

We're told that they purchased 75 lbs of Mir and Alois.

That's not 75 British pounds, but 75 lbs of weight, and people

who rummage about to try and put that into modern terms say that

that was probably somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 of

ointment and perfume for the burial of Jesus, and say that is

a conservative estimate. What is this saying?

It's well, one thing it's saying is the riches are not stuck to

him any longer with super glue. But the really important thing

it's saying is they wanted to give Jesus a burial fit for the

king. They had both thought about

entering the Kingdom. They both had a longing to see

the Kingdom, and now what they were doing was recognizing that

the crucified Jesus was actually that king, that he reigned from

the cross, that he was as much a king to them as he was to the

thief whose words they may well also have heard.

Remember Me, Jesus, when you come into your Kingdom.

And in the process, they sacrificed their reputations, as

well as certainly some degree of their riches in order to embrace

the Lord Jesus Christ. And if at the back of this whole

picture is the memory of the young ruler who went away

sorrowful rather than entering the Kingdom, there's an even

older passage in the Scriptures that we find fulfilled here.

Isn't there at the end of the great prophecy of Isaiah about

the coming suffering servant, When Isaiah understands that

when he pours out his soul to death, he will be numbered with

the transgressors for the sake of our forgiveness, and he will

make his grave with a rich man in his death because he bore the

sins of both? So what a wonderful picture this

is for us on this Good Friday, and perhaps for some of us

particularly relevant, We see the Kingdom of God.

We are disciples of the Lord Jesus in some sense, but we have

never confessed him. And we know it takes courage,

and we learn here that the Lord will give us that courage to

embrace him and to tell others by deed and by word that this

one is our Saviour too. And when that happens, we've not

only seen the Kingdom and entered the Kingdom, but we've

seen Jesus through the eyes of Joseph of Arimathea.

And so let's this afternoon take a moment prayerfully to see

Jesus together. Amen.