“Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away.” (Matthew 27:59-60)

Today is Holy Saturday. It is a day when Christians around the world find themselves caught between remembering the crucifixion on Good Friday and celebrating the resurrection on Easter Sunday. It is a day of mixed emotions. It is a day of waiting and anticipation.

It is good to remember that we are merely caught between the observances of these two days. On that first Holy Saturday, Jesus’ followers were caught between the actual events of Good Friday and Easter. They had to go through the full day with Jesus their Lord and Master crucifed, dead and buried. On Easter we celebrate the empty tomb. But on that holy and sacred day the tomb of Jesus was woefully full.

Jesus’ followers did not know that Easter was coming (although they should have!). We do, and that makes all the difference. We live on this side of the resurrection. On this Holy Saturday and every Holy Saturday we serve a risen Savior.

So let us rejoice in Christ who died and rose again. But let us also remember this day when Jesus’ body lay buried in the tomb. Let us feel for the disciples whose hope was buried along with him. And let us marvel at the incongruent wonder of God in the ground.

Fred Sanders has an interesting post at the Scriptorium today on Narnia and Holy Saturday. First he draws the comparison between Aslan’s delayed arrival to help Peter and the Narnian army in their battle against the White Witch to the disciples’ waiting for Christ’s resurrection on Saturday.

One of the most interesting decisions Lewis makes in establishing the chronology of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the way he keeps Aslan out of the picture long enough that the armies of Narnia have to face the White Witch in his absence. The film adaptation handles this very well, I think. Dramatically speaking, it makes for a great story to have the heroes bravely fight against overwhelming odds with no hope of rescue. They give their all and face real martyrdom, before the risen Aslan comes over the hilltop at the last possible second, leading a re-animated army he has gathered from the dungeon of the Witch.

Then he goes on to compare the waiting of the disciples on Holy Saturday to our waiting in the present for Christ’s return.

Since Jesus ascended into heaven and left us waiting for his return, we are in a position strikingly similar to the disciples: for them, Jesus had descended into the earth and left them waiting for his return. The two returns of Jesus –from the grave and from the Father’s right hand– are different. But the waiting should feel familiar. Welcome to the meantime, where we have God’s promise and live by faith that Christ will be back, keeping all God’s promises. Welcome to Holy Saturday in Narnia.

As a big Narnia fan, I really enjoyed this one. You can read the full article here.

Click here for more Narnia related posts.
Click here for Narnia sermon series.

Here is a poem for Good Friday.

“GOOD FRIDAY” – by Christina G. Rossetti

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky.
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

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(Note: Christina Rossetti is perhaps best known for her Christmas poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter”.)

Click here for Good Friday Poems by George Herbert.
Click here for A Wintry Sonnet by Christina Rossetti.
Click here for poems by Ray Fowler.

Here is an excerpt on human suffering and the cross from John Stott’s landmark book, The Cross of Christ:

I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross’. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after awhile I have had to turn away. And in imagination, I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through his hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ … is God’s only self justification in such a world’ as ours.¹ (John Stott, The Cross of Christ, pp. 335-336)

¹ P.T. Forsyth, Justification of God, p. 32.

The following is excerpted from A. W. Tozer’s essay, “The Cross is a Radical Thing,” found in his book, The Root of the Righteous. I trust you will find it a meaningful meditation on the cross for this Good Friday.
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“The cross of Christ is the most revolutionary thing ever to appear among men.

“The cross of the Roman times knew no compromise; it never made concessions. It won all its arguments by killing its opponent and silencing him for good. It spared not Christ, but slew Him the same as the rest. He was alive when they hung Him on that cross and completely dead when they took him down six hours later …

“After Christ was risen from the dead the apostles went out to preach His message, and what they preached was the cross … The radical message of the cross transformed Saul of Tarsus and changed him from a persecutor of Christians to a tender believer and an apostle of the faith. Its power changed bad men into good ones. It shook off the long bondage of paganism and altered completely the whole moral and mental outlook of the Western world.

“All this it did and continued to do as long as it was permitted to remain what it had been originally, a cross. Its power departed when it was changed from a thing of death to a thing of beauty. When men made of it a symbol, hung it around their necks as an ornament … then it became at best a weak emblem … As such it is revered today by millions who know absolutely nothing about its power …

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When I first saw Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ back in 2004, I was intrigued by the character of Veronica. As Jesus struggles with the cross through the streets of Jerusalem, a young woman approaches him and wipes his face with a cloth. The scene is almost surreal as she walks bravely through the midst of the soldiers to Christ and then back again. As Jesus and the soldiers continue on their way, she stands holding the cloth which seems to bear an imprint of Jesus’ face on it.

I found this a very touching scene, and yet I also remember thinking, “What was that all about? I don’t remember that in the Bible.” Well, three years have passed, and I guess I was never curious enough to do the research myself, but John Mark Reynolds over at The Scriptorium has come to my aid today with a fascinating article called: Women of Holy Week: Veronica and Legends that Capture the Truth.

In the article Reynolds explains the origins of the Veronica legend and even the origin of her name. (Her name, “veron ika” means “very image” and corresponds to the image of Christ’s face on the cloth.) After affirming the historical truth of the gospel accounts and revealing the Veronica account as clearly legend and myth, Reynolds goes on to show how we can still learn something from the Veronica story today.

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I found today’s reading in Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening especially encouraging. The following meditation is from 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Mourning Christian! Why do you weep? Are you mourning over your own corruptions? Look to your perfect Lord, and remember, you are complete in him; you are in God’s sight as perfect as if you had never sinned; nay, more than that, the Lord our Righteousness has put a divine garment upon you, so that you have more than the righteousness of man – you have the righteousness of God . . . Your standing is not in yourself – it is in Christ; your acceptance is not in yourself, but in your Lord; you are as much accepted of God today, with all your sinfulness, as you will be when you stand before his throne, free from all corruption . . . and all this because the divine Lord “was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

You can access Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening daily devotional online here.

Randy Ingermason, who has a PH.D in physics from U.C. Berkley, has put together a fun set of statistics relating to the Jesus Family Tomb. In his March 26, 2007 article here, he introduces the reader to Bayes’ Theorum and at the same time gives you a crash course in statistical analysis.

What’s fun about Ingermason’s article is that he not only gives you five different possible scenarios (click on “Continue reading …” below), but he also gives you a downloadable Excel spreadsheet so that you can run the numbers yourself. How likely is it that the tomb at Talpiot is really the Lost Tomb of Jesus? You do the math!

HT: Dr. Darrell Bock at Bock’s Blog (Dr. Bock has multiple posts at his blog relating to the Jesus Tomb, including email exchanges with Jim Tabor, the biblical scholar and historical consultant on the Lost Family Tomb Documentary.)

Note: For more information on this blog about the Jesus Family Tomb, see the following articles:

• The Lost Tomb Losing More Ground
• How to Ensure Bias in a Presentation
• The Rabbi, the Historian and the Resurrection

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The Nativity Story was released on DVD today in the stores. If you did not see this movie back in December, let me recommend it to you as a biblically faithful, historically accurate and artistically sensitive portrayal of the events surrounding the birth of Christ. Seeing this movie in the theater was one of the highlights of this past year’s Christmas for our family.

I was surprised and disappointed that the movie did not do very well at the box office. Christianity Today has an article here discussing the timing of the film and the rushed schedule that did not allow for adequate publicity or proper promotion.

Regardless of box office performance, this is a beautifully made film that deserves to be seen by many more people now that it has come out on DVD. We will certainly be picking up a copy and making it a part of our Christmas celebration each year.

Albert Mohler has two great back-to-back posts on the importance to Christian faith of the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus. He cites both a Jewish rabbi and a secular historian to make his point. Although some people would claim that it doesn’t matter to Christian faith whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead, the Bible says differently, and both of these writers agree.

Rabbi Marc Gellman: “I know many Christian clergy who have told me that the main truth of Christianity for them is to love as Jesus loved and that no archeological discovery can change that spiritual lesson. I love these folks but, as an outsider, I just don’t agree that decisive refutation of Jesus’ resurrection would have no effect on Christian faith. Unlike Judaism and Islam and Hinduism and even Buddhism, which are built on God’s teachings, Christianity is built both on God’s teachings as well as on an historical event proving a transcendental miracle.”

Gellman continues: “The divide separating Christians from non-Christians is not between those who think loving all people is good and those who think loving all people is bad. The real divide is between those who believe that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day as proof that he was indeed the Messiah sent by God, and those who do not believe this article of faith and this audacious historical claim.”

And here is historian A. N. Wilson weighing in on the supposed find of Jesus’ lost tomb: “Long ago, Paul the Apostle wrote to his friends in Corinth that if Christ did not rise from the dead, their faith was in vain. No doubt, if Cameron’s find were proved to be authentic, it would destroy the Christian religion. The Pope could shut up shop. The Church of England could be absorbed by the National Trust as just a collection of medieval buildings. Unbelievers in the resurrection would feel that their scepticism had been justified and the vast majority of Christian believers, who profess their faith in Christ risen from the dead, would be compelled to admit their faith had been based on a mistake.”

Make no mistake about it. Without the resurrection of Jesus, there is no true Christian faith.

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day . . . If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4,14)

You can read Mohler’s two commentaries here:

• Rabbi Gellman Gets It — The Resurrection Really Matters
• A. N. Wilson Gets It Too — No Resurrection, No Christianity

Here is a classic quote from Billy Graham that bears repeating in light of the recent “Jesus Tomb” special:

“There is more evidence that Jesus rose from the dead than there is that Julius Caesar ever lived or Alexander the Great died at the age of 33. It is strange that historians accept thousands of facts for which they can produce only shreds of evidence. But in the face of overwhelming evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ they cast a skeptical eye and hold intellectual doubts. The trouble with those people is that they do not want to believe.” – Billy Graham, Peace with God

HT: Minister’s ToolBox