Walking With Jesus: An Easter DevotionalÀpẹrẹ

So often, we live our lives at breakneck speed. We frantically go from one thing to the next without a thought, doing violence not only to our bodies and mental health but to our spirituality. We fly over texts like today's on Jesus's burial and miss the pathos they mean to communicate. 

But let’s pause for a moment.

What would it have felt like to have your hopes dashed against the rocks? 

To have the one on whom you’ve placed the entire weight of your hope and love be taken from you? 

To see the one who has loved you in a way that all others have failed, to see him taken by night, mocked, beaten, bruised, crucified like a common criminal, like an enemy of the state? 

How do you bury someone like this?

If we are like most of the disciples we would have tucked tail and ran and not have been around to see all of this go down. 

But there are a couple of characters in this story that once were ashamed or fearful of following Jesus who now are the men who take Jesus down from his cross and prepare his body for burial.

Imagine being with them in a small room, themselves becoming ritually unclean (by touching a corpse) in order to clean the body that was broken to cleanse them of their deepest stains. 

Can you smell the heavy spices in the room? Can you hear the heavy sobs? The heaving of sadness as Joseph and Nicodemus care for the broken and lifeless body of the Author of Life? But how could we if we are always in a rush?

So this is an invitation to slow down this Easter. 

To sit in the tomb with the lifeless body of the Lord of All. 

To see and experience the lengths to which he would go for you. 

So as you wait with the body of Christ, as you experience the death of Jesus, may this enlarge you to taste in new and fresh ways the way this death brings you life. 

Be still.