It Is Finished!

Reading from the Book of Mark 15:42-47

⁴² And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath,
⁴³ Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.
⁴⁴ And Pilate marvelled if he were already dead: and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead.
⁴⁵ And when he knew it of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph.

Still. Cold. Stiff. Death has claimed its greatest trophy. He is not asleep in the tomb or resting in the tomb or comatose in the tomb; he is dead in the tomb. No air in his lungs. No thoughts in his brain. No feeling in his limbs. His body is as lifeless as the stone slab upon which he has been laid.
The executioners made sure of it. When Pilate learned that Jesus was dead, he asked the soldiers if they were certain. They were. It is finished. They pried loose the nails, lowered his body, and gave it to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus the Pharisee.

⁴⁶ And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre.
⁴⁷ And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus beheld where he was laid.

As they sponged the blood from his beard, don’t you know they listened for his breath? 
As they wrapped the cloth around his hands, don’t you know they hoped for a pulse? 
Don’t you know they searched for life?
But they didn’t find it.
So they do with him what they were expected to do with a dead man. 
They wrap his body in clean linen and place it in a tomb. Joseph’s tomb. 
For three days, no one gets close to the grave.
But then....Sunday arrives....to be con't.