Description
Mark For Everyone
MARK 15.40–47
The Burial of Jesus...
...Yesterday a friend came to see me in great excitement. He had been in Jerusalem a few weeks earlier, and had happened to be present when an archaeologist stumbled upon a previously unknown first-century tomb, just outside the walls of the old city. It was preserved intact: bones, ossuaries (bone-boxes), everything, including one full skeleton still wrapped up, laid by itself in a niche in the cave. Presumably the family had not been able to return, as they would normally expect to, and collect the bones to put them in another ossuary.
There are, no doubt, still plenty of other archaeological excitements waiting to be discovered. But this one brings into focus for us what we might otherwise miss in a modern reading of the story: the manner of Jesus’ burial, and the reasons why Mark is keen to tell us the story like this. We might suppose the burial narrative to be a sad and not particularly interesting appendix to the story of Jesus’ death; for Mark, it trembles with the suppressed excitement of what he knows is going to happen next...
Taken from Mark for Everyone by Tom Wright