With evening a new day started.
Joseph of Arimathea approached Pilate for the body of Jesus, and it was given to him.
Joseph appeared nowhere else in the Gospel narrative. According to Matthew he was:
Fittingly for Matthew, a disciple buried Jesus. He worked alone. After he had performed his role, he disappeared as silently as he had appeared.
Matthew was careful to make the point that the vault in which Jesus was buried was not an unidentified vault. There would be no possible mistake identifying the empty vault on Sunday.
Jesus’ dead body was not anointed, because the anointing had already been done by the unidentified woman at the house of Simon the leper while Jesus was still alive [26:12]. However, the body was sensitively wrapped in a clean linen cloth. (The Law’s requirement of a ritually clean cloth were important to Matthew.)
… He rolled a large rock across the entrance to the vaultand departed.Customarily, rock tombs outside the walls of the city were closed by great stones to keep out marauding animals and unwanted humans.
61 Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary,sitting opposite the vault.The two Marys sat watching. They had witnessed the whole event; they knew the location of the vault.
The incident was Matthew’s own composition, added for the purpose of assisting his community of disciples in their ongoing disputes with mainline Jews, many of whom contested the disciples’ claims to Jesus’ resurrection:
Pharisees had been absent during the whole long account of Jesus’ arrest, trials and passion. Matthew brought them back to centre stage, largely because his own community’s ongoing conflicts with the synagogue were orchestrated by those who followed in their footsteps.
63 and said, “Excellency, we recalled that that deceiver said while he was still alive, ‘After three days I shall rise’. 64 So give orders that the tomb be made secure until the third day, just in case his disciples come and steal him and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead’; and their last mistake will be worse than the first.” 65 Pilate said to them, “You have your guard. Go and make it secure, as you know best.” 66 They went off, and after they had sealed the stone, they made the tomb secure by means of a guard.The whole incident was ironic. Matthew wished to show how the leaders’ own machinations served only to authenticate the claim of Jesus’ resurrection:
Next >> Matthew 28:1-10