Joseph of Arimathea has been sitting inside this story since the council condemned Jesus, and Luke tells us who he was only now, when it matters. He was 50"a member of the council, a good and righteous man," 51"who had not consented to their decision and action." He was in the room. He heard the testimony and watched the vote and did not add his consent. His dissent cost him nothing visible in the moment, and it marks him as a man out of step with the body he belonged to.
Luke names what drove the dissent with a phrase this Gospel has used before: Joseph was 51"looking for the kingdom of God." Simeon was waiting for the consolation of Israel (Luke 2:25), and Anna spoke of the child to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem (Luke 2:38). At the end of the story those two opened, a member of the ruling council, who watched that child condemned as a man, is described in the same posture, still watching for God to keep his promise when the council he served had just apparently crushed it.
What he does next takes courage. He 52"went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus," publicly identifying himself with a condemned man his colleagues had just engineered to execute. He does it with care, wrapping the body in a linen shroud and laying it in 53"a tomb cut in stone, where no one had ever yet been laid." The phrase echoes the colt Jesus rode into Jerusalem, on which no one had ever yet sat (Luke 19:30). A king who entered the city on an animal no one had used leaves it in a grave no one had used. The tomb is a rich man's tomb, and Isaiah had said the servant would be with a rich man in his death (Isaiah 53:9).
The timing presses everyone: 54"It was the day of Preparation, and the Sabbath was beginning." The women who had come with him from Galilee watch, and they 55"saw the tomb and how his body was laid," memorizing what they will need to finish properly after the Sabbath. They return and prepare spices and ointments, everything ready except the thing the commandment would not yet permit.
Then comes the shortest, quietest sentence in the passage: on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment. After the arrest, the trials, the crucifixion, and the burial, the followers of Jesus keep the Sabbath exactly as the law required, waiting one more ordinary day before anyone can return to a body they did not yet know would not need the spices.
Joseph does his work in public view and then goes home, and Luke records the act without a word of Joseph's own. What are you looking for? Name it, and keep looking for the kingdom of God in the plain days of waiting.
Prayer
Father, thank you for Joseph's quiet courage, willing to be identified with your Son when every visible reason to hope seemed to have ended. Give us that same patient waiting for your kingdom, unwilling to consent to whatever verdict the world has reached against you. And on our own Sabbaths, our own days of enforced rest before the answer comes, teach us to keep them faithfully, trusting you with what we cannot yet finish. In Jesus' name, amen.