A friend once told me about the day, years earlier, when her husband died far too young after a lengthy illness. “I left the hospital–and people were doing normal things, like they didn’t know he was gone,” she recalled. “People were laughing and holding hands on the street and cutting each other off in traffic just like they always do.”
It was the same for many in Jerusalem the day after Christ’s crucifixion. Babies were born. Sick people died. Men and women fell into–and out of–love. Assuming it was actually Passover (and educated minds seem to be in dispute about that), the observance went on. It was a day like any other.
For Jesus’s closest followers, however, things had changed drastically. The to-ing and fro-
ing associated with their roles in his ministry were no longer certain. What were they to do? Go back to fishing or tax collecting? They must have felt at loose ends, uncertain of their futures. Like my friend, it must have been disconcerting to see life in Jerusalem go on as they had to know it had been before they arrived just a few days earlier, even though for them, the world had changed drastically.
Perhaps they did what my friend did and what any of us do who have lost a loved one. They grieved. They cried. They mourned. They told stories and maybe laughed a little. In the backs of their minds, they wondered what would come next, but not too much. It would have been too soon. They did know, however, they would have to do something, and that was return to the tomb to anoint the body. And so they went about their sorrowful preparations while some in Jerusalem celebrated their friend’s death… and others likely didn’t give it a second thought. For them, it was a day like any other.
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