This year I have studied the Gospel of John. It has been so beautiful. What a Savior we serve! I am amazed at how good our God is!
When Mary Magdalene went to Jesus’s tomb on the Sunday following His crucifixion, she saw that the stone had been rolled away, and the tomb was empty. She ran to tell the other disciples and Peter and John raced to see. They looked into the tomb and….
John 20:6b-7 He [Peter] saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen.
As I was thinking about this Scripture, and was trying to picture in my head what John and Peter would have seen, I thought about the 75 pounds of spices wrapped with the linens around Jesus’s body. The linen was lying where Jesus’s body had lain, and I pictured it as if He had simply passed out of them when He resurrected from the dead.
I remembered something my teacher had said, “the physical often points to the spiritual” (and this has often come to mind this year when I have seen the beauty and majesty of God’s creation – how for example, His faithfulness is demonstrated each morning with the rising of the sun).
I thought about how the linens and spices around Jesus in the tomb would have been much like a cocoon, and how before a caterpillar enters its cocoon, it is a “worm”. (Psalm 22:6-8 “But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads: ‘He trusts in the LORD; let the LORD rescue Him. Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him.”) The words of these verses in the Psalms sound uncannily like the way Jesus was treated as He was tried and hung on the cross. Jesus was, like a caterpillar, probably pretty grotesque looking after His brutal flogging, beatings and enduring the nails being pounded into His hands and feet. After He died, His body was “cocooned” in linens and spices – just as a caterpillar’s body is cocooned in its silk. During the caterpillar’s time in the cocoon, it is transformed into a glorious new creation which emerges to fly in its beauty into the sky. Jesus, too, emerged from His “cocoon” in His glorified and transformed body…. and He, too, “flew”/ascended into the sky/clouds in His return to heaven.
We serve such an amazing God!!! How gracious He is to us – that He points to Himself in creation in ways that make His reality and His glory undeniable!