Resurrection Sunday

Montana Bible College Dean of Students & Discipleship Carter Knight composed a series of short devotionals for Holy Week. We hope they encourage you and help prepare your heart for worshiping our risen Savior! 

And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.

- Luke 2:12

Following Jewish burial custom, they wrapped Jesus’ body with the spices in long sheets of linen cloth.

- John 19:40

And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in.  Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. 

- John 20:5-7

The holy infant Jesus – who was wrapped with cloth upon the lap of Mary and swaddled to sleep in her arms – is the same Christ who was wrapped in burial cloth before Mary's eyes. As Simeon had foretold,^[1] sorrow’s sword pierced Mary’s heart, just as the soldier’s spear pierced Christ's heart.

Now at the graveside, though the manger’s stench was replaced with the aromatic burial spices, how desperately must Mary have yearned to return again to that first year in Bethlehem. This town of David was not far from those gates of Jerusalem outside of which Christ was crucified. It was then but a short distance from the garden tomb in which Jesus was laid, but even that memory must have felt distant.

If in the midst of that tragic trauma she at all remembered those tender moments – how she often wrapped her son’s swaddling cloths – what must she have then felt to see another wrap Jesus within burial cloths? Consider how often the holy infant Jesus, as any child, might have wiggled his way out of her swaddling cloths when he was hungry. Now, Jesus is wrapped in linen cloths long enough to cover head to toe. He was still and without motion. The dead do not grow hungry, nor do they eat or drink. Yet, Jesus would soon share a meal with his disciples. It would be shortly after he had risen from the dead, folded up his own burial cloths, and taken his first steps out of the tomb as the firstborn from the dead.

In the Son of God's gentle and lowly hearted humility, he willingly entered both Mary’s womb and death’s tomb.

He was willing to be wrapped both in the tender swaddling cloths of poor Mary and in the sorrowful burial cloths of the rich Arimathean. Nevertheless, Christ is bound by neither cloths. Jesus comes and goes as he pleases.

Praise him that he chose to come and lay down his life for us. Praise him that he has risen to life and gone into heaven before us. So then, let us pray as we swaddle our children and bury our loved ones. Ask for the necessary grace to always share this faith with the next generation and to never grieve as those who have no hope. For he who was swaddled and buried is our Savior who still breathes his Spirit's rest and peace upon us now and forevermore.

^[1] Luke 2:35