God is dead.

This year in particular, many of us don’t have to really stretch to put ourselves in the mindset of the profound hopelessness Jesus’ follwers must have been feeling the day after Jesus died.

There was nothing to do but mourn, except maybe to hide just in case the Romans would come after them too. The Gospel stories indicate they were doing just that (although we aren’t told the reason they’re hiding; the authors probably thought that woud be obvious).

On Good Friday, there is so much to focus on, that one element of the story is easy to miss. The daily lectionary places it earlier in the week, if I’m remembering correctly. But it’s where my mind turns on Holy Saturday, when Jesus is lying, dead, in the tomb. Yes, the tomb.

One of the many peripheral followers of Jesus, perhaps one of the wealthy supporters of his ministry, had a tomb that the text says had never been used. That’s an odd phrase for modern ears: graves aren’t generally reused nowadays. At the time, the tomb was a place a body was laid out, and then a year or so later, whenever there remained nothing but bones, those bones would be placed in an ossuary box which was then set alongside other family members’ bones.

Joseph of Arimathea was the owner of that brand new tomb. Why he had a new tomb is something we could only speculate about. Had his family grown enough or aged enough that multiple tombs might be required at the same time? That detail isn’t really important. What matters is that it seems Jesus’ family didn’t have a tomb available, and Joseph of Arimathea was bold enough to go request his body from the officials who had killed him.

We read this as a story of devotion to Christ, but I think it’s also a good lesson for us when we feel hopeless, as no doubt Jesus’ followers and supporters alike would have felt that particular Sabbath. Joseph probably was wealthy enough to be okay one way or the other; but many people had staked their hope in this man they had believed to be the Messiah, a figure who was supposed to liberate Israel from their colonizers and rule on the throne of his ancestor David.

But now there would be no throne; only a tomb.

Theologian Miguel de la Torre has developed what he calls a “theology of hopelessness,” which I think I’ve mentioned in this blog before. One key takeaway for me is that de la Torre stresses that we have things to do, and we do them, even though we can’t rely on hope as motivation. What we do may well fail. Often, it probably will. But we do it anyway.

Joseph of Arimathea essentially did just that. When a loved one dies, you bury them. It’s even considered a virtue in most religions to provide burial for the dead. Jesus, who had provided so much hope for so many people, was dead. Hope had died with him. There was nothing to do but mourn. And bury the dead.

What did Joseph have to do in that moment? He had a tomb, and he offered it as an act of devotion. He offered his tomb to God.

When we lack hope, let us do the things we need to do anyway, and let us find what we can offer to God, even if it’s hard to believe God exists or is concerned with our situation.

This side of that first Easter (which we can anticipate on Holy Saturday every year since), we know that whatever we offer God, God will bless it and return it in some form that will serve us as we serve Christ: the Eucharist, for example. We offer bread and wine, and God accepts the gift, transforming it and giving it back to us as the Body and Blood of Christ, food to sustain us in our lives and ministries and daily work.

But it’s Holy Saturday. There is no Eucharist today. We have no bread or wine to offer.

All we have may be a tomb.

Let’s see what God will do with that.