John 19:39 And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight.

There I was Easter Sunday listening to the pastor preach on the resurrection and all I could think was; “How big is my Lord that He should need a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to be buried?”

That sounded like a lot of weight for preparing a body for burial. So I searched for some information about Jewish burial traditions. They changed over the years so the only way to anticipate what they might have been thinking at the time was to address the customs of Jesus’ time.

Gamamiel, Paul’s teacher in the Mosaic Law, was buried using eighty-nine pounds. King Herod oddly enough had five hundred servants carry his to his grave. Even if each only carried four pounds, that would have been a ton. Obviously the issue of weight had little to do with function and said more about the value of the ointments, which were expensive. The rich man gets the expensive funeral.

Jesus did not earn money. He had no house, no place to rest His head. He gave no thought of saving for his own funeral. Joseph of Arimathaea gave up his tomb and Nicodemus gave up what was surely all he had saved for his own funeral.

So what did I learn from my little bunny trail, off the beaten path of the resurrection story?

Oddly enough, I learned about traditions of the times and all of the traditions which were expected of that time were not honored. His leg bones were not broken which was a tradition of quickening the death on the cross. He was buried in a borrowed tomb, very untraditional. No family member was allowed to stay with the body until all the rituals of burial were complete. His burial ceremony was put off because of the Sabbath. The biggest and most untraditional of all, He didn’t stay put.

Yet all those tradition violations were told of in prophesy.

What’s the odds?