And what must that blessed One, who was nailed to that cross, what must He have felt? The answer, as to His feelings in connection with His sufferings from man is found in these pleading words: “Draw nigh unto My soul, and redeem it: deliver Me because of Mine enemies. Thou hast known My reproach, and My shame, and My dishonor: Mine adversaries are all before Thee. Reproach hath broken My heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none” (Psa. 69:18-2018Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it: deliver me because of mine enemies. 19Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonor: mine adversaries are all before thee. 20Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. (Psalm 69:18‑20)). No! blessed Lord, Thine enemies had steeled their hearts against all pity, and there was not one, except the thief who hung by Thy side, who discerned at that moment who Thou wast, and Thy coming glory in the kingdom. No! not even the women, who followed Thee from Galilee, not Mary Magdalene: they loved Thee much and devotedly, but as yet they had no light upon Thy resurrection. Then the greatest sorrow of all to His faithful followers must have been caused by the cry (those that stood by the cross must have heard it): “My God, My God, why hast Thou FORSAKEN ME?” It was the expression of His immeasurable agony as He drank the bitter cup of the judgment of God, and yet thereby He glorified God fully and completely, and became the propitiation for the sins of His people and for the whole world.
Death having been accomplished, there remained but one thing, and that was His burial. The prophet had said that His grave was to be appointed with the wicked (and so it would have been had it been left with his enemies to order it), but that He was found with the rich in His death—for so God had determined. Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple, was the chosen vessel for the accomplishment, in this respect, of the will of God. Obtaining the grant of his Lord’s body from Pilate, he piously and reverently “laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed. And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulcher”; as Mark says, they “beheld where He was laid.” Mary was thus faithful in her devotedness to Christ, during His life, during His sorrows at the end, and after His death. He was really her life, and when that great stone was rolled to the door of the sepulcher the Sun of her soul had set. He was the one and the sole treasure of her heart, and even if she had never seen Him again, the world would have become to her a barren wilderness under the judgment of God. For He was, in very deed, everything to her soul, and thus when the tomb received His body, she had, as far as the world was concerned, lost everything. Darkness may have lain upon her spirit, but, while her hopes were quenched, her heart’s affections for the buried One, divinely begotten as they had been, were inextinguishable; and these would alleviate her grief and be the source in God’s hand, of light and hope still. How deliverance might come she knew not, and maybe she did not expect it, but she loved Him who was still her Lord, and that was everything for God, and also for the Magdalene. It is not light that nourishes the soul, but love, and Mary loved much because she had been forgiven much. So always, the deeper the sense of the state from which we have been delivered, the more absorbingly intense our affection for the Deliverer.