John 19:40 Study Bible: So they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, according to Jewish burial practice.

◄ John 19:40 ►

So they took the body of Jesus and wrapped it in linen cloths with the spices, according to the Jewish burial custom.

They took the body of Jesus
This phrase marks a significant moment in the Gospel narrative, where the physical body of Jesus, the incarnate Word, is handled by His followers. The Greek word for "body" here is "sōma," which emphasizes the tangible, human aspect of Jesus. This act of taking His body signifies the deep love and respect His followers had for Him, even in death. Historically, this was a courageous act, as associating with a crucified person could bring social and religious repercussions. It reflects the fulfillment of prophecy and the devotion of His disciples.

wrapped it in linen cloths
The use of "linen cloths" is significant, as linen was a material often associated with purity and was used in the garments of the priests in the temple. The Greek word "othonion" refers to strips of linen, indicating a careful and respectful preparation of Jesus' body. This act of wrapping is reminiscent of the swaddling clothes of His birth, symbolizing the full circle of His earthly life. Archaeological findings have shown that linen was commonly used in Jewish burials, underscoring the authenticity of the Gospel account.

with the spices
Spices were used in Jewish burial customs to honor the deceased and to mask the odor of decay. The Greek word "arōmata" refers to aromatic substances, which were costly and signified the high regard in which Jesus was held. This act of anointing with spices also echoes the anointing of kings and priests, pointing to Jesus' royal and priestly roles. The use of spices fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah 53:9, which speaks of the Messiah being with the rich in His death.

according to the Jewish burial custom
This phrase highlights the adherence to Jewish traditions and laws, even in the burial of Jesus. The Greek word "ethos" refers to a custom or habit, indicating that this was a well-established practice. The Jewish burial custom involved washing the body, anointing it with spices, and wrapping it in linen, all of which were acts of respect and care. This adherence to custom underscores the continuity of Jesus' life and mission within the Jewish context, fulfilling the Law and the Prophets. It also sets the stage for the resurrection, as the careful burial ensures that there is no doubt about the reality of His death and subsequent resurrection.

Persons / Places / Events

1. Jesus
Central figure of the Christian faith, whose crucifixion and burial are described in this passage.

2. Joseph of Arimathea
A secret disciple of Jesus who, along with Nicodemus, took responsibility for Jesus' burial.

3. Nicodemus
A Pharisee and member of the Jewish ruling council who previously visited Jesus at night and now assists in His burial.

4. Jewish Burial Custom
The traditional method of preparing a body for burial, involving wrapping in linen and using spices.

5. Tomb
The place where Jesus' body was laid, fulfilling prophecies about His burial.

Teaching Points

Respect for the Body
The care taken in Jesus' burial reflects the value and respect for the human body, even in death.

Fulfillment of Prophecy
Jesus' burial in a rich man's tomb fulfills specific Old Testament prophecies, affirming the reliability of Scripture.

Courage in Faith
Joseph and Nicodemus demonstrate courage by publicly associating with Jesus, challenging us to live boldly for our faith.

Community in Grief
The involvement of multiple people in Jesus' burial highlights the importance of community support in times of loss.

Preparation for Resurrection
The burial sets the stage for the resurrection, reminding us that God’s plans often unfold beyond our immediate understanding.

Bible Study Questions

1. How does the burial of Jesus by Joseph and Nicodemus challenge us to take bold steps in our faith, even when it might be risky?

2. In what ways does the fulfillment of prophecy in Jesus' burial strengthen your trust in the reliability of Scripture?

3. How can we show respect and care for the bodies of our loved ones, following the example set in this passage?

4. What role does community play in times of grief, and how can we better support those who are mourning?

5. How does understanding the Jewish burial customs enhance our appreciation of the resurrection account that follows?

Connections to Other Scriptures

Isaiah 53
This passage prophesies the suffering servant, including details about His death and burial, which are fulfilled in Jesus' burial.

John 3
Nicodemus' earlier encounter with Jesus, where he learns about being born again, showing his journey from curiosity to commitment.

Matthew 27
Provides additional details about Joseph of Arimathea and the tomb, highlighting the fulfillment of prophecy.

Mark 15
Offers another account of Jesus' burial, emphasizing the role of the women who witnessed where He was laid.

Luke 23
Complements the burial account, focusing on the preparation day and the women who prepared spices and perfumes.

Sermons

A Secret Disciple	J. L. Nye.	John 19:38-42
A Threefold Power	D. Thomas, D. D.	John 19:38-42
Christ's Funeral	J. Flavel.	John 19:38-42
Joseph of Arimathea	M. Hutchison.	John 19:38-42
Joseph of Arimathea	J. Fawcett, M. A., W. H. Van Doren.	John 19:38-42
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus At the Burial of Jesus	C. Stanford, D. D.	John 19:38-42
Secret Discipleship	F. Hastings.	John 19:38-42
Secret Discipleship	B. Thomas	John 19:38-42
The Burial of Christ	C. Bradley, M. A.	John 19:38-42
The Burial of Jesus	T. Whitelaw, D. D.	John 19:38-42
The Last Stage of the Savior's Humiliation	J.R. Thomson	John 19:38-42

People

Cleopas, Cleophas, Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Nicodemus, Pilate

Places

Arimathea, Gabbatha, Golgotha, Jerusalem, Nazareth, The Place of the Skull, The Stone Pavement

Topics

Accordance, Along, Body, Bound, Burial, Bury, Clothes, Cloths, Custom, Customs, Dead, Folding, Jewish, Jews, Linen, Manner, Mode, Prepare, Preparing, Rest, Spices, Strips, Taking, Wound, Wrapped, Wrappings

Dictionary of Bible Themes

John 19:40

     5286   custom
     5288   dead, the
     5392   linen
     5588   traditions

John 19:31-42

7110 body of Christ

John 19:38-40

     4466   herbs and spices
     7304   anointing
     7552   Pharisees, attitudes to Christ

John 19:38-42

     2530   Christ, death of
     5503   rich, the
     8421   equipping, physical

John 19:39-40

4490 ointment

John 19:40-42

5320 funeral

Library

February 20 Morning
He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied.--ISA. 53:11. Jesus . . . said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.--He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. This people have I formed for myself; they shall shew forth my praise.--To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose …
Anonymous—Daily Light on the Daily Path

August 4 Morning
It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.--JOHN 19:30. Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.--I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.--We are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest standeth daily ministering an offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right …
Anonymous—Daily Light on the Daily Path

October 18 Morning
One of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.--JOHN 19:34. Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you.--The life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls.--It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins. Jesus said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.--By his own blood he entered in once into …
Anonymous—Daily Light on the Daily Path

February 17 Morning
The whole bullock shall he carry forth without the camp unto a clean place, where the ashes are poured out, and burn him on the wood with fire.--LEV. 4:12. They took Jesus, and led him away. And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: where they crucified him.--The bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp. Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify …
Anonymous—Daily Light on the Daily Path

The Title on the Cross
'Pilate wrote a title also, and put it on the cross.' --JOHN xix. 19. This title is recorded by all four Evangelists, in words varying in form but alike in substance. It strikes them all as significant that, meaning only to fling a jeer at his unruly subjects, Pilate should have written it, and proclaimed this Nazarene visionary to be He for whom Israel had longed through weary ages. John's account is the fullest, as indeed his narrative of all Pilate's shufflings is the most complete. He alone records …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

The Irrevocable Past
'What I have written I have written.'--JOHN xix. 22. This was a mere piece of obstinacy. Pilate knew that he had prostituted his office in condemning Jesus, and he revenged himself for weak compliance by ill-timed mulishness. A cool-headed governor would have humoured his difficult subjects in such a trifle, as a just one would have been inflexible in a matter of life and death. But this man's facile yielding and his stiff-necked obstinacy were both misplaced. 'So I will, so I command. Let my will …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

Christ's Finished and Unfinished Work
'Jesus ... said, It is finished.'--JOHN xix. 30. 'He said unto me, It is done.'--REV. xxi. 6. One of these sayings was spoken from the Cross, the other from the Throne. The Speaker of both is the same. In the one, His voice 'then shook the earth,' as the rending rocks testified; in the other, His voice 'will shake not the earth only but also heaven'; for 'new heavens and a new earth' accompanied the proclamation. In the one, like some traveller ready to depart, who casts a final glance over his preparations, …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

Christ Our Passover
'These things were done, that the Scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of Him shall not be broken.'--JOHN xix. 36. The Evangelist, in the words of this text, points to the great Feast of the Passover and to the Paschal Lamb, as finding their highest fulfilment, as he calls it, in Jesus Christ. For this purpose of bringing out the correspondence between the shadow and the substance he avails himself of a singular coincidence concerning a perfectly unimportant matter--viz., the abnormally rapid sinking …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

The Grave in a Garden
'In the garden a new tomb.'--JOHN xix. 41 (R.V.). This is possibly no more than a topographical note introduced merely for the sake of accuracy. But it is quite in John's manner to attach importance to these apparent trifles and to give no express statement that he is doing so. There are several other instances in the Gospel where similar details are given which appear to have had in his eyes a symbolical meaning--e.g. 'And it was night.' There may have been such a thought in his mind, for all men …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

Jesus Sentenced
'Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged Him. And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on His head, and they put on Him a purple robe. And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote Him with their hands. Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I bring Him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in Him. Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the Man! When the chief priests …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

An Eye-Witness's Account of the Crucifixion
'And He bearing His cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: Where they crucified Him, and two other with Him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst. And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin. Then said the chief priests …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

Joseph and Nicodemus
'And after this Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus; ... And there came also Nicodemus which at the first came to Jesus by night.'--JOHN xix. 38, 39. While Christ lived, these two men had been unfaithful to their convictions; but His death, which terrified and paralysed and scattered His avowed disciples, seems to have shamed and stung them into courage. They came now, when they must have known …
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

The Fifth Word
"I thirst."--JOHN XIX. 28. This is the only utterance of our Blessed Lord in which He gave expression to His physical sufferings. Not least of these was that intolerable thirst which is the invariable result of all serious wounds, as those know well who have ever visited patients in a hospital after they have undergone a surgical operation. In this case it must have been aggravated beyond endurance by exposure to the burning heat of an Eastern sun. This word, then, spoken under such circumstances, …
J. H. Beibitz—Gloria Crucis

The Sixth Word
"It is accomplished."--ST. JOHN XIX. 30. 1. What had been accomplished? In the first place, that work which Christ had come into the world to do. All that work may be resumed in a single word, "sacrifice." The Son of God had come for this one purpose, to offer a sacrifice. Here is room for serious misunderstanding. The blood, the pain, the death, were not the sacrifice. Nothing visible was the sacrifice, least of all the physical surroundings of its culminating act. There is only one thing …
J. H. Beibitz—Gloria Crucis

The Third Word
"Lady, behold thy son." "Behold thy mother." ST. JOHN XIX. 26, 27. In this Word we see the Son of God revealed as human son, and human friend, all the more truly and genuinely human in both relations, because in each and every relation of life, Divine. 1. The first lesson in the Divine Life for us to learn here is the simple, almost vulgarly commonplace one, yet so greatly needing to be learnt, that "charity," which is but a synonym of the Divine Life, "begins at home." Home life is the real test …
J. H. Beibitz—Gloria Crucis

The Last Look at Life,
(Passion Sermon.) TEXT: JOHN xix. 30. "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished." THESE greatest and most glorious of the last words -*- of our Saviour on the cross come immediately after those which are apparently of the least significance and importance. The Lord said, "I thirst;" then the moistened sponge was handed to Him; and when He had received the soothing, though not pleasant draught, He cried, "It is finished." And we must not break the connection of these …
Friedrich Schleiermacher—Selected Sermons of Schleiermacher

The Shortest of the Seven Cries
As these seven sayings were so faithfully recorded, we do not wonder that they have frequently been the subject of devout meditation. Fathers and confessors, preachers and divines have delighted to dwell upon every syllable of these matchless cries. These solemn sentences have shone like the seven golden candlesticks or the seven stars of the Apocalypse, and have lighted multitudes of men to him who spake them. Thoughtful men have drawn a wealth of meaning from them, and in so doing have arranged …
Charles Haddon Spurgeon—Spurgeon's Sermons Volume 24: 1878

The Procession of Sorrow
I. After our Lord Jesus Christ had been formally condemned by Pilate, our text tells us he was led away. I invite your attention to CHRIST AS LED FORTH. Pilate, as we reminded you, scourged our Savior according to the common custom of Roman courts. The lictors executed their cruel office upon his shoulders with their rods and scourges, until the stripes had reached the full number. Jesus is formally condemned to crucifixion, but before he is led away he is given over to the Praetorian guards that …
Charles Haddon Spurgeon—Spurgeon's Sermons Volume 9: 1863

Death of Jesus.
Although the real motive for the death of Jesus was entirely religious, his enemies had succeeded, in the judgment-hall, in representing him as guilty of treason against the state; they could not have obtained from the sceptical Pilate a condemnation simply on the ground of heterodoxy. Consistently with this idea, the priests demanded, through the people, the crucifixion of Jesus. This punishment was not Jewish in its origin; if the condemnation of Jesus had been purely Mosaic, he would have been …
Ernest Renan—The Life of Jesus

The Third Word from the Cross
In the life of our Lord from first to last there is a strange blending of the majestic and the lowly. When a beam of His divine dignity is allowed to shine out and dazzle us, it is never long before there ensues some incident which reminds us that He is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh; and, contrariwise, when He does anything which impressively brings home to us His humanity, there always follows something to remind us that He was greater than the sons of men. Thus at His birth He was laid …
James Stalker—The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ

Objections to Genuineness.
THE most plausible objection to the genuineness of these writings is thus expressed by Dupin: "Eusebius and Jerome wrote an accurate catalogue of each author known to them--with a few obscure exceptions,--and yet never mention the writings of the Areopagite." Great is the rejoicing in the House of the Anti-Areopagites over this PROOF;--but what are the facts? Eusebius acknowledges that innumerable works have not come to him--Jerome disclaims either to know or to give an accurate catalogue either …
Dionysius—LETTERS OF DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

And at his Crucifixion, when He Asked a Drink...
And at His crucifixion, when He asked a drink, they gave Him to drink vinegar mingled with gall. (Cf. Joh. xix. 29) And this was declared through David. They gave gall to my meat, and in any thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. [262] …
Irenæus—The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching

Inward Confirmation of the Veracity of the Scriptures
We are living in a day when confidence is lacking; when skepticism and agnosticism are becoming more and more prevalent; and when doubt and uncertainty are made the badges of culture and wisdom. Everywhere men are demanding proof. Hypotheses and speculations fail to satisfy: the heart cannot rest content until it is able to say, "I know." The demand of the human mind is for definite knowledge and positive assurance. And God has condescended to meet this need. One thing which distinguishes Christianity …
Arthur W. Pink—The Divine Inspiration of the Bible

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