We have heard it before, but let’s hear the story again.

The law of Moses said that if a person was killed by hanging on a tree, their body must not be left there overnight but must be buried before sundown. The Romans in charge of the crucifixion did not care at all about what Moses said, and usually left the bodies hanging there for the animals to remove. That set the best example for people walking past to understand what happened to criminals against Rome. But, maybe it was Joseph of Arimathea, an important member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, who convinced the soldiers to let them take Jesus’ body from the cross and move it to one of the tombs that Joseph’s family owned. Now, the soldiers wouldn’t have cared anymore about the Sanhedrin than they did about Moses, but maybe they saw this as a…