Jesus is placed in the tomb

Matthew 27:57-61 NLT
As evening approached, Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea who had become a follower of Jesus,
    went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body.
And Pilate issued an order to release it to him.
Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a long sheet of clean linen cloth.
He placed it in his own new tomb, which had been carved out of the rock.
Then he rolled a great stone across the entrance and left.
Both Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting across from the tomb and watching.

This looks like the end of the story.
It has come to a dead end.
Nothing more is expected.
A great lump of rock sits there like a giant full stop.
The women watch as he disappears from their sight.

 He has been wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes.
When he was a baby
   the future seemed so full of promise.
Now when he is still young, his future is quenched.

 It looks like an end,
   but he is on the cusp of a new beginning.
There lies before him an unimaginable future.
A future which he will share with everyone
   whose life seems to have reached a final impasse.
No dead end can finally defeat God’s creative touch.

The African-American spiritual asks, “Were you there when they laid him in the tomb”?
We were all there, every one of us, when we feared that there was no way forward.
We are all there when our path seems blocked by a great rock.
He is there whenever we feel entombed, hemmed in, in the darkness.                  

From Stations of the Cross by Timothy Radcliffe

John 12:23-24 NLT
Jesus said, Now the time has come for the Son of Man to enter into his glory.
I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone.
But its death will produce many new kernels-a plentiful harvest of new lives.