Friday of the Second Week of Lent – 6 March – Our Lenten Journey With St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) Doctor of the Church
Friday of the Second Week
Feast of the Holy Winding Sheet (the Shroud)
“Joseph taking the Body, wrapped It in a clean linen cloth and laid It in his own new monument.”
Matthew xxvii. 59
By this clean linen cloth three elements are signified in a hidden way, namely:
(i) The Pure Body of Christ.
For the cloth was made of linen which, by much pressing, is made white and,in like manner, it was after much pressure that the Body of Christ came to the brightness of the Resurrection.
Thus it behoved Christ to Suffer and to Rise again from the dead on the third day (Luke xxiv. 46).
(ii) The Church, which without spot or wrinkle (Eph v. 27), is signified by this linen woven out of many threads.
(iii) A clear conscience, where Christ reposes.
And laid Him in his own new monument.
It was Joseph’s own grave and certainly it was appropriate that He Who had Died for the sins of others, should be buried in another man’s grave!
Notice that it was a new grave.
Had other bodies already been laid in it, there might have been a doubt which had arisen.
There is another fitness in this circumstance, namely – He Who was buried in this new tomb, as He who was born of a virgin mother.
As Mary’s womb knew no child before Him nor after Him, so was it with this tomb.
Again we may understand, it is in a renewed soul renewed where Christ is buried by faith, where Christ may dwell by faith in our hearts (Eph iii. 17).
St. John’s Gospel adds, Now there was in the place where He was crucified, a garden ; and in the garden a new sepulchre (John xix. 41). Which recalls to us that as Christ was taken in a garden and suffered His agony in a garden, so in a garden was He buried, and thereby we are reminded that it was from the sin committed by Adam in the garden of delightfulness that, by the power of His Passion, Christ set us free, and also that through the Passion the Church was consecrated, the Church which again is as a garden closed.
ST THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274)
Priest, Theologian, Dominican
Doctor Angelicus (Angelic Doctor)
Doctor Communis (Common Doctor)
Added by Pope Saint Pius V in 1568
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