In all four Gospels, after Jesus has breathed his last, Joseph of Arimathea goes to Pilate to ask for the body. He has taken responsibility for the burial. And, unique among the Gospels, Mark insists on the fact that Jesus is dead. The word "dead" seems deliberately to be repeated. Pilate wonders if Jesus is already dead; he asks the centurion whether Jesus has been dead for some time; and when he learns from the centurion that he is dead, he grants to body to Joseph. Dead, dead, dead. This man, the Son of God is dead. Our Creed insists on it as well: Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is dead. And his death means that God is a God who suffers at human hands, a God at the mercy of creatures, a God who dies. What kind of a God could this possibly be? Does it not stretch the very concept of God to the limit? Indeed, for the disciples, Jesus's death brings about a profound dissolution of their theological understanding. Already in Jesus's company, they have been led beyond their old religious identity and belonging. They had dared to believe that in the person of Jesus, God was present in a new way, bringing into being a new Israel and a new relationship with divinity. With him dead, their embryonic new identities and understandings collapse, and so any sense of where and who God might be.
