Luke 23:56

This verse takes place in the hours between Jesus' crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday morning. A group of women who had followed Jesus — likely including Mary Magdalene and others — wanted to properly prepare his body for burial with spices and perfumes, a customary Jewish burial practice. But Jewish law required all work to stop at sundown on Friday when the Sabbath began, and it could not resume until sundown Saturday. So these women went home, prepared what they could, and then waited — holding their grief and their spices through a full day of mandated rest. They had no idea a resurrection was coming. They just knew their Lord was dead and they loved him enough to obey even when it cost them.

Lord, give me the faith of these women — obedient in grief, trusting in a silence that felt like abandonment. When waiting feels unbearable, remind me that you are always working, even when I can't see it. Teach me that rest is not giving up, but giving over. Amen.

Imagine sitting in your kitchen with a jar of burial spices in your hands, your teacher's body freshly sealed in a tomb, and being told you have to stop. Not because it isn't urgent — it feels like the most urgent thing in the world — but because the sun has set and the Sabbath has begun. These women didn't know Sunday was coming. There was no promise of resurrection posted on the wall. There was only a commandment, and grief, and the long, aching silence of Saturday. There's something quietly stunning about obedience that happens in the dark, when it makes no emotional sense. You might be in a moment right now where waiting feels unbearable — where the thing you need to do feels too important to pause. But these women teach us that rest isn't always a reward. Sometimes it's an act of trust, a surrender of control, a way of saying: God is still at work even when I am not. The spices would keep. The body would not stay buried. They just didn't know that yet. Neither do you — and you rest anyway.