The other prophecy was this,—­“They shall look on Him whom they pierced.”  Because of what John saw and tells, we pray in song,

    “Let the water and the blood
     From Thy riven side which flowed,
     Be of sin the double cure: 
     Cleanse me from its guilt and power.”

[Illustration:  IN THE SEPULCHRE H.  Hofmann Page 201]

John once more furnishes a contrast between Jesus’ foes and friends.  He says that the Jews asked Pilate that the bodies of the crucified might be taken away.  This was to the dishonored graves of malefactors.  John more fully than the other Evangelists tells of Joseph of Arimathaea who “besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus”—­for honorable burial.  Other Evangelists tell of his being “rich,” “a counsellor of honorable estate,” “a good man and a righteous,” who “had not consented to” the “counsel and deed” of the Sanhedrin of which he was a member, because he “was Jesus’ disciple.”  Mark says, “He boldly went in unto Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.”  He had summoned courage so to do.  Hitherto as John explains he had been “a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews.”  John implies that Joseph was naturally timid like Nicodemus.  As Pilate had delivered Jesus to His open enemies to be crucified, he delivered the crucified body to Joseph, the once secret but now open friend.  The Jews “led him”—­the living Christ—­“away to crucify Him.”  Joseph “came” and tenderly “took away His body” from the cross.

“There came also Nicodemus,” says John, “he who at the first came to Him by night.”  Yes, that night which John could not forget, in which to this same Nicodemus Jesus made known the Gospel of God’s love, manifested in the gift of His Son whose body in that hour these timid yet emboldened members of the Sanhedrin took down from the cross.  They were sincere mourners with him who watched their tender care as they “bound it in linen cloths with the spices” for burial, with no thought of a resurrection.

Perhaps Joseph and Nicodemus recalled moments in the Sanhedrin when they whispered together, speaking kindly of Jesus, but were afraid to defend Him aloud; thus silently giving a seeming consent to evil deeds because timidity concealed their friendship.  But at last the very enmity and cruelty of His murderers emboldened them as they met at the cross.

It is John who tells us that Jesus the night before His crucifixion went “where was a garden into which He entered,” and who also says, “Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden.”  The one was ever more suggestive to him of a coming trial; the other of that trial past.  “There,” in the garden—­probably that of Joseph—­John says “they laid Jesus.”  There also were laid John’s hopes, which seemed forever buried when Joseph “rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.”  What a contrast in his thoughts and feelings between the rolling away of the stone from the tomb of Lazarus, and the rolling to that of Jesus.  The one told him of resurrection; but the other of continued death; for as he afterward confessed, “as yet” he and Peter “knew not that Jesus must rise from the dead.”