MARY, OUR MOTHER

SCRIPTURE COMMENTARY # 602

And after these things, Joseph of Arimathea (because he was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews), besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus. And Pilate gave leave. He came therefore and took away the body of Jesus. And Nicodemus also came (he who at the first came to Jesus by night), bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. They took therefore the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths, with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury. Now there was in the place where he was crucified a garden: and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein no man yet had been laid. There, therefore, because of the parasceve of the Jews, they laid Jesus: because the sepulchre was nigh at hand. (John 19:38-42) 

THE POVERTY OF JESUS WAS EXTREME: Neither in life nor in death had Jesus a place to lay His Head; and after He died, His Body did not belong to those who loved Him, but to His executioners and tormentors; and was given away by them to the first asker as a thing of no value. Jesus renounced everything in the world, even His own Body, made of the earth; He only kept for Himself the sins of the world, to make satisfaction for them. He had no grave of His own in which His Body might lie: it was buried in the grave of a stranger, by the charity of him who owned it.

[From 'A Practical Commentary on Holy Scripture' by Bishop Knecht, D.D.]
(1899 Douay-Rheims Bible)