Revelations of St. Bridget/Chapter 20. The Burial of our Lord
CHAPTER XX.
THE BURIAL OF OUR LORD.
Daughter, thou shouldst think of five things: First, that all my Son’s limbs were stiff and cold in death, and the blood which flowed from his wounds during his Passion, adhered coagulated on all his members. Second, that he was so bitterly and unmercifully afflicted in heart, that it did not cease to pain till the lance reached his side, and his heart divided clung to the spear. Third, think how he was taken down from the cross. The two men who took him down from the cross, set up three ladders; one reaching to his feet, another to his armpits and arms, the third to the middle of his body. The first ascended and held him by the body; the second, mounting another ladder drew out first one of the nails from one hand; then changing the ladder he took out the nail from the other. These nails extended far beyond the wood of the cross. Then he who bore the weight of the body, descending gradually and moderately as he could, the other got up the ladder reaching to the feet, and drew the nails from the feet. And when he approached the ground, one of them held the body by the head, and the other by the feet, but I, being his mother, held him by the middle. And so we three bore him to a rock which I had covered with a clean linen sheet, in which we wrapped the body, but I did not sew the winding-sheet. For I knew Tor certain that he would not decay in the tomb. Afterwards, Mary Magdalen and the other holy women came, and many holy angels, like specks in the sunbeam were present, paying reverence to their creator. What grief I then felt, no one can tell. For I was like a woman in childbirth, all whose limbs after delivery are tremulous, who, though she can scarcely breathe for pain, yet rejoices inwardly as much as she can, because she knows that her child is born never to return to the misery from which he came. So, though I was incomparably sad for the death of my Son, yet as my Son was to die no more, but live forever, I rejoiced in soul, and so a certain gladness was mingled with my grief. I can truly say that when my Son was buried, there were in a manner two hearts in one tomb. Is it not said: “ Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart ?” So my thoughts and my heart were ever in the sepulchre of my Son. — Lib. ii., c. 21.