My Jewish-turned-Christ-follower mother incorporated a lot of her upbringing into bringing up my sisters and me. By far, our favorite was no work on the Sabbath, which we translated to no chores from Saturday evening to Monday morning. Our shared space became a wilderness for clothes and shoes—neither making their way to closets or dressers. Our beds were unmade, our homework buried under the piles of clothes. We knew that our room had to regain a semblance of order come Monday morning, but that didn’t stop us from throwing clothes on the floor.

I thought about my childhood wasteland the other day as I read one of the gospel writer’s accounts of Jesus’ last few weeks on earth. There’s a lot of mention about clothes and cloaks on the ground or floor or in and out of tombs.

There’s Lazarus, the dead man who came out of the tomb, hands and feet still wrapped with strips of linen, even though his sister Martha warned everyone of their bad odor. When Jesus instructed those at the tomb to take off his grave clothes, I suspect Lazarus dumped those rotting clothes on the ground without a second thought. Time for some new clothes.

And then there’s Jesus. He shrugged off his outer clothing, wrapped a towel around his waist and picked up a basin of water. In another wardrobe change, Jesus wears a crown of thorns and a purple robe. Oddly enough, he didn’t shrug off this robe or crown nor even denounce the cries for his crucifixion.

All this leads to graveclothes again—Jesus’ graveclothes. We watch Joseph and Nicodemus—the former a secret disciple, the latter a night visitor to Jesus—carefully, gently, wrap the dead man’s body with strips of linen and 75 pounds of myrrh and aloe. Did Joseph weep when he gave the fragrant spices for burial? As he prepared this lifeless body for burial, did Nicodemus recite the Teacher’s words to him, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Death is a strange way to bring about forgiveness and eternal life.

Ezra Klein, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, made this observation in a recent opinion piece: “What I, an outsider to Christianity, have always found most beautiful about it is how strange it is. Here is a worldview built on a foundation of universal sin and insufficiency, an equality that bleeds out of the recognition that we are all broken, rather than that we must all be great. I’ve always envied the practice of confession, not least for its recognition that there will always be more to confess and so there must always be more opportunities to be forgiven.”

Yes, Mr. Klein, this is beautiful and strange. But it's something much greater than worldview.

One dead man is called out of the tomb and lives; one dead man enters the tomb, and we live.

One man is free from rotting clothes with their stench of death; the other takes on the stench of sin and death, enters the rotting wilderness of our souls, and exchanges our rot for his righteousness and we are free from sin’s penalty.

A tomb is a strange place to find linen cloths scattered about and a face cloth for the dead, folded up by itself. Indeed, this empty tomb is a strange place for the fragrance of spices to linger long after three days. The reality of those odors remind us that he really did die. He put on the cloths of death. But then he took them off and left them on the floor of the tomb for all to see.

The One who was dead is risen, ascended, interceding, living in and with us now and forevermore.