Christ is risen! We sing the following in our Resurrection Matins: “Pious women ran in tears to You, O Christ, 
bringing myrrh to you as dead; but instead they adored You in joy as the living God and announced your mystical Passover to your disciples.” That is a concise summary of the meaning of this second Sunday after Pascha as we continue our liturgical celebration of the Resurrection of Christ.
This Sunday is known as the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women, or sometimes simply as that of the Holy Myrrh-bearers, since as we see at the beginning of the Gospel (Mk. 15:42 – 16:8), some men were involved as well. It’s curious, though, why the Gospel of Mark was selected to proclaim this mystery, since only in John are the men described as actually bringing anointing oils to the burial of Jesus, and also since Mark’s version is the shortest and least detailed one—and it even seems to have been somehow accidentally abbreviated, since it ends with the women running from the tomb in fear and not saying anything to anyone! But we know from the other Gospels that in fact the holy women became “apostles to the apostles” after they had heard the announcement of the Resurrection from the angel and had even met the risen Christ on their way from the empty tomb. So today I’ll use a composite version from the Gospels to get the full story and thus a fuller understanding of the mystery.
The women, still being law-abiding Jews, could not work on the Sabbath, so after Jesus was laid in the tomb (it was already after sunset on Friday and so the Sabbath had begun), they rested, as St. Luke says, according to the commandment. But by sunrise on what would soon be known as “the Lord’s day,” they were on their way to the tomb, to fulfill that act of love and piety which is the proper burial ritual for the dead. The women, unlike the men, were fearless. Not only was it they alone who stood at the Cross with Jesus (with the notable exception of St John), it was only they who dared to brave the armed guard at the tomb of their beloved Master. The disciples, as we heard last Sunday, were cowering in fear behind locked doors.
It was the power of their love for Jesus that compelled the women to seek Him, to minister to his body, even in the face of the possibility of arrest and imprisonment, or even ending up as Jesus did. Scripture says that love is stronger than death, and in their case, love was stronger than fear of death, for they would go to their Beloved at all costs. Their concern was not the anger or the strength of the guards, but only how they might remove the huge stone from the entrance to the grave so as to gain access to the body of Jesus.
In all the accounts of the Resurrection, angels are there at the empty tomb to announce to the women the startlingly good news of the Resurrection of Jesus. But in St Matthew’s account, they actually see the angel arrive like a flash of lightning and roll away the stone before their eyes. His heavenly brilliance was enough to paralyze the guards with fear, so that was one problem out of the way. But, ironically, now that the problem of the stone was solved, the women could not do what they had come to do! That didn’t matter to them, however, since they were both profoundly amazed and overjoyed at the unhoped-for proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus.
Let us look a little more closely at this delicate mystery of the tender love of these women for Jesus. There’s a text in our Resurrection Matins that I have often found a little odd, simply because it is factually inaccurate. It says that early in the morning at sunrise, myrrh-bearing virgins were seeking Christ. The Scripture identifies some of these women in reference to their sons (the mother of Joses, the mother of James), so these were definitely not virgins, and while Mary Magdalene was not married, I don’t think she has ever been described as a virgin. So they were mainly myrrh-bearing mothers (and those of you being honored on this Mother’s Day can perhaps find in them some new patron saints).
But there may be a symbolic reference in the liturgical text. I received an Easter card from the Norbertine Sisters, and on the cover of it was an artistic conflation of the Gospel stories of Jesus’ Resurrection and of the five wise virgins who kept vigil to meet their Bridegroom. So it doesn’t really matter that the holy myrrh-bearers were not virgins, because they represented a virginal, that is total, loving, and spiritually exclusive espousal to their beloved Jesus, who had referred to Himself, and was referred to by St John the Forerunner, as the Bridegroom. The Liturgy picks up this imagery as well: “Exult and celebrate and rejoice… seeing Christ the King coming from the tomb like a bridegroom.” Instead of lamps filled with oil like the wise virgins of the parable carried, the myrrh-bearing women brought vessels of fragrant spiced oils with which to anoint the Bridegroom.
Anointings, let us remember, are not only for the dead. That is only one kind. There are other anointings that are proper to festive occasions, and still others that belong to royal and priestly consecrations. “Christ,” which means the “Anointed One,” was anointed by the Holy Spirit at his baptism. So perhaps the myrrh-bearers, lamenting on the way to the tomb, were thinking of the Song of Songs, in which the lover says of the beloved: “anointing oils are fragrant; your name is oil poured out; therefore the maidens love you” (1:3).
Later in this same book we read, almost as if the myrrh-bearers were expecting Christ to greet them on the other side of the stone: “I gather my myrrh with my spice… and my heart was thrilled within me. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh.” What happens in this story in the Song of Songs is not so different from what happened at the empty tomb: “My beloved had turned and gone… I sought him but found him not.” The angel at the tomb was aware of this: “You seek Jesus of Nazareth,” he said. But “he is not here; he is risen!”
According to St Matthew, the women then ran from the tomb, full of both fear and joy, and suddenly there was Jesus before them, and they fell at his feet and embraced Him. So the Song of Songs goes: “I will rise now and go… I will seek him whom my heart loves… When I found him whom my heart loves, I held him and would not let him go.”
So this Sunday’s approach to the Resurrection is not simply a theological one. It is not primarily the indispensable proclamation that Christ has conquered sin and death and was exalted by his Father for the redemption of mankind. It is a different but equally indispensable proclamation; it is a love song, a testimony to the indestructible relationship between lover and beloved, between human beings and their Savior. So I think we really can, in a mystical sense, call these holy women “myrrh-bearing virgins.” They were risking all to go and meet their Bridegroom. Their love could not be quenched or cowed or in any way diminished because of the obstacles that lay before them. The courage and sacrifice it took to go to Him perhaps enhanced their love still further. They didn’t even give in to despair over the ultimate obstacle: their beloved Bridegroom was dead! So the Lord rewarded them beyond all imagination by overcoming the ultimate obstacle, the last enemy, death, in his own body, and he rose triumphantly and gloriously, as the psalmist says, like the rising sun, “which comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber” (18/19).
So how shall we make this beautiful mystery our own? If we don’t already have deep love for the Lord, we can’t instantly manufacture it now simply because it happens to be Easter. The myrrh-bearing women didn’t just begin to love Him on their way to the tomb. They grew to love Him through years of discipleship and fidelity, through hearing his word and keeping it, through following Him wherever He went, serving Him, accompanying Him even on the way of the Cross. That is how love comes to be and how it grows. Those who just liked to see miracles or whose love was superficial or diminished by fear were nowhere to be found at the Cross or at the tomb. It was those who loved Jesus so much that they could not live without Him who risked all to serve Him, even when hope seemed to be lost. These were the ones whom He rewarded with the announcement of his Resurrection and with his first appearances.
While women have the privilege of becoming brides of Christ, and men seem to have to content themselves, like the Forerunner, to be “friends of the Bridegroom,” it is possible for all to enter into an intimate union with the Lord on mystical and sacramental levels. The human soul as such has a certain character that might be called feminine, since it is created to receive from God his gifts, and it can only bear fruit in spiritual life after it has received the seed of the Word, as Jesus explained in the parable of the sower.
So at that deep level of soul and spirit, where Christ abides in us and we in Him through communion in the Holy Mysteries, the level at which, as St Paul says, “there is neither male nor female” but “all are one in Christ Jesus,” let us receive his love and let us love Him in return. Let us not be deterred or discouraged by any obstacle thrown in our path by the world, the flesh, or the devil. But like the myrrh-bearing virgins, the myrrh-bearing mothers, and even the myrrh-bearing men, Joseph and Nicodemus, let us take the risk of loving the Lord as He loved us, to the end, to the full, even to folly, as it were. It certainly seemed like a very dangerous foolishness for those women to publicly show themselves as disciples of One who was condemned and executed as an enemy of the state and even of the established religion. Yet love compelled them. St Paul would later write: “The love of Christ compels us… He died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2Cor. 5:14-15).
Go, then, to meet the Bridegroom, cost what it may. Realize that He is in fact the One whom your heart loves. Christ is risen!
