The third Sunday of Pascha is dedicated to the holy Myrrhbearers: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who provided a proper, although hasty, burial for our Lord’s body and the women who came to His tomb to embalm the body and left it as heralds of the Resurrection. These righteous men and women symbolize elements of our spiritual life. They remind us that we all need to cultivate our “myrrh-bearing”.
The things we do for others strengthens our relationship to Christ. Our Lord Himself made clear that following Him depends upon our love of our neighbor and our manifestation of that love in good works done for others’ benefit. But Christ also speaks of our love for Him and makes that the first commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” Fulfillment of both commandments, love of God and of neighbor, is essential to the Christian life.
This fact is illustrated in the incident which prophecies the actions of the Myrrhbearers, the anointing of the Lord’s feet by the St. Mary, the sister of the righteous Lazarus (Matthew 26:1-13; Mark 14:3-9; John 12:1-8). Some of the disciples, at Judas’s instigation according to St. John, protest that the woman’s action is wasteful: “Why was this ointment not sold … and given to the poor?” Christ, however, justifies her conduct, saying, “You always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying” (Mark 14:7-8). Here Christ is not freeing us from the obligation of charity. We indeed always have the poor with us, and our responsibility for them never ceases. The Lord points out, however, that our commitment to others must rest upon a prior commitment to Him. The spiritual life demands that we cultivate both worship of God and charity for others; we cannot grow spiritually unless we pursue both.
What often passes for religion in the world usually takes Judas’s attitude as its norm. “Religion” in this view is solely a matter of “compassion for others,” to the degree that faithful commitment to Christ and right belief in and worship of Him are ignored or even despised. As is usually the case with heresies, this error is not something totally false but rather a distortion of the truth. Compassion and love are key Christian virtues; their manifestation through acts of charity are indispensable to Christian life. But they are not the whole Christian life. We must first commit ourselves to the gospel, to worship, to love of Him. Only then will we have the grace to “go and sell all we have, and give to the poor.”
We learn another lesson from the different circumstances of the Myrrhbearers. Although united in their love for Christ, Sts. Joseph and Nicodemus, on the one hand, and the holy women, on the other, came forward to care for Christ’s body from very different motives.
Joseph and Nicodemus were men of wealth, learning, and position, members of the Sanhedrin, the Jews’ supreme legislative and judicial council. Unlike most of their colleagues, however, they responded to the Lord’s call to repentance and new life with openness and genuine soul-searching. Nicodemus was apparently puzzled by what he heard and came to Christ privately to clarify his understanding. Although the Lord spoke rather harshly to him (“Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand this?” [John 3:10]), Nicodemus listened with an open mind and heart. Later he even dared to challenge his fellow councillors who were bent on arresting Christ and is soundly rebuked by them (John 7:45-52). Prominent men like Nicodemus and Joseph exposed themselves to great danger when they identified publicly with the condemned and crucified Jesus. When they appear at the cross to take charge of that blessed corpse, they demonstrate remarkable courage, disclosing the depth of their commitment to the teaching they had heard and accepted.
The women had become followers of Christ in Galilee. St. Luke lists several and notes that Christ had “healed (them) of evil spirits and infirmities” (Luke 8:1-3). In other words, miracles worked for their benefit first brought them to Him. The gospel did not come to them as teaching. Rather they discovered Christ’s love and mercy through first-hand experience of His healing power. They did not love and follow Him, however, merely because He had healed them. Many saw the miracles, including Judas who betrayed Him and the Passover crowds who shouted for His death. Miracles beget wonder, not love. The women came to love the Lord because their faith matured; they then could look through the wonders to see His love behind them. Their love grew as a response to Christ’s love, for, as St. John says, “We love because He first loved us” (I John 4:19). The women were first drawn to Christ as beneficiaries of His healing power. They stayed with Him even to the cross and the tomb because their wonder and thankfulness matured into love and faith.
We thus learn two more facts about myrrh-bearing. From Joseph and Nicodemus we see the need to know and understand the truths of our Orthodox Christian Faith; only through absorbing the gospel teachings can we have the courage necessary to live the Christian life. The women show us that knowledge of Christ must be confirmed by experience of His transfiguring grace, and that this experience, in turn, must deepen into true love and faith. If we have these things – knowledge of, faith in, and love for Christ – then, like the Myrrhbearers we will remain loyal even to the end and become witnesses to the power of our Lord’s death and participants in the glory of His Resurrection!
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