Mark 16:9-20 (Matins)
Acts 6:1-7
Mark 15:43-16:8

Bearing Myrrh

The Kingdom of God. Any first-century Jew hearing this curious phrase would pause. The Kingdom of God? What's that? The sentence does not read what might be expected: "Joseph of Arimathe'a was seeking God" but rather he was seeking the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God and its near relation the Kingdom of Heaven do not occur in the Hebrew Scriptures at all. The Greek Septuagint (LXX), composed on the eve of Jesus birth, does contain one instance of the phrase The Kingdom of God, and there in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon  (10:10), that most Christo-centric of pre-New Testament writings.

We might say that the entire concept of post-Resurrection life being God's Kingdom is revealed to humankind with the Advent of God in the Person of the Lord Jesus. These phrases are unknown to history before then. Yet, they are everywhere to be found in the New Testament, occurring ninety-seven times. And let us not fail to remember that other startling fact: that the title for Jesus in the original Greek, Κυριος (kyrios) meaning King, occurs in the New Testament more than seven hundred times. (This same title is used in the LXX to refer to YHWH, or God the Father.)

At His Most Holy Nativity, Three Kings mysteriously arrive to Bethlehem to reverence Him. I say "Three Kings" following the tradition of Isaiah:

When I was a child, growing up in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, I would hear homilies, singling out myrrh, that would include the declaration, "This was the Child Who was born to die!" But today, I have grown. Advancing in my Christian journey, I have been accepted into the Church that Jesus founded, the Orthodox Church — that unbroken chain of teaching and worship founded in the Holy Land and still practiced there today. And now I see life where once I saw death.

I now understand that God sent His Son, Who is the author of Life, to show us how we were created to live. The portrait of humankind had been defaced through sin, but we had no living subject to sit for it that the Image might be restored. Who will sit for this portrait? St. Athanasius asked. The Great Emperor's Image had been stamped upon silver coins, but the gritty world had reduced them all to indecipherable slugs. Who will restamp these coins? Origen asked. God's people were held thrall in a slavery of sin by a powerful prince? Which Life will be offered as a ransom? St. Irenaeus asked. God sent the Lord of Life to Whom death was meaningless, Whose great force of Life shattered the walls of Hell. You see, the Advent of God was not about Jesus' death, but about His Life.

Yet, in the eleventh century an Italian Benedictine monk, Anselmo, offered an innovation: that Jesus had to die in order for us to live. This was quickly taken up with zeal in the West, who at the same time was separating itself from the Church to form a new, Roman Catholic, Church (1054). And it would later be embellished with even greater zeal by Jean Calvin and Martin Luther and the Protestants who followed them. "Jesus paid the debt!" they claimed .... resulting in a passivity among God's people, whose only responsibility, it was claimed, was to accept and believe it.

Meantime, Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics built worship spaces whose inescapable lines of tragic perspective converged upon a High Altar, where the bloody, lifeless body of Jesus was offered again and again to appease an angry God. Pastors ever after were wont to single out myrrh and bravely declare, "This was the Child that was born to die!"

But I have grown. I reject this Italian innovation, much less accept the canard that myrrh signifies merely funerals. And I bow before Heaven's messenger who asks us, "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" (Lu 24:6). I reject this innovation and point to our highest authority, which is Sacred Scripture.

Consider myrrh, to take one example, as being a royal appurtenance. We read in the Book of Revelation of

Myrrh was ordained by the LORD God to be used exclusively for consecration:

Should myrrh, then, signify merely the mortician's art to us, or should its fragrance declare the empyreal courts of God? Yes, indisputably, Jesus' body is prepared with myrrh and aloes (Jn 19:39), but should these not call to mind Psalm 45?

This week we behold the Equal-to-the-Apostles, the Myrrh-bearing Women, in their courage. The Apostles ran; the women sought after Him. The Apostles hid; the women boldly stood by the Cross and the tomb. The Apostles looked only to themselves; the women reverenced Him at great personal cost and risk. One bathed his royal feet with her hair and anointed Him with costly oils. Equal to the Apostles? During this time, before the Holy Spirit is sent, are they not much more than the Apostles?

Jesus called His Twelve Disciples; the Myrrh-bearing women followed without invitation. Jesus must continually rebuke His Disciples for their incapacity to understand. But the Myrrh-bearing Women seem instinctively to understand what He is saying. Most important, they seem to know in their hearts that most important teaching that He has for them and for us: that He is God.

At a time when the Disciples only exasperated the Lord Jesus, the women silently attended in reverence. When Jesus vainly reveals His Divine Kingship to them over and over — crying out, "Do you still not understand? Do you still not perceive?"  (Mk 8:17) — the Myrrh-bearing women knelt before their God and their King. They knew without being told. Their souls stirred within them as surely as the lowly shepherds had been stirred in the wintry fields of Bethlehem. For God writes His will on the fleshly tablets of our hearts before He writes in stone  (2 Cor 3:3) ... if we will but humble ourselves to listen.

Like the Myrrh-bearing women, standing near to the tomb, we too live in a world we do not entirely understand. It is harsh and violent and a certain darkness pervades our lives with its death and hideous and withering finitude. Yet, like them we sense something more. Our finest intuitions and most cherished ideals and hopes see something more, something pure, something good and eternal. Like them, though in the darkest night, we see within the prism of our souls that to be faithful and true brings us to our own essence, to our noble identity, and what we were made to be. We see not His death, but only His Lordship, which alone is Life ... and everlasting life.

To be a Myrrh-bearer to Jesus is to be in attendance to a great King that no one else perceives. It is to honor the God and King that no one else honors. He is the highest of Kings and greatest of Lords. And beside Him death, even Hell, cringes in horror: