Bearing Myrrh

Though Simeon prophesied that the Lord Jesus would be a Sign of Contradiction and that Mary's heart would be pierced by a sword, "Joseph and His mother marveled" (Lu 2:33): they did not understand. His disciples did not understand the nature of His ministry. We read in John 6:66 that most abandoned Him "and walked with Him no more." So He taught an additional teaching:

In that spirit, I ask a question this morning. What is this myrrh flowing through the invisible cracks between Heaven and Earth? What is this empyreal essence arising from holy icons .... if not the tears of Heaven? "The burning point of life is love, and because love is sad, life is sad," wrote Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces). The great question of our earthly journey is this sad love. "Christ did not come to explain human suffering or to eliminate it," wrote the modern saint, Romanian Archpriest Gheorge Calciu. "Rather, He came to fill human suffering with His Presence."

Let us turn for a moment to the earthly perspective. What is the well-spring of all human activity? What is the well-spring of all human creativity? What drives most people forward in life? What are most of our songs about? And most of our poems and novels and movies .... what are they about? What is the only force we know capable of transforming a human life? ..... the only force that can effect complete conversion? What can move a bitter man, homeless and living rough, unto tender tears? What can melt the stony heart of a woman who has suffered betrayal and abandonment? What is this magic on Earth which turns a life degraded and unruly into one devoted to God and ordered to goodness? It is love. Love alone is this magic. And only love can effect these miracles .... and swiftly.

God has inscribed this truth upon our hearts. We see it plainly in daily experience — the love of a mother for her children; the life-changing love shared between two soul-mates; and, above all, the courageous devotion of the Myrrh-bearing Women. This is a love that risks all, no matter the odds. It soars high above selfhood and selfishness. It participates in Divine love. Unsullied, self-sacrificing love is the only Divine property to be found on Earth — a vestige of Paradise and the continuing atmosphere of Eden.

We see it foreshadowed in the all-embracing love of St John the Baptist, who was beheaded. We behold it perfectly formed in the King of Love, Who was crucified. Indeed, it is precisely this place where Heaven touches the Earth marking the climax of the Lord's teachings, which we have called in past reflections, the Proverbs of Heaven: — "on Earth as it is in Heaven."

But the quality of Heaven's life on Earth? That is an eschatological concept, the Day of the Lord. We see it depicted in the Apocalypse of St John.

Yet does Heaven's quality dwell within the sincere heart. Have you ever experienced pure love? Do you know its life-transforming power? Once planted within, your entire life will be ordered to it. It is all you think about. It will become your gravity, your oxygen. It joins hands with the Divinity within. After that, nothing else really matters. For nothing else might rise to the marvelous world of God's goodness and light. And the world?

Within its own sphere, love is harmonious. Jesus repeatedly calls it the "Kingdom of Heaven," a term never-before-heard. It seeks nothing from the world save to take its quiet, lowly place. But should the world challenge it, should the world seek to undermine it, then shall such a resistance be seen that no worldly force can overcome.

Is this not our common experience? The mother and her children pitted against the world's unkindness? The marriage of one-bone, one-flesh committed until death (and beyond)? Hearts consecrated to God under persecution? This true and unbreakable love is everything to the ones who know it, and they will die for it. For the world holds nothing for them besides.

Its destiny, therefore, is Contra mundum. This was the name by which Athanasius was known: Athanasius Against the World. And this is love's nature: pure, true, tempered in Heavenly fire .... it will not yield. It cannot yield. And because it is pure and true and tempered as finest steel, it will always be at odds with a world that is not pure nor true nor fine.

Pure love is not of this world. It participates in a higher and better Kingdom. Nothing can replace it — not all the kingdoms of the world set before Jesus in the wilderness, not the offer of spared life to a martyr. It is for this reason that pure love must suffer. This is the love enshrined in the hearts of the Myrrh-bearing Women.

If the world be immoral, then motherly love or the holy heart of true marriage or devout souls consecrated to God lurch back in revulsion. There is no room for compromise, not where the elemental quality of sanctified life is threatened.

This must have been the instinct of the earliest Christians: to turn away from the gritty world. This is the very quality of the Catholic Letters and the Pauline Correspondence: repugnance for the elemental spirits, the prince of the power of the air, and the pride of worldly life. St John the Theologian, writing from a Community whose members included the Most Holy Mother of God, said,

No doubt, this explains St Paul's injunction that Christians pray for civic leaders .... because they weren't. (Isn't that the occasion for every emergency decree or piece of legislation? A crisis?) There can be no truce between "dog-pack-think" and the soul's empyreal life. From the time of St Paul, the Church has strained to seek harmony with the world, always a fragile peace. And we must never forget the Prophecy of St Simeon upon Meeting the Lord in the Temple: the birth of the Lord Jesus, he said, is a "Sign of Contradiction": a challenge, even an accusation, against a treacherous world.

No doubt, this will sound strange to Americans of a certain age. For example, we at the Hermitage were raised in an ethos thought of as "God and Country." From the time we entered elementary school, we began the day reading from the Bible and then pledging allegiance to the flag. On Sundays this theme was ratified at church. I suppose all young people of that time perceived Independence Day, Veteran's Day, and Thanksgiving to be holy days of the Church Calendar.

But winds can turn suddenly and blow with ferocity. Unexpected weather fronts suddenly can move in with leveling destruction. The Russian Orthodox Church, to take one historical case, saw an entire lifeworld (you understand that the Soviet Union occupied twelve time zones), whole lifeworld, Holy 'Rus, vanish in a few, short years as Bolsheviks transmuted a devout and Christ-loving nation into a tyrannical machine of atheism and mass murder. On a more modest scale, "cancel culture" and abridged religious freedoms begin to push devout Christians to the margins of our own society.

But when love is threatened, it cannot change. For the world is discontinuous with the Kingdom of Love. So it is transformed from public rejoicing to quiet grieving and worship. Consider the outpouring of love in a house of Bethany. A women anoints the Lord Jesus as King upon a throne. "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him" .... and she receives Him. Her joy is complete. But that same fragrant, anointing unguent, that myrrh — resented by the world in the person of Judas Iscariot and condemned by the Temple refusing Heaven's King — must now become a funereal balm, to be ministered in grief and mourning. Those who washed His feet with their tears, those who sold everything they had to procure costly oils, these hearts must now be transformed to Myrrh-bearing Women — keeping vigil near His tomb, never counting the cost, offering themselves to danger and to death.

Divine Love is unintelligible to a scoffing, persecuting world. Jesus said,

to which Pilate replied in a mocking tone, "What is truth?"

Divine Love can never be quenched, so it suffers in witness to Simeon's prophecy: Jesus, the Sign of Contradiction, upon the Cross — that navel of the world where a twisting torsion strives to break the King of Love upon a cruel wheel, the Cross standing fast and true midst dark chaos. As our own Church did during the first decades of the last century, God's faithful Kingdom on Earth, standing fast, must suffer. The Russians have a theological word for this: podvig. Do you know the suffering of the Russians? Thirty million people were killed during World War II. Nine million soldiers. By comparison the United States lost a little more the 600,000. For the Russians this was vast smoking battlefield of eschatological dimensions. The Church must wait in a wilderness and endure its faithful exile.

At His birth, three kings (Compline, Feast of the Nativity) laid gifts before the infant Lord Jesus: gold signifying Royal estate, frankincense signifying Divine worship, and a mysterious third gift, myrrh, signifying His anointing as the Christ but also pointing to His suffering and death. As His life would reveal .... "not so mysterious." For it is the Kingship of Jesus the Christ which provokes the world to rebellion as the fact of His Father's Sovereignty provoked rebellion in Heaven.

What shall become of the ones kneeling reverently on that silent night, beholding perfect love, perfect order, and the source of all goodness and life? They see and hear the Truth. What shall now become of them who are caught between this Truth and the world? The three Magi must flee to their homeland. Joseph must suffer one privation after another. Mary's heart must be pierced by a sword (Lu 2:35). All who follow Him must pick up a Cross (Mt 16:24). And the Twelve whom He called (save one) must die.

To follow Him, to aspire to the Kingdom of God, we must die to our selfish lives. We must conform our lives to His, the Wounded One. We may use the word theosis or deification or sanctification. Each points to a God-ordained destiny shared by everyone. You see, the choice is not ours. We do not "opt in" or "opt out." "You did not choose Me, but I chose you" (Jn 15:16), Jesus said. There is no neutral position. We all begin in God, and we all must end in God.

In like measure to our love, ours will be a suffering path:

The Kingdom of Heaven can never square with the world, not because God is distant and forbidding. Far from it. God did not turn away from the world, but the world turned away from God.

The Kingdom of Heaven is all that the world promises but cannot reach. God's Kingdom shimmers — the morning of Creation, all that God made in its purity. And the holy tincture distilled from this purity passing through fiery trials is myrrh. Myrrh is the precious cordial pressed from the lives of the saints.

His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah, former Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, traveled to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He journeyed to the great Monastery of Valaam in Karelia finding it a virtual ruin. He would become a monk there joining men who would begin the long process of restoring the monastery. He told me of the heart-breaking destruction they found but also of the irrepressible holiness, which tyrannical atheism could not destroy. One day the monks discovered a room where the holy icons had been hidden. As they opened the door, a cloud of Heavenly fragrance poured out over them. They saw the holy things gathered together, leaning, stacked up in piles, and scattered about the room. All were dripping with myrrh.

The remains of St Nicholas (famously the West's inspiration for Santa Claus), who had suffered as a confessor during the Great Persecution of the Emperor Diocletian, were seen to drip myrrh through the bottom of his sarcophagus in Myra. These remains would be stolen a few years after the Great Schism by Roman Catholic merchants and taken to Italy. But the purity of God cannot be bought. It cannot be stolen. Basilicas gilt with gold or encrusted with jewels cannot be offered in substitution. The royal estate of the Kingdom resides in lives lived, for the human creature alone was made for such holy work.

Our vocation from God's hand is to bear myrrh after the example of our Holy Mothers. The thorns of the Myrrh Tree recall His Crown; its wood points to His Cross. Its resins attest to imperial estate and a dying to the world. Who hear His Truth and know His voice must suffer. The ones who practice Heaven's Proverbs on Earth must be exploited and crushed. But be of good cheer, for He Who suffered above all has overcome the world. And He still gives signs of His Love. Defying all worldly explanation and obeying no law of physics, myrrh pours into our lives. And we respond, in like fashion, by pouring our lives out as a holy libation (2 Tim 4:6, Phil 3:17). We pour our lives on to the broken ground. And there, in that place of twisting torsion and pain, where the Proverbs of Heaven are mocked and the other cheek is struck once more, we detect the unmistakable fragrance of holiness, of royal anointing and Presence.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.