Sermon for Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing women

Christ is risen! Christos anesti! (Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!)

In the quiet, grey light before dawn, we find ourselves standing at Christ’s tomb. Today, we celebrate the Myrrh-Bearing Women — Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, Joanna and others — those faithful disciples who did not flee when the world turned dark, and who did not calculate the risks when love demanded action. They knew the stone was too heavy for them. They knew the soldiers were armed. They knew the authorities had not finished with anyone who loved Jesus of Nazareth. They went anyway. Love did not first solve the problem; love simply walked toward it.

Their story is one of extraordinary courage, but it carries also a profound and challenging message about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Consider the paradox of this morning. In a first-century world where women’s testimony was not even admissible in a court of law, God made a definitive choice. Whom did the Risen Christ choose to be the first witnesses of the Resurrection? Whom did He entrust with the greatest news in the history of the cosmos? Women. While most of the male disciples — the ones who had promised to fight to the death — were locked behind closed doors, paralysed by fear, the women were already walking toward the grave.

This is not, however, a sermon about men failing and women succeeding. We just heard that Joseph of Arimathea risked his standing in the Sanhedrin to ask Pilate for the body of Jesus. Nicodemus came in the dark to help bury Him. The faithful, then as now, were not divided cleanly along the lines we expect. What divided the disciples that day was not their gender but the disposition of their hearts — whether love had taken deeper root in them than fear.

Notice how the women came. Not with swords to overpower the guards. Not with grand theological arguments about resurrection. They arrived with myrrh — with grief and tenderness, carrying the humble tools of service. And it was precisely this quiet, unrelenting devotion that was met by the reality of the Kingdom.

This is the spiritual truth they teach us: the Kingdom of God is not entered by force, by intellect, or by worldly dominance. It is entered by faithful, persistent love — the kind of love that keeps walking when it cannot yet see what it will find.

There is a particular message in this for our age, and perhaps especially for the men among us. In a world that still prizes a certain image of strength — control, dominance, the firm grip — the Myrrh-Bearers invite a re-evaluation of what true courage looks like. Their courage was not the courage of the sword. It was the courage of the hand that prepares a body for burial, and the courage of a heart willing to be seen weeping in public.

Spiritual leadership, the women remind us, is not about being the loudest or the strongest. It is about being the one who shows up at the foot of the Cross when everyone else has fled. It is about replacing the desire for control with the willingness to serve, even — especially — in the darkest hours. You could call these women the Apostles to the Apostles (from the Greek ἀπόστολος, “one who is sent”), because Christ Himself sent them to break the news to the men still hiding in the upper room. They are not a footnote in the Resurrection story. They are its first preachers.

So, what do we do with their witness? We carry myrrh. We ask where love is calling us to walk; while fear tells us to stay home. We sit with grieving friends. We tell the truth where it is unwelcome. We go to the parts of our lives we have given up on, not because we have a plan for the stone, but because love does not require a plan in order to begin.

May we — men and women alike — have the humility to follow these women to the empty tomb, and the courage to follow them out again, into a world that still needs to hear the message of the resurrected CHRIST more than ever.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
Christos anesti! Alithos anesti! (Χριστὸς ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!)