ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

SOMETHING THAT REQUIRES OUR GENTLEST ATTENTION

Sermon for the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women
Bishop Basil of Amphipolis

Sunday 11 May 2008, Parish of the Annunciation, Oxford

Acts 6: 1-7; Mark 15:43-16:8

Christ is risen!

Today we celebrate the memory of the Myrrh-bearing Women, and the passage which we heard this morning includes the second of the eleven Matins Gospels that we read in sequence throughout the year, on the eve of Sunday.

This particular passage, which describes the activities of the Myrrh-bearing Women, is the subject of an icon, as well as having its own Sunday. What we see in the icon is what we read about in the Gospel. We see the women approaching the tomb. We see the young man sitting on the right side clothed in a long white garment, and of course we know that this young man is in fact an angel. We are told in the Authorised Version that ‘they were affrighted’. In the Revised Standard Version you will read ‘They were amazed’. It could also be ‘They were astonished’.

The news which they are told is itself astonishing. ‘He is risen. He is not here. Behold the place where they laid him.’ These words are, of course, the very foundation of the Gospel. They are the foundation of the new and good news. In effect these words set in motion the whole history of the Church. Yet what lies behind these words, and behind the women coming to the grave, is something else: something in a way even more fundamental. It is the mystery of God’s embodiment.

In a sense, the Church’s response to God’s embodiment starts with the coming of the women to the tomb. They come as an expression of love, of closeness with Christ; and that love, that devotion, that closeness, develops over time – in art, in hymns, in the Liturgy. Finally it reaches expression in the theology of the Church, and perhaps nowhere as strikingly as in Maximos the Confessor. Maximos, who lived in the seventh century, says at one point ‘The Word of God and God – Christ – wills always and in everything the realisation of the mystery of his embodiment’. Always and in all things, he wills, he desires, to realise the mystery of his embodiment – his Incarnation.

It is actually difficult to grasp what St Maximos is saying, but we are helped by St Paul. At one level there is an eschatological meaning, one which looks forward to the consummation of all things, which St Paul describes in 1 Corinthians as that moment when, through Christ, God will be ‘all in all’ (1Cor 15:28). This is not just a future moment however. It is something that is already present. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, he says in the present tense, ‘The Word of God fills all in all’ (Eph 1:23). So this is something which is around us now. More specifically – and this is where I would like to focus – in the Epistle to the Colossians, where St Paul is talking about the effect of Baptism, he says ‘You have put on the new man in Baptism, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, bondman nor free, but Christ is all in all’ (Col 3:11). In other words, he has brought that aspect of Christ’s being ‘all in all’ down to the level of our existence in the Church.

It is at this point that we actually join the passage from Acts that we read this morning. It is against the background of Christ being the unifying power in the Church that we need to read these words. ‘And in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews [two factions in the Jewish community], because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration.’ This then leads to the appointment of seven deacons to see that this does not happen.

What does this tell us? It tells us that the unity given to us by Christ is something that is constantly under threat, and it has been under threat from the very beginning. It can easily be disturbed, and then we have to work to restore it. As a result of this the Church is in constant movement, as it seeks to realise in itself the will of God, that is that the Word of God – the Son of God – might bring into effect in this world the mystery of his embodiment and our incorporation into it as members of the Church.
St Maximos says ‘The Word of God and God wills always and in everything the realisation of the mystery of his embodiment’ – in other words the mystery of his personal presence in the created world, an embodied presence.

The Church is the privileged place for the realisation of God’s desire, and we, therefore, are at the cutting edge of this process. That cutting edge is also the coalface: the place where the work has to be done. We should not expect this to be easy. We can see that at the very beginning of the Church, its members had to struggle to realise the unity of Christ. We cannot expect it to be easy for ourselves. Yet this is not a task that we can step back from, because it is part of what we undertook when we were clothed in Christ, when we put on Christ in Baptism.

To return to the icon of the Myrrh-bearing Women and the devotion they showed to the embodied Christ, and the tenderness which they wished to express by anointing him with spices – this is the attitude we need to take towards the body of the Church as well. The body of the Church is something which we need to touch and to experience in our lives as something that requires our gentlest attention. This is what the Myrrh-bearing women showed. And it is in this that we are all invited by God to participate, in our life in the Church.

Christ is risen!