A homily from St. John Russian Orthodox Mission Church, Lewisburg PA, on Sunday May 6, 7531 (May 19, 2024 on the civil calendar).

The Myrrh-Bearing Women and the Noble Joseph

This Third Sunday of Pascha is always a personal favorite of mine, partly because I was married on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women and the Noble Joseph. I was the most unworthy bridegroom in all of Christendom. But thanks to God, my patient Christian wife, and the mystery of the Church, it was like a second baptism to me as we were united together with Christ in the Dance of Isaiah at the ceremony in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago. That is the old Russian Cathedral in Chicago that had been funded by a gift from Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, for whom our older son is named. It was also built under the supervision of the Priest-Martyr John of Chicago, the first known martyr to the Christ-hating Bolshevik regime in 1917 after his return to Russia. These have threads connecting to our feast today, as I’ll mention soon.

As the old song put it, “Love was out to get me.” We know that God is Love as the Evangelist John the Theologian tells us, but he also notes that we need to love in Truth, meaning that we need to love in our Lord Jesus Christ. The marriage ceremony indicates this, as the Bride and Groom are tied by the hand to the Priest and go thrice around the central icon of the Wedding of Cana together. Our commitment is not just to one another, although that is important, but first and foremost of all to Jesus Christ. The mystery of marriage is itself an image of the Church in Holy Scripture in Orthodox Christian Tradition. We are married as a community, even as our humble mission parish, to the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ.

As in the parables of the Virgins coming to meet the Bridegroom, told by Jesus Christ, so arrived the myrrh-bearing women at the tomb, ready with their myrrh. They found the Lord had risen even as they were prepared to adorn His Body, which is become the Church. There are eight women associated by Tradition and Scripture with the Myrrh-bearers, who may have arrived at different times and clusters at the tomb. Let us name their names: Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary and Mother of God, Joanna, Salome, Mary the wife of Cleopas or Alphaeus, Susanna, Mary of Bethany and Martha of Bethany, the sisters of Lazarus.

We still in this Paschal Season are living in the Eighth Day, as we do throughout the year in the Eighth Day of Sunday at Divine Liturgy, the day of the Resurrection, and in the spirit of the Resurrection each day. Just so St. Seraphim of Sarov would greet visitors throughout the year “Christ is Risen!” This is how, especially at this Paschal season, we should great loved ones each morning, and even answer the phone, joyously spreading the word of the Resurrection, as did the Myrrh-bearers and the Noble Joseph. And we should always respond, “Truly He is Risen!” The circle from Forgiveness Sunday to Agape Vespers remains unbroken. In some Orthodox Churches, we bow to each other on Forgiveness Sunday in a circle at the beginning of Lent, and we hug one another in a circle at Agape Vespers after Pascha.

So, too, marriage reminds us of the unbroken circle in the Church of the spirit of the Resurrection. Just as marriage includes ascetic struggle, to join our wills as one, to die for one another in Christ, today reminds us of that also, because today is also the Feast of the Holy Righteous Job the Long-Suffering, grandson of Esau. It is also on this date, the Feast of Job, that Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II was born, a coincidence on which he reflected especially in his final years as a royal martyr and confessor. Job suffered not for his sins but for the glory of God, that his faith might be strengthened, and this became true also of the royal martyrs and their head, whose cruel death was for the glory of God, and also strengthened our faith. The Russian Orthodox Church lost a monarch and monarchy in her homeland, but gained an intercessor, and many intercessors, among the martyrs to Bolshevism, to help pray for the mission work of Orthodoxy worldwide, including the mission to North America of which we are a part today, as we labor with God’s grace to serve our King Jesus.

The Noble Joseph of Arimathea is also a special part of this day, and of the watchful vigilance shown by the Myrrh-bearing Women, commemorated together as a fulfillment of the watchmen among Old Testament Prophets, notably the Holy Prophet Ezekiel. They were alert watching, seeking to adorn the Body of Christ at night and early, and experienced the Resurrection of our Lord, although it came as a glorious surprise to most.

God surprises us in personal ways through the Person of Jesus Christ and the Person of the Holy Spirit. In my unworthy path to Orthodox Christianity as a great sinner, these personal ways included in relation to today the connection of Job to the Tsar-Martyr. His martyrdom moved me greatly as a teenager in Chicago, though I seemed infinitely far from Russia and the Orthodox Church. Reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in high school was a great influence on me, mainly through the accounts of the martyrs for our faith. Likewise, my marriage became a very significant path and how it was preceded by my marriage so to speak to the Church and to Jesus Christ in my Baptism in the Orthodox Church, glory to God.

The Noble Joseph of Arimathea was another thread of personal connection. When I left the old heterodox faiths of my family in Unitarianism and Christian Science, two branches of Yankee New England Puritanism gone to seed, I wandered sinfully, but was strangely led by the account of St. Joseph’s life in traditions about his early apostolic work to England, woven in legend with the tales of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. Leaving Chicago and my work in journalism, I became an academic pilgrim of sorts, helped by a grant to study in Wales at the University of Aberystwyth. There I had the opportunity to focus, in my Master’s Thesis work, on historical and archaeological contexts for the legend of the Noble Joseph’s bringing of Christianity to Glastonbury in England in apostolic times. That would form my first academic publication, in the start of my academic work, by which I was led here, where eventually unworthily I would help found the mission and eventually unworthily become a priest to help serve our mission work. By the grace of God, and according to His mysterious plan, that historical and spiritual interest helped lead me toward the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, for the more I studied about the early Church, the more I kept finding connections to the Orthodox Church, and became drawn to her. Looking back, I’m sure that part of this, despite my complete sinfulness and ignorance, was the intercession of the Noble Joseph, on whose day I was also married in the Orthodox Church.

For me unworthily, all these personal threads of God’s grace are remembered today. All of us are part of the reconstituted seamless robe of Jesus Christ in His Church this day, as by God’s grace we seek to adorn His body like the Myrrh-bearing women and Joseph, in unity in the Bride of the Lamb, His Church, and partake of His Liturgy and Eucharist. This spring, as our physical Church Temple rises nearby, we look forward to carrying forth our mission work from that base that will be permanent, God willing, and which can be fully adorned over time in the beauty of the Lord, as the myrrh-bearing women and Joseph sought to adorn the body of Jesus. Like the myrrh-bearing women, and the Noble Joseph, let us be watchful at our Temple and ready. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ comes from the fulfillment of the old Temple in the Orthodox Church, the Body of Christ.

As the Priest’s prayers after the Great Entrance put it, while preparing the Chalice and Diskos for the consecration of the gifts, “The noble Joseph, having taken down your most pure body from the tree, wrapped it in fine linen and covered it with spices, and laid it in a new tomb…. Thy tomb, the source of our resurrection O Christ our God, has appeared as life-bearing, more beautiful than Paradise and more radiant truly than any royal chamber.”

So let us walk with the Myrrh-bearing Women and with the Noble Joseph each day, watchfully, in the wedding procession of our resurrected Lord with His Church, adorning His body, and let us be vigilant and rejoice in His Resurrection, and in the fractal of it which rises in a little country field in Winfield — as once He was born in the countryside of Bethlehem long ago, in a manger prefiguring the tomb that would appear as live-giving, the source of our salvation, more beautiful than Paradise and more radiant truly than any royal chamber. For His tomb also has become our manger in which we are reborn.

Christ is Risen!