Fr John Breck On the eve of the Sunday of the Holy Myrrhbearing Women, the Matins service includes Christ’s resurrection appearances as they are recounted at the close of St Mark’s Gospel. If Biblical scholars are correct, these last verses, Mark 16:9-20, did not originally belong to the Gospel narrative. This series of appearances of the risen Lord was apparently gathered together by the early Church for catechetical purposes and was only subsequently added to the second Gospel to provide it with what seemed to be a more appropriate conclusion.
This means that the original Gospel, as St Mark composed it, in fact ended with the passage read at the Sunday morning Liturgy (Mk 15:42-16:8). The Myrrhbearing Women, having beheld the empty shroud and heard the angelic testimony, were filled with trembling and astonishment—tromos kai ekstasis, more precisely rendered “ecstatic wonder.” It was this intense emotional response that led them to flee the tomb and, for a while, to say nothing to anyone, “for they were afraid.”
Why would the evangelist have ended his narrative in this surprising, almost scandalous way? Especially since we know that the women finally did announce to Peter and the other disciples that they had discovered the tomb to be empty, and that an angel had declared to them that Jesus had risen from the dead? Mark addressed his writing to believers: those who were thoroughly familiar with the entire Gospel story, persons whose very life and faith was grounded in the truth and hope of the Resurrection. Why, then, should he conclude his work with the mysterious image of the tomb, together with the women’s reaction, rather than depict, as the other evangelists did, the various appearances of the risen Lord to His disciples?
The only plausible answer is that St Mark wanted to stress above all this reaction—this intense inner response—of the women to the vision of the tomb and the evidence of the holy shroud. These women had followed Jesus faithfully throughout the time of His earthly ministry, caring for His needs, providing food and lodging for Him and His disciples as they made their pilgrimage from Galilee through Judea and into the holy city of Jerusalem. They remained faithful to him throughout his Passion, and they assisted in His burial. Then, as the Sabbath drew near, they had to leave the burial ritual uncompleted and return to their homes. That ritual could only be finished after the Sabbath, early on the following Sunday morning.
Very early on that first day of the week, the women gathered aromatic spices and walked to the tomb. Finding the stone rolled away, they entered with trepidation. There they beheld a young man, and angelic figure, seated where the body of Jesus had been laid, where now there was only an empty shroud. Then, filled with trembling and astonishment, with “ecstatic wonder,” they fled from the tomb, struck dumb by the vision that had just been granted to them. For the moment they could say nothing to anyone, “for they were afraid.”
This fear experienced by the Myrrhbearing Women was not abject terror, a kind of dread before something threatening and indecipherable. Rather, it was the experience of awe, so deep and intense that they became “ecstatic,” “beside themselves,” removed from the usual sphere of human experience, and granted the degree of self-transcending wonder that the apostle Paul knew when, in an ecstatic trance, he was “caught up into the third heaven, into Paradise” (2 Cor 12).
Such is the emotion that accompanies the experience of a theophany, a revelation of divine power and majesty. This is the emotion that seized the women in the empty tomb. They beheld the linen shroud and heard the angel’s assurance that Jesus, who was dead, had been raised to life. They saw, they were amazed, and they left the tomb in a spirit of wonder and awe-filled silence.
As the memory of the paschal celebration fades in the days and weeks following the feast, we are offered in the Myrrhbearing Women an image—a living icon—of paschal wonder, ecstatic wonder. If we listen attentively to the magnificent hymns of the Pentacostarion, we can hear the angelic announcement they heard and share the wonder that was theirs. In the midst of our ordinariness—shopping, taking the kids to school, fussing with the computer, sitting through office meetings, fighting traffic, or battling anxieties in the middle of the night—in the midst of all of it, that image of the Myrrhbearing Women extends an invitation. It calls us to step out of ourselves for a while, and with them to enter the tomb where our Lord was laid. It calls us to contemplate the ineffable mystery of the empty shroud, together with the angelic proclamation, “He is not here, He is risen!”
Out of that silent contemplation can come once again the profound sense of awe, of ecstatic wonder, that seized the women and all those who beheld the risen Lord. As it did for the apostle Paul, that awe and that wonder can lift us out of our ordinariness, if only for a moment, and give us a glimpse, a blessed foretaste, of Paradise.