The Myrrh-bearers as Model

The Church does not merely record the myrrh-bearing women; it holds them up as a model. Their love did not flee the Cross, watched the burial, and could not rest until it had come to the tomb to anoint the dead — and that love was rewarded with the first news of the Resurrection. This file sets out the patristic and liturgical reading of the myrrh-bearers as a pattern of faithful discipleship, with Mary Magdalene at their head, and the Song-of-Songs figure of “the love that seeks Him.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles, Myrrh-bearer)

A Love That Did Not Flee

The first thing the Church sees in the myrrh-bearers is constancy. Where the male disciples scattered — “they all forsook him, and fled” (Mark 14:50, RSV) — and where Peter denied Him three times (Mark 14:66–72), the women remained: at the Cross (John 19:25), at the burial (Matt. 27:61; Mark 15:47), and at the tomb (Mark 16:1–2). The Fathers draw the contrast pointedly. Chrysostom, preaching on the women at Golgotha, marvels that “the women… showed more courage than the men,” for “when the disciples fled, they were present, and ministered to him even in his dangers” (Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 88, on Matt. 27:55). The fidelity of the myrrh-bearers is, for the Fathers, a rebuke and a summons: the love that endures when all seems lost is the love the Lord rewards.

This is why the Church proposes them as a model to all the faithful, men and women alike. The myrrh-bearers are not honored for any office but for the quality of their discipleship — a love that stays. The hymnography of the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women makes them the pattern of those who follow Christ to the end and beyond, who do not abandon Him in His apparent defeat and are therefore the first to share His victory (The Pentecostarion, the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women).

A Love That Seeks Him

The second thing the Church sees is seeking love. The myrrh-bearers came to the tomb in the dark, carrying spices, asking only “Who will roll away the stone for us?” (Mark 16:3) — seeking the dead body of their Lord to render it the last service of love, with no thought of resurrection. They came to anoint a corpse and found the Living One. The Eastern tradition reads this seeking through the lens of the Song of Songs, whose bride rises in the night to seek her beloved: “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not… I held him, and would not let him go” (Song 3:1–4, RSV). The earliest application of this text to the myrrh-bearers is already in Hippolytus of Rome (early third century), who reads the bride’s search as the women’s search for Christ at the tomb and the bride’s “I would not let him go” as Mary’s clinging in John 20:17 (Hippolytus, Commentary on the Song of Songs 24–25; see Apostle to the Apostles). The myrrh-bearers thus become, in the Eastern reading, the very figure of the soul that seeks Christ — and finds Him.

Mary Magdalene is the foremost of these seekers. In John 20 she will not leave the tomb when the male disciples have gone home; she stands weeping, she stoops twice to look in, she pleads with the supposed gardener, “tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away” (John 20:15) — and her persistence is rewarded with the first sight of the risen Lord and her own name spoken by Him: “Mary!” (John 20:16; see The First Witness). The Fathers read her refusal to leave as the model of the persevering love that the Lord cannot refuse. As Gregory the Great himself put it — in a passage on the same scene that survives his conflation — “she who had sought sought again… and so it came about that she found him whom she sought” (Gregory, Homily 25 on the Gospels, on John 20). Her seeking, not her supposed sin, is the point.

The Reversal of Eve

The Eastern tradition reads the primacy of the myrrh-bearers as a deliberate reversal woven into the economy of salvation. As the news of death entered the world through a woman, so the news of life is first given to women; the kontakion of the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women has the angel proclaim that the Lord, “when Thou didst cry ‘Rejoice’ unto the myrrh-bearers, didst make the lamentation of Eve the first mother to cease by Thy Resurrection” (The Pentecostarion, kontakion). The myrrh-bearers, and Mary Magdalene above all, are the “new Eve” of the proclamation: where Eve heard the sentence of death, they hear the “Rejoice” of the rising. This figure, ancient and pervasive in the hymnography, makes the women’s fidelity not merely exemplary but salvation-historically significant — they stand at the turning of the ages.

The Model for All the Faithful

What, concretely, does the Church set before the faithful in the myrrh-bearers? Three things above all. Perseverance in love when all seems lost — to stay at the Cross, to keep the vigil, to come to the tomb even when hope is dead. The willingness to serve Christ in the lowliest acts — the myrrh-bearers came to perform a humble, even thankless, service to a dead body, expecting no reward; the Church commends this disinterested love. And the readiness to proclaim what one has found — the myrrh-bearers, sent from the tomb, became the first heralds of the Resurrection, and so the model of every Christian who is sent to bear witness (Matt. 28:7–8; John 20:18). The Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women gathers all this into a single annual celebration of faithful discipleship, and the Church honors in the myrrh-bearers the love that does not flee, that seeks, and that proclaims (see The Feasts).

The Myrrh-bearers and the Dignity of Women

Finally, the Church reads the myrrh-bearers as a sign of the dignity of women within the Body of Christ. That the first witnesses of the Resurrection and the first heralds sent to the apostles were women is not incidental but, in the Eastern reading, providential — a divine honoring of the very sex whose testimony the world discounted (see Women Disciples in the Gospel). The model of the myrrh-bearers therefore carries, alongside its summons to all the faithful, a particular affirmation: that the love and the witness of women stand at the very foundation of the Church’s Paschal faith.

References

The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version: Mark 14:50, 66–72; 16:1–8; Matthew 27:55–61; 28:7–8; John 19:25; 20:11–18; Song of Songs 3:1–4.
Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, Hom. 88. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 10.
Gregory the Great. Homily 25 on the Gospels (on John 20). Trans. David Hurst, Forty Gospel Homilies. Kalamazoo, 1990.
Hippolytus of Rome. Commentary on the Song of Songs 24–25. Ed. and trans. Yancey W. Smith. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2015.
The Pentecostarion. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston, 1990. (The Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women.)