The Courage of the Myrrhbearers

In this inspiring sermon, Fr. Geoff reflects on the courage and devotion of the myrrhbearers, drawing parallels to the challenges faced by Christians today. He explores themes of faith, the significance of the Shroud of Turin, and the importance of multiplying disciples. Fr. Geoff encourages believers to overcome fear with love for Christ and to avoid murmuring, urging everyone to be active in spreading the faith.

Transcript

Well, some of us woke up happy this morning. Some of us woke up sad in Australia, I mean, but all of us woke up very happy because Christ is risen. Christ is risen, and that changes everything. Changes perspective on everything, including what happened yesterday, and I don't even know the results.

So today, we have a focus on the myrrhbearers, and I've got four points this morning: Myrrhbearers, mummies, multipliers, and murmurers—all M's. I hope you remember them. Okay, first of all, the myrrhbearers. We're here to honor the myrrhbearers, a very special group of ladies, and we're going to hear a lot of detail in the synaxarion. So I just want to focus on one aspect of why we are focusing on them today, and that is their courage, their zeal for Christ, their love for Christ. They were afraid, I'm sure they were afraid. Do you remember what Franklin Roosevelt said? Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the assessment that something else is more important than that fear. And these ladies, I'm sure they were afraid. Afraid of the guards at the tomb, afraid of the Roman soldiers, afraid of what they'd find at the tomb. But they nevertheless went out of love to the tomb early on that Sunday morning, that first Sunday morning, to anoint Jesus and to wrap him in the spices that they bought and give him a decent burial. So their love overcame their fear.

And they're a great example, a great example to us because things are getting tough in the Western world. Things are getting tough in Australia. Things are going to get harder, things are going to get more challenging, more frightening for Christians. The way it's going, it's extraordinary what's happened in Australia. 100 years ago, 98% of this country was Christian, and now our governing classes are really not really Christian at all, and if anything, anti-Christian, and they're passing laws and things which are going to give us a very hard time. So we need to look to these ladies, these myrrhbearers, as an example for us. Even though we might be afraid, we have to have courage. What gives us the courage? Our love for Christ, our zeal for Christ. We can do it because Christ is risen. Amen. And they didn't know that. They didn't know that. But we do know that, so we should have more courage than they did. They were braver than the men. Peter had denied Christ three times. The men had all run away from the cross. The ladies stayed at the cross. God bless you, ladies, for that. And thank God for all the myrrhbearers we have in this congregation. So it's not just an example for the women; it's an example for us all. This story is a call to us to follow their example, but it's also a judgment. It's also a judgment on us. It judges our lack of courage sometimes. You know, are we afraid to identify ourselves as Christians? Are we afraid to wear our cross in public or whatever?

There's a very frightening verse in Revelation 21:5-8: "Then he who sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new.' This is our risen Christ. And he said to me, 'Write, for these words are true and faithful.' And he said to me, 'It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts. He who overcomes shall inherit all things, and I will be his God and he shall be my son. But, but listen to this: But the cowardly—that's the first in the list—the unbelieving, the abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.' Wow. The first thing in that list is the cowardly. So if you're ever afraid, think of the myrrh-bearing women and how they overcame their fears and they went forth because of their love for Christ and because of their zeal for Christ. And then we won't be faced with that particular judgment. We sometimes think that it's all the other things that people get judged for, and we're not doing any of those, so we're okay. But if we're cowardly, we're in trouble.

All right, second one: Mummies. Now, mummies. The Jews did not mummify bodies when they died, but it was a good topic. It was a good title for the heading or good heading. They wrapped dead bodies in shrouds. And when Jesus was taken off the cross, they wrapped him in a shroud. And it was, the shroud is, it's something like 14 feet long, and it covers you up the front, over the top, down the back again. It's 14 feet, and Jesus was wrapped in this shroud, which was actually for some for Joseph of Arimathea, but he gave it to our Lord, and he laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of rock.

Now, because of recent technological discoveries, a particular shroud in this world has come up for a lot of attention lately, and for example, Dr. John Campbell, some of you may have heard of, he made a YouTube presentation on it recently, and when we last looked, there were over two million views of his presentation, so people are interested in this. I'm talking, of course, of what is known as the Shroud of Turin. Have any of you heard of that? Yeah. If you're Protestants like I was, then you probably think, well, it's just a, it's a Catholic relic. But actually, do you know what? It wasn't a Catholic relic until 1985. It was kept by a family. It's been preserved by a family and only given to the Romans in 1985. So it's only a very recent thing. It's only recently it's got to the Roman Catholics. So where's it been before? Well, it's very interesting. 120 academic disciplines have spent over 500,000 hours examining this particular shroud. And why? Because it has on it the image of a crucified man in the form of a negative. It's extraordinary. And it was only discovered that it was a negative when somebody, I think in the 19th century, took a photograph of it, and when he was developing it in the, if you've ever done developing in, I used to do it with my father. You have the thing in the dish with all these chemicals, and suddenly the picture comes out, and when the picture came out, it was a positive. He couldn't believe it. It was a positive photograph from the photograph he had taken of the shroud. And the question is, how do you get such an image on a shroud centuries before photography has even been invented?

The image is of a badly beaten-up man. The wounds are consistent with ancient prophecies in all and all four gospel accounts. I'm not going to go into an awful lot of detail about it today, but I think I might put some of this detail into my weekly email next week. But just very quickly, just very quickly to get your interest here, the image, there's no paint, no pigment, no dye, no oxidation on the cloth. The image is only two or three fibers per thread, and there's 70 to 150 fibers per in each thread. In fact, if you move closer than 8 feet to the actual icon, to the, not the icon, the shroud, you can't see it. You have to move back for more than 8 feet away before you'll see it. It's so small. The image on the shroud has encoded in it three-dimensional information. A VP8 image analyzer developed by NASA for interpreting planetary data revealed that this 3D data using eight shades of gray. The formation of the image is estimated to have required, listen to this, 34,000 trillion watts of energy in 1/40th of a billionth of a second. I don't know how they work that out. It's kind of like a nuclear flash from the inside to the outside. Sounds to me like God in action. Somebody said it's the first selfie that God ever took. I like that.

The interesting thing is that looking at human blood now, the human blood that is on the cloth and can be identified is type AB. If you know anything about type AB, it's mainly found in the Middle East. It's very rare but very common in Israel, and it's present on the shroud. Postmortem blood from a chest wound suggests the person was pierced after death, consistent with the biblical accounts. Other blood stains indicate bleeding from a living person. Now, wounds, the wounds match scriptural descriptions. The shoulder bruises from carrying the cross. There's a broken nose because when you're lashed to the cross piece of the bar, can you imagine it, and you trip and you fall, how do you, you can't put your hands out, so you land flat on your face. So the nose is broken. There are knee bruises and nail wounds in both wrists. Jerusalem's soil is found on the soles of the feet, knee, and nose. Limestone in the cloth matches local Jerusalem's samples. Pollen from plants in Jerusalem, Turkey, France, and Italy is present, matching the shroud's historical paths. Specific pollen, I won't give you the technical name, from Jerusalem blooms in February to May as found on the shroud only in February to May, which aligns with the time of the Passover. Why the different, why pollen from different parts? Well, a lot of relics and so on from the Middle East were running away from Islam as it moved through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. So it seems that the people were taking this shroud away from Islam, which was advancing. Dating, carbon dating results are disputed due to possible flaws with the method. New dating via wide-angled X-ray scattering suggests linen dates from around 55 to 77 AD, around the time of the siege of Masada, where they have another shroud which they have dated to that time. So it's taking it right back. So this is where the carbon dating is not accurate. This is more accurate. Historical records and multiple scientific disciplines, pathology, medicine, topography, botany, geology, mineralogy support the shroud's authenticity.

Now, okay, we have liturgical parallels to a shroud. The Orthodox equivalent to the shroud, we don't have a liturgical object that is in some ways like the shroud. We do, sorry, it's called the epitaphios, an embroidered cloth icon depicting Christ's body prepared for burial. We have it on an icon which is actually laid on the altar at the moment. Do you remember we had the epitaphios here during Holy Week, and then we carried it around in the, all the way around the church? That's the same thing. It's used in Holy Friday services. It's a liturgical icon, not a physical relic. The Shroud of Turin is a relic for the Roman Catholics, but we don't actually call it a relic at this stage. So what's the Orthodox view of the Shroud of Turin? There's no mandatory Orthodox attitude. It's seen as optional, peripheral, and requiring discernment. Some Orthodox, especially among the laity and some priests, believe the shroud is authentic and regard it with great awe. In light of all the information that I've just shared with you, I'm in that category where I think it is authentic. Some Orthodox theologians are more skeptical, or at least more cautious, and recommend not building one's faith on the authentication question, and I agree with that. The only thing we have to believe is the creed. We don't have to believe that this is the shroud, but I think it might help our faith. C.S. Lewis, those of us with Protestant backgrounds, he had a photograph of this Shroud of Turin on his mantelpiece in his bedroom. They found it after he died. He wanted to see the face of Christ when he was waking in the morning.

In Mark chapter 16, the gospel today we read, entering the tomb, they saw a young man clothed in a long white robe sitting at the right side. They were alarmed, but he said to them, "Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen." At the gospel reading this morning, we had the passage from Luke, a similar passage from Luke, stooping and looking in. He saw the linen cloths by themselves. He saw the linen cloths by themselves. That's what they report. Not he saw the empty space, but he saw the linen cloths. Interesting that Luke recorded that detail. He saw the linen cloths, and he departed wondering. And then you get in John's gospel, the other disciple who came to the tomb first went in also, and he saw and believed. Now, what did he see? Did he see an empty space and believed? I think he saw the cloths and he believed. He saw the shroud, the folded-up shrouds, and he believed.

So let me see, where am I going here? I must lose my way, but I have lost my way. There was one other liturgical thing connected with this passage this morning. If you'd been here at Vespers Matins this morning, you would have heard coming out of this, imagine this symbolizes the tomb. You would have heard Father Nicholas reading the gospel from the right-hand side of the altar. And that is a direct connection with this passage where when they looked into the tomb on the right side, there was the angels, and the things were laid there, and the angels said, "Christ is risen," and he reads the gospel. We have 11 different gospels to read. We rotate every week, we read a different one out of a series of 11, and they're all about Christ risen from the dead. So that's another liturgical thing that we have in the passage in the church.

Right, the last two things I'll do very quickly: Multipliers. So we've had myrrhbearers, mummies, multipliers. I was struck when I read, when I first read the passage, in those days when the number of the disciples was multiplying at the end, and the word of God increased, and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem. Here we are, what, it's only two Sundays since the resurrection, and we're reading passages about disciples multiplying. Fantastic. Wonderful. And today, there are 2.8 billion people who follow Christ in the world. A third of the world follows Christ. How did that happen? If it had been by addition, say we had added one a year, that would have been about seven, about 3/4 of a million. Do you know there haven't been a million days since Jesus was on earth? We haven't had a million days yet. We talk about millions of dollars and all that sort of stuff. There haven't been a million days yet since Jesus walked this earth. So one by one will be about a million, 3/4 of a million. But we multiplied. We've multiplied. This is the key to the church. When I think of Australia, I've said this before, I'm going to say it again. How many people in Australia? 27 million. How on earth can we reach 27 million? Well, not by addition, but by multiplication. You can by multiplication. Do you know how many years it would take? I'm the first, just me, I invite one of you to church, and next year, both of us invite somebody else to church. There's four of us. The following year, all four of us invite somebody to church. There's eight of us. How many years does it take to reach the whole of Australia? Anybody know? Have a guess. Sorry? Couple of weeks? Couple of weeks? That's a bit, I like your enthusiasm. I'll recruit you for the multiplying group. No, 25 years. That's all. 25 years. 25 years. We can do it, but we got to work on multiplying, not adding. So that means all of us have to be involved. All of us have to invite our friends. All of us have to say, "Christ is risen, come and worship him." Okay. So I'm encouraging everybody to be involved in this process because the priests, you know what they say about the priest? "Christ is risen, and the priest is dead at the end of Easter, at the end of Pascha." So we need some help. All right. Actually, this year it was "Christ is risen, and the pope is dead," which is very sad.

But, all right, last thing was murmuring. It mentions here the Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily ministry. Isn't it interesting? As the church begins to grow, murmuring starts. It was in the Old Testament, it's in the New Testament, and it's here today in our gospel, and it's a danger because God does not like murmuring, and he judges it very severely. John, in John chapter 6, the Jews then complained against about Jesus because he said, "I am the bread which came down from heaven." And they said, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that he says, 'I have come down from heaven?'" Jesus therefore answered and said, "Do not murmur among yourselves." So there's the words of Jesus today: Do not murmur among yourselves. And murmuring, what is murmuring? It means complaining, grumbling, often expressing dissatisfaction or discontent. When you're in a big body of people like this, and you've got unworthy priests like me, you know there's going to be cause for murmuring. But we got to somehow keep the lid on it and not do it and look and be thankful, be grateful for things that are going, that have happened. And then God will be praised. So if you're tempted to murmur, don't do it. If you're with somebody who's murmuring, discourage them. All right. Because the devil can use this to get into the church and start causing problems.

So there we have it today: Myrrhbearers, wow, what an example. Never forget their example, their courage, their zeal, their love for Jesus. Mummies, well, think about the cloth, the, what do you call it, the thing of Turin, the, it's gone out of my head. Yeah, see, I'm an old priest. Think about the Shroud of Turin, and it's up to you what you decide about it. Multipliers, we need to multiply. All of us, every single one of us, we need to be involved in this. And we mustn't murmur. May God help us to be multipliers and not murmurers. Okay. Christ is risen.