Sunday of the Myrrhbearers

In the Byzantine Rite of the Orthodox Catholic Church, The second Sunday after Pascha commemorates the Myrrhbearers (Greek: Μυροφόροι, Latin: Myrophorae; Slavonic: Жены́-мѷроно́сицы; Romanian: mironosiţe), the individuals mentioned in the New Testament who were directly involved in the burial or who discovered the empty tomb following the resurrection of Jesus. The term traditionally refers to the women with myrrh who came to the tomb of Christ early in the morning to find it empty. Also included are Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who took the body of Jesus down from the cross, embalmed it with myrrh and aloes, wrapped it in clean linen, and placed it in a new tomb.

The Myrrhbearers were the first persons to witness the empty tomb, and, thus, were the first disciples to proclaim the great tidings of the Resurrection of Christ. The Feast of the Myrrbearers provides a unique opportunity each year to reflect on the profound role of women and the historical and theological basis of women’s ordination in the Church.

Probably surprising to many, in 1976, experts of the Pontifical Biblical Commission of the Roman Catholic Church determined that there were no scriptural reasons preventing women’s ordination. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, however, overturned the commission’s judgement and instead wrote its own statement (Inter Insigniores, 1976) stating that women do not image Jesus who was a man; and therefore only male priests can adequately represent Christ, thus upholding the exclusion of women from ordination in the Roman Catholic Church.

His Eminence, the Most Reverend Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia the titular metropolitan of the Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarchate in Great Britain, offers an interesting and, perhaps to many, surprising theological perspective on the nature of a female priesthood in the “canonical” Eastern Orthodox Church. He writes that unlike Roman Catholicism “at no point in the actual prayer of consecration does the priest speak in persona Christi.” Rather, the Orthodox priest speaks during the Anaphora “in persona Ecclesiae, as the representative not of Christ but of the Church.” As a result, the “iconic argument against the ordination of women is bound to seem less conclusive to Orthodox Christians than it does to Roman Catholics.”

As members of the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America (OCCA), we celebrate our jurisdiction’s decision to accept both men and women, married and unmarried, as candidates for ordination to all three orders of the apostolic ministry (deacons, presbyters, and bishops). In our theological understanding, Christ made women’s ordination possible when he revoked the Old Testament priesthood of Aaron and brought both men and women into a new convenant; into a new priesthood through baptism. Therefore, we do not believe that there is any valid reason to reject the calling of women to any office or service in the Church. Ordination is one form of living out the baptismal vows we all have taken, and thus we do not consider gender or marital status of candidates for Holy Orders.

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