This article was originally published in "Women in a Changing World" January 1988, no 25.A Worship and Meditation Resource for Easter and for the WCC Women's Unit Programme - Ecumenical Decade Churches in Solidarity with Women, 1988-1998.

So the crucified Christ addresses His Mother in a hymn for Holy Friday, at the point when hope begins to gain the ascendency over the horror with which we relive the events leading up to Christ's death. How do we come to share in the Resurrection, the joy beyond death? I believe we can only experience this to the extent to which we have passed through death:

This death experience can take a number of forms; actually coming near to physical death, perhaps, or surviving the death of a loved one, or living liturgically through the death of Christ. It is here that we have much to learn from the women who appear in the Gospel narratives of the Passion and Resurrection, though I would hesitate to assume that they necessarily speak more to women than to men.

In the Orthodox services for Holy Week and Easter, it is immediately noticeable how prominently women figure. This cycle begins on Saturday with the sisters of Lazarus, and more particularly with Martha. It is obvious how the raising of Lazarus prefigures the general resurrection, but it is perhaps worth reflecting that in this event, as in Christ's own Resurrection, it is a woman who is at hand to receive His message of life and joy,

Martha, who had once risked overlooking the "one thing that is needful" in her zeal to minister to her guests is brought by that same practical concern, and by grief for her sick brother, to the point where she commends him wholly to Christ's love (Jn 11:3,21). She is brought to a point where she is powerless, where all her efforts and energies have met with death. And it is at this point that she hears the words of life.

On Wednesday of Holy Week we remember another woman disciple of the Lord whose prophetic action gives a profound insight into Christ's death and Resurrection. If Martha more obviously takes the part of the women who heard the news of the Resurrection, the sinful woman who anoints Jesus' feet clearly takes the part of a myrrh-bearer (Mt 26:6-13). Her symbolic action is a ministry to the dead - it has not practical usefulness, but is a symbolic expression of a love which death cannot wipe out.

What is the quality that makes a myrrh-bearer, a person who continues to express their love in ritual when apparently it can no longer profit anyone? I believe that it has to do with having nothing more to lose - which means attaining death. This applies equally to the sinful woman who has put herself outside the pale of society, and to the women who stay by Christ as He is dying and come later to anoint His body. They have invested all their hope in Him, and their own life, their own light is extinguished with Him.

cries the Mother of God in the words of a lament sung on the evening of Holy Friday. She is of course objectively justified, as it were, in that her dead Child really is the life of the world.

It is not accidental that the Church puts into her mouth words full of echoes from Greek folk songs, the words of bereaved mothers in every time and place. Here is no "sense of proportion", no detachment, no aspect of getting on with one's own life-no hope, for hope has died with the dead. We have a picture of all-absorbing, inconsolable grief, just as Christ's infancy was accompanied by the sound of "Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted because they were not" (Mt 2:18). And indeed, there is nothing their own lives or the world aorund them that can comfort Christ's Mother and His women disciples - there is only the sudden realisation, against all their expectations, that He Is.

The extraordinary miracle of joy on Easter night comes from the fact that the women who received the message of the Resurrection were faithful even till death without a thought that there was anything to hope for. In the liturgical commemoration of the Passion, there is a constant tension between the lamentations which seem not to see beyond the tragedy of betrayal, suffering and death and the texts which show the underlying reality of events, the hidden power of God moving inexorably towards the Resurrection

Unlike the women who watched Christ die, we know that the Resurrection is sure; but we cannot stand with them and hear Christ say to us "Rejoice!" unless we have brought into our liturgical experience-in the framework of Christ's death and Resurrection- those experiences and situations from which we can see no escape, no end.

Most often when we ourselves are broken-hearted, when we are crushed by a sense of loss, our grief differs in an important respect from that of the women in the Gospels- it is not centred on Christ. This does not make it useless as a way of approaching Him-far from it. It is our life, or rather our deadness- the raw material for our life-giving death and resurrection with Christ.

Even our distractions, our inability to give time and attention to God because of more or less pressing needs, can be seen as part of our deadness. They are our crosses-always remembering, of course, that the cross is not something you grin and bear, but a degrading torture that kills you. It is that element of your life which brings you to the point of death, because only when we reach death and hell do we see that Christ is there raising the dead, and understand how "through the Cross joy has come to all the world."

Of course, it is all too easy to be drowned in sorrows or preoccupations without even realising that we are drowning, that we are on the threshold of a life-bringing death. Nevertheless, I do believe that the way through this death to life is not by detachment but by immersion. And the way to make our drowning in death into a baptism into life is neither imaginative nor moral, but liturgical.

Here again, the women who surround Christ at the time of His Passion and Resurrection can show us the way. Looking at them, we are struck first by the centrality of their role, and secondly by its liturgical quality. They participate in events and make theological statements by symbolic actions; by being present at the Cross and tomb, by anointing Christ's body as if for burial. One can imagine how every loss they had suffered every lesser bereavement, must have been a small factor contributing to their utter desolation.

In a similar way, although with a different emphasis, as we participate in the liturgical celebration of the Passion and resurrection we bring with us all our losses, our failures - everything that tends towards death. Without in any way being confused with the suffering of Christ, our own experiences provide us with a way of approaching that suffering and the state of the world which lies behind it without having to resort to flights of imagination. Correspondingly, the events that we live liturgically provide a framework within which all the rest of our experience acquires a direction and a meaning.

The basis of our faith lies not in holding a philosophical belief in resurrection nor in producing historical evidence for the Resurrection of Christ, but in seeing the Resurrection and believing it. It is as if the liturgical vision which we are given trains us in the insight to perceive the same dynamism at work in the rest of our lives, so when we reach the depths, when we are overwhelmed, then we hear the voice which addresses us,