The Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, 2026
Oops!
Fear is a powerful motivator.
In fact, it may be the most effective motivator in the world. Politicians know this well. Nearly every campaign, at some point, stops telling you what their candidate will do for you — and starts telling you what the other candidate will do to you. Fear gets people to the polls. Fear keeps people in line.
And religion is not immune.
Clergy worry about Sunday attendance because they fear their bishops. Parish councils cut corners because they fear a budget shortfall. And sometimes — perhaps more often than we’d like to admit — ordinary believers fear God himself.
I once knew someone who grew up hearing a great deal of “fire and brimstone.” Every night before sleep, this person lay awake terrified that unconfessed sins might be enough to keep them from heaven. That if they didn’t wake up, they’d wake up somewhere else. Every bedtime was a small trauma. A nightly audit of the soul — not out of love, but out of dread.
Stay scared so you can stay faithful. That was the operating logic.
Ugh!
And then we come to this morning’s Gospel.
The myrrh-bearing women go to the tomb before dawn, carrying spices to anoint a body. They are already grieving. They already know the cost of loving Jesus — they watched him die. And when they arrive, they find the stone rolled away, and inside, a young man in a white robe who tells them the most astonishing thing anyone has ever said: He is risen. He is not here.
And what happens? Joy? Proclamation? A sprint back to tell the disciples?
No. Mark writes:
“They went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come upon them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Fear, again. Even here, at the empty tomb, fear wins — at least for a moment. The most liberating news in human history, and it produces silence. No word to the disciples. No message of hope to the world. Just women running, and their mouths shut tight.
This is what fear does. It doesn’t just make us anxious — it makes us mute. It leads us down narrow corridors of self-protection, into hiding, into performance, into the exhausting work of managing how we appear before God and everyone else.
A faith built on fear will eventually burn out. Because — and this is worth sitting with — who wants to worship a God who is threatening them? Fear cannot produce love. Not the kind of love that draws us into union with God and one another. Not the kind that lasts.
Aha!
But here’s what we also know: the women’s silence didn’t last.
We know this because we are sitting here. The message got out. Somewhere between that terrified flight from the tomb and this Sunday morning, something shifted. Fear gave way to something else entirely — and the good news of the Resurrection became the most widely told story in human history.
That shift has a name. It’s called hope.
Hope is not optimism. It is not a cheerful feeling or a confident prediction. Christian hope is trust anchored in a promise — the promise that the One who was dead is alive, and that his life is now the ground beneath our feet. And that changes everything about how we stand in the world.
Recent research on psychology and religion has begun to confirm what the Church has always understood: hope functions as a stabilizing force. In one study of older adults, hope was found to mediate the relationship between spiritual burnout and future anxiety — acting, as the researchers put it, as a psychological and spiritual buffer. That doesn’t prove the Resurrection, of course, but it does suggest that the tradition knew something true: hope steadies us in ways that fear never can.
Whee!
Here is where the difference becomes most concrete — and most personal.
What happens when you fail?
In a fear-based faith, failure means hiding. It means performance for others. It means the long, exhausting labor of making sure no one — not God, not your priest, not your fellow parishioners — sees the gap between who you appear to be and who you actually are. That kind of religion makes people brittle. One crack and the whole thing can shatter.
But a faith rooted in hope — in the trust that God’s love is not contingent on your performance — that faith produces something different. It produces honesty. Repentance without self-destruction. The freedom to begin again, without pretending the failure never happened. You can bring your doubt to God rather than hide it from him. You can tell the truth in prayer rather than curating it.
The anxiety we sometimes see in religious communities is real. But it is not evidence that Christianity produces fear. It is evidence that some communities have drifted — replaced the gospel with performance, replaced grace with management. The real thing looks different. It is quieter. Steadier. Significantly less exhausting.
Yeah!
The myrrh-bearing women came to the tomb with grief and spices — and they left in fear. But they came back. They spoke. They witnessed. And the world was never the same.
That is the shape of Christian hope. Not that life becomes easy, but that your faith has a deeper center than your nervous system. Not that doubt disappears, but that you have somewhere to bring it. Not that you never fail, but that failure is not the final word.
Christ is risen — and that changes what fear gets to do with us.