Mark 16:1 Meaning When the Sabbath Was Past

Love that keeps moving when hope is gone is what receives the first news of the Resurrection. These women expected to find a body. They came anyway, with no plan for the stone and no reason to think anything could change, and that faithful, unreasonable devotion put them where God's greatest work would be revealed first.

God honors this. The Church has never forgotten that the announcement of life over death was entrusted to women who came to care for the dead, so that those who had been last in the world's counting were made first messengers. Ordinary acts of love, performed with no expectation of reward, are the ones that find themselves standing at the empty tomb.

When the crown center has done its work and its rest is past, the lower faculties move to tend what has been raised. The sabbath is the seventh chakra, the pineal, and once its stillness has passed the energies of bitterness and of the carnal desire allied with Herod come carrying sweet spices to anoint the risen awareness. Bitterness itself brings the fragrant oils, for the very griefs of the lower nature are turned into what honors the higher.

Even the carnal pull, which elsewhere sides with the flesh, arrives here in service, bearing spices to the anointing. What weeps and what craves are drawn upward together, converted into the offering that consecrates the awakened self.

Sabbath: the seventh chakra, the pineal gland, whose stillness has now passed Mary: bitterness, the grief of the lower nature turned into fragrant offering Salome: the lower flesh, the carnal desire once allied with Herod, now brought into service Sweet spices: the fragrant oils the lower faculties carry to consecrate the risen awareness