On Power Laid Down and Tombs Broken Open — A Reflection for Meatfare Sunday (Sunday of the Last Judgment) on Mark 16:9–20 and 1 Corinthians 8:8–9:2
She came to them weeping-wet with news that could unmake the world, and they did not believe her. Mary Magdalene—from whom seven devils had been driven like wolves from a sheepfold—stood before the eleven and spoke the only word that matters: He is alive. And they sat in their grief like men walled inside a barrow, preferring the known darkness to an unimaginable dawn. Mark does not soften this. He lets the shame of it stand. Two more witnesses came after her, and neither believed they them. The Risen Lord had to come Himself, break bread among them at table, and upbraid them—that word sharp as a struck flint—with their unbelief and hardness of heart.
Here is the first judgment, and it falls before any throne is set, before any sheep are sorted from goats. The judgment is this: can you receive what love is doing when it arrives in a form you did not expect? The eleven expected a corpse. Mary brought them a life. They could not metabolize it. Their hearts had hardened—not from malice but from sorrow, from the very human reflex that armors the chest against further wounding. And Christ names this precisely as the obstacle. Not sin in the lurid sense. Not rebellion. Hardness. The calloused place where the heart has stopped being able to feel.
This is the inner work of Meatfare Sunday, the Sunday whose Gospel sets before us the terrifying simplicity of I was hungry, and ye gave me meat—or did not. The Last Judgment is not an audit of ritual compliance. It is the revelation of what your heart has become, whether it has remained soft enough to recognize Christ in the stranger’s face, the prisoner’s cell, the sick-room’s stench. And here Mark shows us the prototype of that failure: men who could not recognize the Resurrection even when a woman who loved Him spoke it plainly. Maximos the Confessor understood this with devastating clarity: “The one who has not yet come to know the purpose of creation has not yet come to know the purpose of the Creator” (Ambigua 7.22). To miss the risen Christ in the testimony of a delivered woman is to miss the very structure of reality—God arriving always through the lowly, the overlooked, the ones from whom seven devils were cast.
And then Paul, writing to Corinth about meat. Meat offered to idols—so particular, so first-century, so apparently remote from us. Yet the Church places this letter here, on the last day before flesh-meat is set aside until Pascha, and the placement is a master-stroke of liturgical wit. Meat commendeth us not to God, Paul says. Neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither, if we eat not, are we the worse. The food itself is nothing. And yet—and here the whole epistle pivots on a single hinge—your freedom can become a wound in your brother’s flesh. Through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died.
This is not moralism. This is the shape of kenosis discovered in the kitchen, at the butcher’s stall, at the common table. Paul knows what he is entitled to. He enumerates his rights with the precision of a Roman litigator—apostle, free man, one who has seen Jesus Christ our Lord. He has power to eat, power to drink, power to receive wages. And then the breath-stopping turn: Nevertheless we have not used this power; but suffer all things, lest we should hinder the gospel of Christ. Paul chooses the shape of the Cross not under compulsion but from a whole heart. He empties himself of every legitimate claim, every earned right, because something larger is at stake—not his own holiness, but another person’s capacity to receive the good news without stumbling.
Here the two readings speak to one another across the liturgical table like antiphonal choirs. Mark gives us the Risen Christ who commissions power—in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents—a torrent of sovereign, wonder-working authority poured upon those same hard-hearted men. And Paul shows us how that power is properly wielded: by laying it down. The signs follow them that believe, yes. But belief, genuine belief, is not the clutching of power; it is the willingness to relinquish it for love’s sake. As John Chrysostom preached on this very passage: “Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength” (Homilies on First Corinthians 21.5). The one who can take up serpents and chooses instead to set down his fork for the sake of a weaker brother—that is the apostolic life.
Gregory of Nyssa taught that “the one who pursues true virtue participates in nothing other than God, because God is complete virtue” (The Life of Moses II.7). On Meatfare Sunday, the Church invites you into a fast that is not deprivation but participation—a small, embodied rehearsal of the kenosis that structures all reality. The Trinity’s eternal life is self-giving: Father pouring into Son, Son returning all to Father, Spirit transforming mutual sacrifice into unending glory. When you abstain from meat this week, you are not earning merit. You are practicing the fundamental gesture of the cosmos: yielding what you have every right to keep, because someone near you—someone for whom Christ died—needs you to.
The judgment throne of Matthew 25 does not ask what you believed in theory. It asks what your hands did, what your table offered, whether your freedom became bread for the hungry or a stumbling-block for the weak. The Risen Christ sends you forth with power enough to shatter death—and then watches to see whether you will spend that power on self-display or pour it out, unmarked and unmeasured, into the least of these. The fast begins. The flesh you yield at table is the rehearsal. The flesh you keep—the living body, this bone-house, this breathing temple—becomes the instrument. Pascha waits on the far side of self-emptying, as it always has, as it always will.
resurrection, kenosis, judgment, fasting, freedom, Meatfare, apostleship, compassion, hardness of heart, self-emptying
The Greater Horizon 