36th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Righteous Simeon the Godbearer and Anna the Prophetess

  Anna the Prophetess (Ἄννα ἡ Προφῆτις) is the aged widow of the tribe of Asher who, with the righteous Symeon, witnessed to the infant Christ at his Presentation in the Temple (Luke 2:36–38). "A prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel," she had lived with a husband seven years and remained a widow to a great age, "which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day." Coming forward at the very hour Symeon held the Child, "she gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem." She is one of the few women the Scriptures call a prophetess, and the Church honours her as the last prophetess of the Old Covenant and the first evangelist of the Temple, proclaiming the Redeemer to the waiting remnant. With Symeon the God-receiver she leads the afterfeast of the Meeting, commemorated on February 3. She is not to be confused with Anna the mother of the Theotokos, nor with Hannah the mother of Samuel.

• Our Father among the Saints, Nikolai (Nicholas), Archbishop and Enlightener of Japan (1912)

  Nicholas of Japan (Ivan Dmitrievich Kasatkin, 1836–1912) was the founder and first hierarch of the Orthodox Church in Japan, honoured as Equal-to-the- Apostles for a missionary labour of half a century. A Russian priest who came to the consulate at Hakodate in 1861, he gave himself to the language, literature, and mind of Japan so completely that he rendered the Scriptures and the whole round of the services into Japanese, and gathered from nothing a native Church of tens of thousands, served by Japanese clergy and catechists. As bishop and then archbishop he built the great Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Tokyo — known to the city as Nikolai-do, "Nicholas's house" — and through the Russo-Japanese War he remained at his post, bidding his Japanese flock pray for their own country and its soldiers even as he, a Russian, kept silence. He reposed in Tokyo on February 3, 1912, and was glorified as a saint in 1970. He is one of the great apostolic missionaries of the modern age.

• Adrian and Eubulus

  Adrian and Eubulus were two Christians of the region of Batanea who, at the height of the Diocletianic persecution, came to Caesarea to visit and comfort the confessors imprisoned there and were themselves seized. Brought before the governor Firmilian and refusing to sacrifice, they were cruelly tortured and condemned to the beasts of the amphitheatre: Adrian, after being given to a lion that did not finish him, was dispatched by the sword; Eubulus, offered his freedom if only he would sacrifice, chose death and suffered two days later — by the tradition preserved in Eusebius, the very last of the martyrs of Caesarea in that persecution. They are commemorated on February 3, and their courage in seeking out the imprisoned made them a byword for the works of mercy that the persecution could not extinguish.

• Azariah the Prophet

  Azariah, son of Oded, is the Old-Testament prophet who, "the Spirit of God coming upon him," went out to meet King Asa of Judah as he returned from victory and summoned him to reform: "The Lord is with you, while ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he will forsake you" (2 Chronicles 15:1–7). His word moved the king to purge idols from Judah and Benjamin, to restore the altar of the Lord, and to gather the people to a great covenant, so that "they sought God with their whole desire, and he was found of them." Azariah flourished in the early ninth century before Christ; the Church commemorates him on February 3. He is not to be confused with Azarias, one of the Three Holy Youths in the furnace, nor with the many other bearers of this common Hebrew name.

• Blaise of Caesarea

  Blaise the Herdsman (Βλάσιος ὁ Βουκόλος, "the cowherd") was a simple keeper of cattle near Caesarea in Cappadocia who, in the persecutions of the third century, was seized for confessing Christ and refusing to sacrifice to the idols. Tortured, hung upon a tree and his flesh torn with iron, he endured with the constancy of the great martyrs, and — the tradition holds — was attended even by the beasts of his herd, which followed him and would not leave him; he was at last beheaded. He is commemorated on February 3. He is to be distinguished carefully from the more famous Blaise (Vlasios) the Bishop of Sebaste (February 11), the physician-hieromartyr with whom, sharing both name and an association with animals, he is very frequently confused.

• Symeon the God-receiver

  Symeon the God-receiver (Θεοδόχος, "he who received God") is the righteous and aged elder of Jerusalem who, "just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel," took the forty-day-old Christ-child into his arms in the Temple and knew him for the Salvation of God (Luke 2:25–35). To him the Holy Spirit had revealed "that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ"; and holding the Infant he sang the last of the Gospel canticles — "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace… for mine eyes have seen thy salvation" — the Nunc Dimittis that the Church prays at every Vespers. He blessed the Mother and foretold to her the sword that should pierce her own soul. A cherished tradition numbers him among the Seventy translators of the Septuagint, kept alive across centuries until the prophecy he had doubted — the Virgin who should conceive — was fulfilled before his eyes. With Anna the Prophetess he leads the afterfeast of the Meeting, commemorated on February 3.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Caellainn of Roscommon (6th C)
• Holy Martyr Ia (Ives) of Cornwall (450)
• St. Werburgh of Chester, abbess of Hanbury (700)
• St. Werburgh, abbess of Bardney (c.785)
• St. Anatoolius, Scots bishop (9th C)

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