Bright Wednesday

Saints commemorated

• Prophet Jeremiah

  Jeremiah is the second of the four Greater Prophets, the priest of Anathoth who was called as a boy in the thirteenth year of Josiah and prophesied for some forty years, through the reigns of five kings, until Jerusalem fell and the Temple burned. To him was given the bitterest of all prophetic commissions: to announce the ruin of his own city, to be hated for it by priests, princes and people, beaten, put in the stocks, imprisoned and let down into a miry cistern to die — and yet to promise, at the very bottom of the catastrophe, a new covenant written not on tablets but on the heart (Jeremiah 31:31–34), the text that gives the New Testament its name. Dragged into Egypt by the fleeing remnant against his own warning, he was stoned to death by his countrymen at Tahpanhes. The Church honours him on May 1 as prophet and martyr, reads him through Holy Week as the figure of the innocent Lamb led to slaughter, and ascribes to him the Book of Jeremiah and the Lamentations.

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• Ven. Paphnutius of Borovsk

  Paphnutius (1394–1477) is one of the great abbots of the northern Russian revival that descended from Saint Sergius of Radonezh. Grandson of a baptised Tatar tax-collector, he was tonsured at twenty in the Protection monastery on the Vysokoye near Borovsk, served there some thirty years and became its abbot; then at fifty-one, after an illness he had thought mortal, he left his own house and began again in the forest at the mouth of the Isterma on the Protva, founding the monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos that has borne his name ever since. He was a builder, a strict ascetic who ate nothing at all on Mondays and Fridays, and a spiritual father of the first rank: it was Paphnutius who tonsured the young John Sanin and gave him the name Joseph — Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk. He reposed on May 1, 1477, and was glorified in 1531.

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• Saint Tamara (Tamar), Queen of Georgia (1212)

  Tamara (c. 1166–1213) is the queen under whom Georgia reached the height of its power and holiness, and whom her own people call not queen but king — mepe — because she ruled in her own right. Daughter of George III of the Bagratid house, crowned co-ruler at about twelve and sole sovereign at eighteen, she opened her reign by summoning a council that purged the Church of simony, and closed it having doubled her kingdom: the victories of Shamkor (1195) and Basiani (1203) broke the Muslim coalitions ranged against her, and Georgian arms reached from the Black Sea to the Caspian. She abolished capital punishment and torture, endowed churches and monasteries from Vardzia to Athos, Palestine, Cyprus, Sinai and Antioch, wove vestments with her own hands, and lived beneath the purple as an ascetic. To her court belongs the golden age of Georgian letters, and Shota Rustaveli's Knight in the Panther's Skin is dedicated to her. She reposed in 1213 and is honoured on May 1 and on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women.

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• Synaxis of the Three New Righteous Martyrs of the Holy Mountain, Euthymius, Ignatius, and Acacius (1814-1815)

  Three young monks of the Holy Mountain, formed by the same elders and following one another deliberately to death, are commemorated together on May 1 as the new martyrs of Athos: Euthymius, a Peloponnesian who had denied Christ in Constantinople and returned to wash the apostasy away with his blood, beheaded — in the event, his throat cut — on Palm Sunday, 22 March 1814; Ignatius, a Bulgarian of Stara Zagora, hanged at the Daktyloporta in Constantinople in October 1814; and Acacius, a Bulgarian of Macedonia, beheaded at Parmak Kapi on 1 May 1816. All three were prepared for their contest at the Skete of Saint Anne and at Iveron under the elder Acacius and under Nicephorus of Chios, the "trainer of martyrs"; all three were accompanied to the city by the same monk Gregory, who afterwards ransomed their bodies and brought them home. Their relics were laid at Iveron in a church built for the first two, and their heads are venerated at the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon.

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• Batas of Nisibis

  Batas was a monk of the Church of Persia in the fourth century who was put to death at Nisibis for confessing Christ, about the year 364, in the persecution of the Christians carried on under Shapur II. The synaxaria preserve almost nothing beyond the fact and the place, and this entry does not go beyond what they say; but the fact is eloquent enough, for Nisibis had just passed from Roman into Persian hands, and Batas belongs to the first generation of monks who paid for their faith under the new masters of the city that had been Saint Ephrem's.

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• Gerasimus of Boldino

  Gerasimus (1490–1554) was the great monastic coloniser of the Smolensk lands. Born at Pereslavl-Zalessky, he attached himself at thirteen to Saint Daniel of Pereyaslavl and spent some twenty-six years under him, becoming known in Moscow as an ascetic of the strictest kind; then, seeking obscurity, he went west into the wild forest near Dorogobuzh, settled beside a great oak at Boldino, was beaten and driven off by robbers, and stayed. Out of that solitude grew four monasteries — the Trinity at Boldino (1530), the Forerunner at Vyazma, the Entry of the Theotokos on the Zhizdra in the Bryansk forest, and a fourth house at Bryansk — and a school of disciples that included Anthony, later bishop of Vologda. He dictated a testament to his brethren, and reposed on 1 May 1554.

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• Isidora of Tabenna

  Isidora is the first fool-for-Christ whose story the Church records — a nun of the great Pachomian women's monastery at Tabennisi in the Egyptian Thebaid in the middle of the fourth century, who deliberately made herself despised. She wore a rag on her head instead of the monastic cowl, never sat at table but lived on the crumbs and the scourings of the pots, served four hundred sisters who mocked, struck and drenched her, and never in all those years spoke an idle or a resentful word. Her secret was disclosed by an angel to the hermit Piteroum, who was sent to the monastery to find "one wearing a crown upon her head" and holier than himself; and when the honour of the community turned upon her, she slipped away and was never found again. Her account, written by Palladius within living memory, is the foundation-text of the whole tradition of holy folly.

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• Macarius of Kiev

  Macarius, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus (1495–1497), was killed by a Tatar raiding party at the altar, in the middle of the Divine Liturgy, in the village of Strigolovo on the river Vzhishcha, on 1 May 1497. Formerly archimandrite of the Holy Trinity monastery in Vilna, he was raised to the metropolitan throne of the western Russian lands at a moment when the Church there was pressed between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Latin hierarchy and the Crimean Tatars, and he spent his short episcopate travelling his ruined diocese to rebuild what the raids had destroyed. He died vested and serving, having told the people to flee and refused to leave the holy table. His incorrupt relics rest in Kiev, and he is honoured as the hieromartyr of the Kievan see.

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• Nicephorus of Chios

  Nicephorus of Chios (c. 1750–1821) was a monk, teacher, hymnographer and — the title by which the tradition knows him — a trainer of martyrs. Dedicated as a child to the monastery of Nea Moni on Chios after surviving a plague, educated in the schools of the island, he became the disciple and collaborator of two of the leading figures of the Greek spiritual revival, Macarius of Corinth and Athanasius Parios. Driven from the abbacy of Nea Moni by intrigue, he withdrew to the hermitage of Saint George at Resta, where he planted trees, wrote, and completed the great collection of saints' lives and services which Macarius had entrusted to him, the New Leimonarion. He composed services for a multitude of saints, and above all he prepared repentant apostates for martyrdom, among them the Athonite new martyrs Euthymius, Ignatius and Acacius, with whom he is commemorated on May 1. He reposed in 1821, and his relics were found in 1845.

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• Panaretus of Paphos

  Panaretus (c. 1710–1790) was bishop of Paphos in Cyprus for twenty-three years, in the hardest decades of Ottoman rule on the island, and is honoured as one of the very few eighteenth-century Cypriot hierarchs glorified as a saint. Born at Peristeronopigi in the Famagusta district and formed as a monk at the monastery of Saint Anastasius, he was exarch of the archbishopric and abbot in Nicosia before his consecration to Paphos in January 1767. He rebuilt and restored churches across a devastated diocese, defended his flock against the extortions of the Ottoman governors, and paid for the printing of books; and beneath all of it he lived as an ascetic, eating once a day and wearing an iron chain next to the skin. He foretold his own repose, was granted the arrival of his confessor by what the tradition treats as a miracle, and died in the late spring of 1790. Patriarch Gerasimos III of Constantinople proclaimed his sanctity in 1794, only four years after his death.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Brioc (510)
• St. Asaph, bishop of Llanelwy (7th C)
• St. Ceallach, bishop of Killala (6th C)
• St. Buriana (Beryan) (6th C)

Readings

Troparia & kontakia