Paschaltide, day 3 · 2 days since Pascha
Saints commemorated
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Hieromartyr Januarius and Companions
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Alexius of Bortsurmany
Alexius Gnevushev (1762–1848) was a village priest of the Volga country who served one parish, the church of the Dormition at Bortsurmany in the Kurmysh district of Simbirsk province, for some sixty years and never held any other. Shaken in 1796 by having let a parishioner die without the Mysteries, he took upon himself a rule of life that belonged to the desert rather than to a parish house — daily Liturgy, the full monastic office, fifteen hundred prostrations a day with the Jesus Prayer, one meal, a hair shirt — and became one of the great clairvoyant elders of the Russian nineteenth century, in the same spiritual country as Seraphim of Sarov, who is remembered to have sent pilgrims on to him. He died on Great Thursday, 21 April 1848, in his eighty-sixth year, blessing the people from the window of his cell, and was glorified by the Russian Church in 2000; the uncovering of his relics is kept on August 4.
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Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus
Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus were officials of the court of Diocletian — pagans by upbringing and by office — who were converted by what they saw at the trial of the Great Martyr George: his endurance under torture, the wonders worked through him, and his refusal to be broken. Having believed, they declared themselves Christians before the emperor and reproached him for his impiety and cruelty, and were condemned. Quadratus was beheaded; Isaac and Apollos were left to die of hunger in prison, about the year 303. The Church commemorates the three together on April 21, two days before the feast of the martyr whose witness converted them.
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Januarius of Benevento
Januarius, Bishop of Benevento in Campania, was beheaded near Pozzuoli about the year 305, in the persecution of Diocletian, together with a company of six: his own deacon Festus and his lector Desiderius, the deacons Sossius of Misenum and Proculus of Pozzuoli, and two laymen, Eutychius and Acutius. The Byzantine synaxaria keep the whole company on April 21; the West keeps Januarius on September 19. His relics were carried to Naples, of which he became the great patron; there, from the fourteenth century onward, the periodic liquefaction of a relic of his blood has made him one of the most famous martyrs of the Latin world — though the Orthodox Church honours him, then as now, simply as a hieromartyr who confessed Christ before a magistrate and died for it.
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Maximian of Constantinople
Maximian, a Roman by birth who had lived as an ascetic and spent his own inheritance burying the bodies of holy men, was raised from the presbyterate to the throne of Constantinople on 25 October 431, four months after the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus deposed Nestorius. His two and a half years in the see were given almost wholly to peace: he cleared the capital and the neighbouring sees of Nestorian bishops, and he laboured — pressing even St Cyril of Alexandria to set his Twelve Anathemas aside for the sake of concord — for the reconciliation of Alexandria with John of Antioch and the Eastern bishops, which was achieved in the Formula of Reunion of 433. He reposed in peace, on Great and Holy Thursday of 434, and is commemorated on April 21.
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Raphael, Nicholas and Irene of Lesbos
The strangest entry in the modern Greek calendar, and one of the few saints in this collection whose whole biography reached the Church after their cult did. For five centuries the people of Lesbos walked up on Bright Tuesday to a ruined enclosure at Karyes, above the village of Thermi north-west of Mytilene, without being able to say why: there had been a monastery there, it was remembered, and the monks had been killed by the Turks, and that was all. In 1959 the ground was being cleared to build a chapel when the workmen uncovered a grave, and from that year the dead began — in the accounts of a very large number of islanders — to appear and to say who they were: Raphael, hieromonk and abbot, a native of Ithaca; Nicholas, his deacon, of Thessaloniki; Irene, the twelve-year-old daughter of the village headman; and with them Irene's parents Basil and Maria, the schoolmaster Theodore, and Irene's fifteen-year-old cousin Eleni. They were tortured, the accounts say, from Great Thursday until Bright Tuesday, 9 April 1463, ten years after the fall of Constantinople; Raphael died with a saw through his jaw, tied to a tree; Irene had an arm cut off before her parents' eyes and was suffocated in a burning earthenware jar. They asked for an icon, for a service, and for their graves to be found, and all three were given them: the icon by Photios Kontoglou, the office by the hymnographer Gerasimos Mikragiannanites, and the relics between 1959 and 1961. Their commemoration is movable — it is kept on the anniversary as the Church counts it, the Tuesday of the Renewal, and has no fixed date in the general calendar.
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The Six Thousand Martyrs of David-Gareji
The largest single martyrdom in the history of the Georgian Church, and the one commemoration of the Georgian calendar that is fixed to Bright Week rather than to a day of the month. In 1616, in the aftermath of the devastation of Kakheti by Shah Abbas I of Persia, the whole brotherhood of the cave-monasteries of the David-Gareji wilderness — reckoned by the Georgian tradition at six thousand monks — was cut down by the shah's troops in the paschal season, at the altar, in their festal vestments, immediately after they had received Holy Communion. The tradition relates that the shah, hunting in the semi-desert, saw from his camp a line of lights moving on the mountain at midnight and was told that these were monks going round their church with candles for the Resurrection of Christ, and that he gave the order for their slaughter on the spot; that an angel warned the abbot Arsenius that night and left each man free to flee or to stay; that all but two novices stayed; and that the two who had hidden returned and were killed when they saw the crowns descending from heaven, two of which floated empty in the air. Their bones were gathered later in the century by King Archil and laid in a great stone vessel beside the altar, where they were reported to stream myrrh. The brotherhoods of the David and the Baptist monasteries asked Catholicos Anthony I to compose their service and to appoint the Tuesday of Bright Week as their day, and it has been kept so ever since.
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Theodore of Perge
Theodore was a young Christian of Perge in Pamphylia, on the south coast of Asia Minor, who was crucified for refusing to sacrifice to the idols in the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161). His passion is one of the very few in the calendar in which the martyr dies on a cross in imitation of his Lord, hanging three days in prayer, and one of the few in which the martyr's mother, Philippa, stands beside him to the end and is crowned with him. Two of the soldiers who guarded him, Socrates and Dionysius, confessed Christ at the sight of his deliverance and were beheaded, and the pagan priest Dioscorus, challenged to prove his own gods, confessed Christ in the fire and perished giving thanks. The company is commemorated on April 21.
British Isles and Ireland
- St. Beuno, abbot of Clynnog Fawr (c.640)
- St. Maelruba of Applecross (722)
- St. Eingan (Eneon), Hermit of Llyn, Bangor
Readings
Epistle
Acts 2.14-21
14But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judæa, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words: 15For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. 16But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; 17And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: 18And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy: 19And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke: 20The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come: 21And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Gospel
Luke 24.12-35
12Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass. 13And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. 14And they talked together of all these things which had happened. 15And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. 16But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. 17And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad? 18And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days? 19And he said unto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: 20And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. 21But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done. 22Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which were early at the sepulchre; 23And when they found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that he was alive. 24And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not. 25Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: 26Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? 27And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. 28And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he made as though he would have gone further. 29But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them. 30And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. 31And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. 32And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? 33And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them, 34Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon. 35And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread.
Troparia & kontakia
Apolytikion
Sharing the manner of life of the Apostles and seated upon their thrones, thou didst find in the practice of virtue the ascent to divine vision, O inspired one; therefore, having rightly dispensed the word of truth, thou didst contend for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Januarius. Intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
The truth of things hath shown thee forth to thy flock as a rule of faith, an image of meekness, and a teacher of temperance; therefore hast thou attained to lofty things by humility, and to riches by poverty. O father and hierarch Maximian, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Apolytikion — Tone 1 (common of several martyrs)
By the sufferings which thy saints endured for thee, O Lord, be thou entreated; and heal all our pains, we pray thee, O Lover of mankind.
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of many martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from thee our God; for possessing thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. At their supplications, O Christ our God, save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst tend the flock of Christ as a shepherd and didst lay down thy life for the sheep, O wise Januarius; and with thee the deacons and the faithful people were crowned, a sevenfold choir offered to the Trinity. Wherefore we cry to you: cease not to intercede for us who honour your memory.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Called from stillness to the shepherd's throne, thou didst seek not thine own but the peace of the Churches, O all-blessed Maximian; and having gathered the scattered into one confession of the Theotokos, thou didst pass over to the light unwaning. Wherefore we cry: rejoice, O reconciler of the divided.
Kontakion — Tone 4 (composed for this repository)
Five hundred years ye lay unknown beneath the stones of Karyes, and the people came up to you year by year and could not name you; but in the appointed time ye rose upon the island like a great sign, and told your names, and asked for nothing but to be remembered. O Raphael and Nicholas and Irene, remember us.
Kontakion — Tone 8 (original composition on the matter of the day)
Vested as for the feast and fed with the Bread of immortality, ye went out to the sword as to a bridal chamber, O six thousand fathers of the wilderness; and the crowns that came down from heaven found none of you wanting save two, and them the Lover of mankind called back. Wherefore we cry to you: rejoice, O city of monks made a city of martyrs.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Nailed upon the tree, thou wast made like unto the Crucified, and for three days didst preach from thy cross to them that stood by, O athlete Theodore; and thy mother rejoiced beside thee as she yielded her neck to the sword. Together with Socrates and Dionysius intercede for us who honour your contest.
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a righteous man)
O righteous father Alexius, thou didst stand before the altar of God with fear and burning love, and offering the bloodless sacrifice day by day thou didst become thyself an offering acceptable unto Him; wherefore, having received the grace of healing and of discernment, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of many martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received from Thee, our God, the crowns of incorruption; for having Thy strength, they cast down their persecutors and broke the feeble arrogance of the demons. By their supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.
Troparion
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received from Thee, our God, the crowns of incorruption; for having Thy strength, they cast down their persecutors and broke the feeble arrogance of the demons. By their supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Theodore, O Lord, in his contest received from Thee, our God, the crown of incorruption; for having Thy strength, he cast down his persecutors and broke the feeble arrogance of the demons. By his supplications save our souls.