3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Martyrs Timothy the Reader and his wife Maura of Antinoe in Egypt (286)

  Timothy and Maura were a young married couple of Penapeis in the Thebaid of Upper Egypt who were put to death about the year 286, in the persecution of Diocletian, twenty days after their wedding. Timothy, son of a village priest, was a reader of the church and a copyist of the sacred books, and when the prefect Arrianus demanded that he surrender the Scriptures for burning he answered that he would as soon give up his own children. Blinded with red-hot irons and hung head downward, he was not broken; and when the prefect summoned his bride in the hope that a girl of twenty days' marriage would plead him into apostasy, Maura was instead won over to her husband's confession and declared herself ready to die with him. She was scalped, her fingers were cut off, and she was plunged in boiling water; and at the last the two were crucified facing one another and hung on their crosses for nine days, giving up their souls on the tenth. Maura is the patroness of Lefkada — the island the Venetians called Santa Maura after her.

• Diodorus and Rhodopianus

  Diodorus and Rhodopianus were deacons of the church of Aphrodisias in Caria, on the south-western coastlands of Asia Minor, who were stoned to death by their own townspeople in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 302. The synaxarion notice is short and gives no dialogue and no magistrate: the two were known in the city as Christians and as preachers of Christ among the pagans, were seized by the soldiery, endured insults and scourging, and were finally killed with stones — the mob's death rather than the executioner's, and one of the few martyrdoms by stoning in the Byzantine calendar after the age of the Apostles. The Greek books keep them on May 3 and the Slavonic books and the OCA on April 29; this entry, following the Greek placement, is primary on May 3 and secondary on April 29.

• Joanna the Myrrhbearer

  Joanna was the wife of Chuza, the steward of Herod Antipas, and one of the women who followed Christ from Galilee, supported His ministry out of their own means, and came to the sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. Saint Luke names her twice and only twice — among the women healed of infirmities who "ministered unto them of their substance" (Luke 8:3), and among those who brought the news of the empty tomb to the apostles and were not believed (Luke 24:10). The tradition adds one act to the Gospel record: that when Herodias had the head of the Forerunner thrown away in an unclean place, it was Joanna who recovered it and buried it in a vessel on the Mount of Olives, where it lay until the First Finding. She reposed in peace in the first century. Her fixed commemoration is June 27; her great commemoration, the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, is movable.

• Joseph of Arimathea

  Joseph of Arimathea is the rich and noble counsellor — εὐσχήμων βουλευτής — who alone of the Sanhedrin refused to consent to the condemnation of Christ, and who, when the Twelve had scattered, went in to Pontius Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. All four Evangelists record him; the Church names him in every one of her Passion services. With Nicodemus he took the Lord down from the Cross, wound the body in clean linen with the spices, and laid it in his own new tomb, hewn in the rock in a garden beside Golgotha — the sepulchre from which Christ rose, and the holiest place in the Christian world. Tradition adds that he afterwards preached the Gospel and reposed in peace; the Church keeps his memory on July 31 and, with the myrrhbearing women and Nicodemus, on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Luke of Steiris

  Luke of Steiris (c. 896 – c. 953), called the Younger and Luke of Hellas, was the most beloved Greek ascetic-saint of the tenth century and one of the great wonderworkers of the Byzantine world. Born of poor Phocian farmers who had fled the Arab raids on Aegina, he gave himself from childhood to prayer, fasting, and an almost reckless charity, and left the world young to live as a monk and hermit in the mountains of central Greece. Driven from place to place by war, he settled at last at Steiris in Phocis, where a community gathered around him. He was famed for healings, for the reading of hearts, for the gift of prophecy — most celebrated of all his foretelling that Crete would be recovered from the Saracens, which came to pass under Nikephoros Phokas eight years after his death — and, the tradition says, for being lifted from the ground in prayer. He reposed on February 7. Over his tomb rose the monastery of Hosios Loukas, one of the supreme monuments of Byzantine art, where his myrrh-flowing relics rest to this day.

• Mary and Martha, Sisters of Lazarus

  Mary and Martha of Bethany are the sisters of Lazarus the Four-Days-Dead and, with him, the household in which the Lord was most at home. The Gospels give them to the Church in three scenes: Martha serving and Mary sitting at the Lord's feet (Luke 10:38–42); the two sisters meeting Jesus outside their brother's tomb, where Martha makes the confession "I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God" and hears the words "I am the resurrection and the life" (John 11); and the supper six days before the Passover, at which Mary anointed the Lord's feet with the pound of costly spikenard and wiped them with her hair (John 12:1–8). They believed in Christ before the raising of their brother, followed him to the tomb with the myrrhbearing women, and — after the martyrdom of Stephen drove Lazarus from Jerusalem — shared his exile and his preaching. The Church remembers them on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers and, as a fixed commemoration, on June 4.

• Mary Magdalene

  Mary of Magdala, the fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, was delivered by Christ from seven demons and thereafter followed Him and ministered to Him of her own substance. She stood by the Cross when the disciples had fled, watched where the Lord was laid, and came at first light on the third day with the spices — and so became the first human being to see the risen Christ and the first to be sent with the news of the Resurrection. For this the Church calls her ἰσαπόστολος, Equal-to-the-Apostles, and the Fathers name her apostle to the apostles. Tradition carries her afterwards to Rome, where she is said to have testified of the Resurrection before Tiberius with a red egg in her hand, and then to Ephesus, where she laboured beside the Apostle John and reposed in peace; her relics were translated to Constantinople by the emperor Leo VI the Wise.

• Mary of Cleopas

  Mary "of Cleopas" is the woman whom St John names at the foot of the Cross — "his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas" (John 19:25) — and whom the Church numbers among the myrrh-bearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood by at the Crucifixion, watched the burial, and came with spices to the tomb on the first day of the week to hear from the angel that He was risen. The Orthodox tradition makes her a daughter of Joseph the Betrothed by his first marriage, brought up in the same household as the Virgin and her companion from childhood, and afterwards given in marriage to Joseph's younger brother Cleopas; her son is the hieromartyr Simeon, son of Cleopas, second bishop of Jerusalem. She reposed in peace. Her fixed memory is May 23; her great commemoration is the movable Sunday of the Myrrh-bearers.

• Nicodemus the Righteous

  Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, a member of the Sanhedrin, who came to Jesus by night to ask about the Kingdom and received from Him the teaching on being born again of water and the Spirit (John 3). He appears twice more in the Fourth Gospel: pleading in the council that the Law does not condemn a man unheard (John 7:50–51), and coming at last into the open on Great Friday with a hundred pound weight of myrrh and aloes to help Joseph of Arimathea take the body of the Lord from the Cross and lay it in the tomb (John 19:39–42). Tradition has him baptised by the Apostles Peter and John, expelled from the Sanhedrin and driven from Jerusalem, and sheltered in the country house of the teacher Gamaliel, in whose tomb at Kaphar Gamala his relics were found together with those of the Protomartyr Stephen in the year 415.

• Peter of Argos

  Peter (c. 855 – c. 922) was bishop of Argos and Nauplion in the Peloponnese, and is remembered in the Greek Church chiefly as the merciful hierarch: a monk of Constantinople from a family in which all five children took the habit, who twice refused a bishopric and accepted the third call only under compulsion, and who then spent some thirty years feeding a province through famine, ransoming captives from the Saracen raiders of Crete, and healing the sick. The Peloponnese of his episcopate was a frontier under attack, and his charity has the shape of that emergency: the Life by Theodore of Nicaea makes the miracle for which he is best known the flour and grain that would not run out while the queues of the hungry lasted. He wrote homilies, of which some seven survive; he foretold the day of his death and reposed at about seventy; and in 1421 his relics were carried to Nauplion, whence they exuded myrrh. He is titled ὁ Θαυματουργός, the Wonderworker, and is the patron of Argos and of Nauplion.

• Salome the Myrrhbearer

  Salome is the wife of Zebedee and the mother of the apostles James and John, and one of the myrrhbearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood at the Cross when the disciples had fled, and came to the sepulchre before dawn with spices to anoint a body that was not there. The Gospels name her twice by name (Mark 15:40; 16:1) and twice more by description — the mother of the sons of Zebedee who asked for the two thrones (Matthew 20:20–21), and one of the women watching the crucifixion from afar (Matthew 27:56). The tradition makes her a kinswoman of the Theotokos, though it has never agreed on the degree. She lived to see her elder son become the first of the Twelve to be killed for Christ, and reposed in peace. She is commemorated on August 3, and with all the myrrhbearers on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Tamara of Georgia

  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.

• Theodosius of the Kiev Caves

  Theodosius (Feodosy Pechersky, †3 May 1074) is the father of Russian monasticism: the second founder, with Antony, of the Kiev Caves monastery, and the man who turned a company of hermits in a hillside burrow into a cenobium governed by a written rule. Born at Vasilev near Kiev and raised at Kursk, he baked the prosphora for his village church as a boy against his mother's violent opposition, escaped to Kiev in his twenties, and was received by Antony into the cave above the Dnieper and tonsured by Nicon. As abbot he procured a copy of the typikon of the Studion monastery at Constantinople and imposed it on the brotherhood — common table, common property, unbroken obedience — so that the Caves became the mother and model of every monastery in the land of Rus'. He raised the community from a handful to a hundred, built the wooden and then began the great stone church of the Dormition, gave a tenth of the monastery's income to the poor and maintained a hospice for the sick and the mutilated, sent a cartload of bread each week to the prisoners, and rebuked the Grand Prince Svyatoslav to his face for usurping his brother's throne. His Life, written by Nestor the Chronicler, is one of the founding works of Slavonic literature; his relics were uncovered on 14 August 1091, and in 1108 he became the first monastic saint of Rus' to be formally canonised. Not to be confused with any of the six other saints named Theodosius already in this corpus, and above all not with Theodosius the Cenobiarch (†529), the founder of the coenobia of the Judaean desert. See Disputed questions below.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Conleth the bishop (519)
• St. Scannal, missionary (563)
• St. Aldwyn, abbot of Partney (8th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings