Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Martinian of Caesarea

  Martinian (c. 397 – c. 422) was a hermit of Caesarea in Palestine, one of the best-loved of the ascetic saints for the story of the temptations he fled. From the age of eighteen he lived twenty-five years alone on a mountain near the city, gifted with the healing of the sick and the casting-out of demons. When a courtesan named Zoe, wagering to seduce him, came to his hut feigning a lost and storm-caught traveller, Martinian mastered the temptation by standing barefoot in the fire he had kindled, that the pain of earthly flame might remind him of the eternal — and the sight so pierced Zoe that she repented and became a nun. Fleeing thereafter to a lonely rock in the sea, he was tempted again by a shipwrecked woman, Photina, cast up on his island; he saved her, gave her his provisions, and threw himself into the waves rather than sin, leaving her the rock for her own hermitage. From then he would not settle anywhere, but wandered from city to city "for the love of God," owning nothing and fleeing every occasion of sin, until he reposed at Athens about the year 422. Zoe and Photina, whom his flight turned to God, are commemorated with him on February 13.

• Holy Apostles and Martyrs Priscilla and Aquila

  Aquila and Priscilla were a married couple of the apostolic age, Jewish Christians and tentmakers by trade, who became among the closest and most faithful of the co-workers of the Apostle Paul. Aquila, a Jew of Pontus, and his wife Priscilla (Prisca) had been expelled from Rome by the emperor Claudius; they met Paul at Corinth, shared his craft and his household, and travelled with him to Ephesus, where in their own home they instructed the eloquent Apollos "more perfectly in the way of God" (Acts 18:26). Paul names them with singular warmth in his letters — "my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who laid down their own necks for my life" (Romans 16:3–4) — and greets "the church that is in their house." Aquila is numbered among the Seventy Apostles; the tradition holds that both were martyred for the faith. They are commemorated together on February 13, and Aquila among the Seventy on July 14.

• St Symeon the Myrrh-streamer, founder of the Chilandar Monastery (1200)

• Eulogius of Alexandria

  Eulogius (died c. 607/608) was Patriarch of Alexandria for some seven-and-twenty years, one of the learned and vigorous hierarchs of the age of the emperor Maurice. A Syrian by origin, he had been abbot of the monastery of the Mother of God at Antioch before he was raised, about the year 580, to the ancient throne of Saint Mark. He gave his long patriarchate to the defence of the Orthodox faith against the heresies that divided Egypt — above all the Monophysite confusion of the two natures of Christ and the various sects it had spawned — writing many treatises in refutation, of which the learned Patriarch Photius, three centuries later, still read and summarised a great number. He was the close friend and correspondent of Saint Gregory the Great of Rome, whose letters to him survive as a monument of their friendship across the Churches. Honoured as a teacher, an ascetic hierarch, and a pillar of Orthodoxy, he is commemorated on February 13.

• Simeon the Myrrh-gusher of Serbia

  Simeon the Myrrh-gusher (c. 1113 – 1199), born Stefan Nemanja, was the Grand Župan (grand prince) who gathered the scattered Serbian lands into a single state, won their independence from Byzantium, rooted out the Bogomil heresy, and founded the Nemanjić dynasty that ruled Serbia for two centuries and gave it a line of saints. A great builder of churches — Đurđevi Stupovi, and above all his burial-church of Studenica — he abdicated his throne in 1196 in favour of his son Stefan, was tonsured a monk under the name Simeon, and went to end his days on Mount Athos beside his youngest son, the monk Sava. There father and son together refounded the ruined monastery of Hilandar as the great Serbian house of the Holy Mountain. Simeon reposed at Hilandar on 13 February 1199; from his relics there flowed a fragrant, healing myrrh, and when Sava translated them home to Studenica they streamed myrrh again and reconciled his warring sons. He is the first-glorified saint of the Nemanjić house — the root of the "holy vine" of Serbian sovereign-saints — and is kept on February 13.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Modomnoc, bishop of Ossory (550)
• St. Huna of Ely, priest and hermit (690)
• St. Dyfnog of Clwyd (7th C)
• St. Ermenhild, abbess of Ely (c.700)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings