Bright Thursday

Saints commemorated

• Apostles Jason and Sosipater of the Seventy

  Jason and Sosipater are two apostles of the Seventy, disciples and kinsmen of the Apostle Paul, whom the Church honours together as the enlighteners of Corfu (Kerkyra). Both are greeted by name in the New Testament — Jason as Paul's host at Thessalonica whose house was stormed by the mob (Acts 17:5–9), and both as those who send greeting from Corinth, "Jason and Sosipater, my kinsmen" (Romans 16:21). The tradition makes Jason a native of Tarsus, its first-fruits and its bishop, and Sosipater a man of Achaia and bishop of Iconium. Leaving their sees, the two sailed west to the island of Corfu, built there the first church in the name of the Protomartyr Stephen, and were imprisoned by the island's ruler; from that prison they converted seven condemned robbers and the gaoler who guarded them, and at last the king's own daughter Kerkyra and the ruler himself, who was baptised Sebastian. They ended their days on the island in great old age, and Corfu keeps them as its apostles to this day.

• The Nine Martyrs at Cyzicus (3rd c.)

• Cyril of Turov

  Cyril, Bishop of Turov, is the greatest preacher of Kievan Rus and one of the finest writers in the whole of Old East Slavonic literature — called by his own contemporaries "a Russian Chrysostom" and, in the troparion of his feast, "the golden-tongued teacher" whose learning "enlightened the ends of the Russian land." Born in the 1130s to a wealthy family in Turov on the river Pripyat, he refused his inheritance, was tonsured in the Turov monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb, and afterwards shut himself up on a pillar — the first named stylite of the Russian Church — where he wrote and expounded the Scriptures. Drawn from the pillar to the episcopate, he ruled the see of Turov, took part in the council of 1169 that condemned the schismatic bishop Theodore of Vladimir, and wrote letters of admonition to Prince Andrew Bogolyubsky. About 1182 he resigned his see for the sake of writing, and reposed on April 28, about 1183. There survive from his hand sermons for the feasts of the Lord through the year, allegorical parables, treatises on the monastic life, canons and a cycle of daily prayers — some forty pieces, gathered in the collected edition of 1880.

• Kerkyra and the martyrs of Corfu

  Kerkyra was, by the received account, the daughter of Kerkyllinos, the ruler of the island of Corfu in the first century, who confessed Christ when she learned why the apostles Jason and Sosipater and their fellow-prisoners were suffering in her father's gaol. She gave away her jewels and her goods to the poor, withstood her father's rage and his attempt to shame her, and was at the last hung upon a tree and shot to death with arrows. With her the Church keeps on this day the whole company of the island's first martyrs: the seven condemned robbers whom the apostles converted in prison and who were boiled in a cauldron of pitch, the gaoler who confessed Christ at the sight of their end and was mutilated and beheaded, the robber set upon Kerkyra who believed instead of harming her, and the martyrs Zenon, Vitalis, Eusebius and Neon, perfected by fire. They are the first-fruits of Corfu, and the company from which the church of the island grew.

• Maximus, Quintilian and Dadas

  Maximus, Quintilian (Kyntilianos) and Dadas were three kinsmen of the region of Dorostolum on the lower Danube (in Roman Moesia, now Silistra), martyred about the year 286 in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian. Arrested for refusing to sacrifice at the pagan festival, they confessed Christ under interrogation and torture, and were beheaded at a place called Ozovia. The Church keeps their memory together on April 13.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Cronan, abbot of Roscrea (7th C)
• St. Gerard the Pilgrim (639)
• SS. Probe and Germaine (4th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings