3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  James the Son of Zebedee

  James the son of Zebedee is one of the Twelve, the elder brother of John the Theologian, and — with his brother and with Peter — one of the three disciples whom the Lord took apart with Him to the raising of the daughter of Jairus, to the Transfiguration on the mountain, and to the agony in Gethsemane. Christ named the two brothers Boanerges, "sons of thunder," and told them they would drink His cup; James drank it first. About the year 44, at Jerusalem, Herod Agrippa I "killed James the brother of John with the sword" (Acts 12:2) — the first of the apostles to be martyred, and the only one whose death the New Testament records. In the Latin West he became Santiago, patron of Spain, whose reputed relics at Compostela made the greatest pilgrimage of medieval Europe; the Eastern synaxaria keep his memory on April 30 on the plain ground of the Acts of the Apostles.

• St Ignatius (Brianchaninov), Bishop of Stavropol and Kavkaz (1867)

• Argyra of Prussa

  Argyra was a young married woman of Prussa (Bursa) in Bithynia who, having refused the advances of a Turkish official's son and refused with them the invitation to apostatise, was denounced on a false charge, flogged, and shut up in prison at Constantinople, where she spent seventeen years under repeated interrogation, beating and the abuse of her fellow prisoners without yielding, sustained by fasting and prayer. She died in her cell on 5 April 1721, aged about thirty-three. Some years later her body was found whole and incorrupt and fragrant, and on 30 April 1735 her relics were translated with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch to the church of St Paraskeve, where they are still venerated. She is commemorated on April 30, the day of the translation.

• Basil of Amasea

  Basil — in the Greek sources Basileus (Βασιλεύς), "the king," not the commoner Basileios — was bishop of Amasea in Pontus in the first decades of the fourth century, a subscriber of the canons of Ancyra (314) and Neocaesarea (c. 315), and one of the hierarchs destroyed in the last persecution the Roman world saw: that of Licinius, who turned on the Church in his eastern half of the empire in the years before his defeat by Constantine. His fall was occasioned by his sheltering the fugitive virgin Glaphyra, a maidservant of the empress Constantia who had fled Licinius's advances to Amasea and spent her mistress's money on the bishop's new church. Summoned to Nicomedia, Basil refused to sacrifice and was beheaded about the year 322; his body, flung into the sea, was recovered at Sinope after an angel three times directed his companion Elpidephorus to it, and was buried in the church he had built. He is honoured on April 26 together with Glaphyra.

• Clement the Hymnographer

  Clement "the Poet" (ὁ Ποιητής) is one of the great canon-writers of the iconophile generation: a monk of the late eighth and early ninth centuries who composed some thirty canons for the service books, who was a confessor for the holy icons and died in exile, and who left his signature across the Church's hymnography in an unusual way — the initial letters of his theotokia spell out ΚΛΗΜΕΝΤΟΣ, "of Clement," a device that later hymnographers imitated. Almost every canon of his touches, somewhere, on the veneration of the icons or the folly of iconoclasm, so that his poetry is at once liturgy and confession. He is commemorated on April 30.

• Donatus of Euroea

  Donatus, bishop of Euroea in Epirus in the second half of the fourth century, is one of the very few wonderworking hierarchs of the age whose miracles are recorded not by a synaxarion but by a contemporary church historian: writing about 440, Sozomen devotes a chapter of his Ecclesiastical History to him, reporting the fame of his sanctity among the people of Epirus, the destruction of a monstrous dragon on the high road at Chamaegephyrae by the sign of the Cross, and the spring that God caused to rise from waterless ground at his prayer, beside which his tomb lay in a great church bearing his name. The later synaxaria add the sweetening of a brackish spring, rain given in drought, the healing of the daughter of the emperor Theodosius the Great, and the raising of a dead man to bear witness that a debt had been paid. He reposed in peace about 387, and is honoured today as the patron of Paramythia in Thesprotia and, since his relics were carried there in the seventh century, at Kassiopi on Corfu.

• 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.

• 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.

• Maximus of Ephesus

  Maximus is a martyr of Ephesus commemorated on April 30, of whom the Byzantine books preserve only a single line — that he suffered for the faith of Christ and was perfected by the sword. The Latin tradition, which keeps the same day, transmits a little more and probably older matter: that he was a layman and a merchant of the city, that he was arrested in the persecution of Decius about the year 250, that he confessed Christ before the proconsul, was beaten and racked, and was finally stoned to death. The two traditions agree on the man, the place and the fact, and differ on the manner of his death.

• 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.

• Nikitas of Novgorod

  Nikitas of Novgorod (†1108) was a monk of the Kiev Caves who became one of the most instructive figures in the Russian ascetic tradition: a young hermit who, shutting himself into reclusion against his abbot's warning and before he was ready, fell into spiritual delusion (prelest) — visited by a demon in the guise of an angel, given a false gift of prophecy, and turned wholly to the Old Testament while unable so much as to bear the name of Christ or the Gospels. The elders of the Caves, discerning the deception, drove out the demon by their prayers, and Nikitas was restored — humbled, unlettered again, and set on the sure path of obedience. He rose to sanctity, was made Bishop of Novgorod about 1096, and governed that see for some thirteen years, remembered for the two miracles by which he saved his city: he brought rain in a drought and quenched a great fire by his prayer. He reposed in 1108; his incorrupt relics were uncovered in 1558.

• 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.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Erconwald, bishop of London (c.693)
• St. Cynwl, hermit (6th C)
• St. Forannan (982)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings