Lazarus Saturday

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Simeon, Kinsman of the Lord

  Simeon, son of Clopas, was the second bishop of Jerusalem and a kinsman of the Lord according to the flesh — by the witness of Hegesippus a cousin of Christ, since Clopas was the brother of Joseph the Betrothed. Chosen to the throne of the mother church after the martyrdom of James the Brother of the Lord, he governed the Christians of Judea through the catastrophe of the Jewish War, the flight of the community across the Jordan to Pella, and the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, and held the see for some forty years — the longest bridge in the record between the apostolic generation and the Church of the second century. In the reign of Trajan, denounced by heretics both as a descendant of David and as a Christian, he was tortured for many days before the consular governor Atticus and at last crucified, in the year 107, at the reputed age of one hundred and twenty; his judges, says Hegesippus, marvelled that so old a man could endure. He is honoured as apostle of the Seventy, hierarch and martyr, and his feast is April 27.

• Our Holy Father Stephen, Abbot of the Kiev Caves and Bishop of Vladimir (1094)

  Stephen was a disciple of Theodosius of the Kiev Caves, whom the dying founder named as his own successor at the request of the brotherhood, and who as abbot completed the great church of the Dormition at the Caves monastery and reorganised its life around the new church. Deposed in 1078 by a faction within the community, he answered the injury by praying for those who had driven him out, and founded a new monastery on the Klov stream near Kiev, dedicating its church to the Placing of the Robe of the Theotokos at Blachernae in thanksgiving for the Mother of God's protection of the Caves. About 1091 he was made bishop of Vladimir in Volhynia, took part that same year in the translation of the relics of Theodosius, and for three years governed his see with a reputation for meekness and mercy before his repose on 27 April 1094. He is commemorated on April 27 and among the Saints of Volhynia on October 10.

• Burning of the relics of St Sava I of Serbia by the Turks (1594)

  Sabbas (Sava, c. 1174 – 1236), born Rastko Nemanjić, youngest son of the Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, is the father of the Serbian Church and the most beloved of Serbian saints. As a youth he fled the court for Mount Athos and was tonsured a monk; there, joined by his abdicated father — the monk Symeon — he refounded the ruined monastery of Hilandar as the great Serbian house of the Holy Mountain. Returning home with his father's relics, he reconciled his warring brothers, reformed the monastic life of Serbia from Studenica, and in 1219 obtained from the exiled Patriarch of Constantinople at Nicaea the autocephaly of the Serbian Church and his own consecration as its first archbishop. He gave his people their law in the Zakonopravilo, its churches their order and hymnody, and its national memory its shape, writing the Life of his father the founder-saint. He died on pilgrimage at Tarnovo in Bulgaria in 1236; his relics, translated to Mileševa, worked wonders until the Turks, to break the Serbs, burned them at Belgrade in 1594 — the act that made him more than ever the symbol of the nation. He is commemorated on January 14, the leavetaking of the Theophany.

• Eulogius the Hospitable

  Eulogius, called Xenodochos, "the receiver of strangers," was a stonecutter of the Thebaid in Upper Egypt who earned a single small coin a day by his chisel and spent it all on the poor and on travellers: every evening, his work done and himself still fasting, he went out into the market place — in winter with a lantern in his hand — to find whoever had come into the town without bread or shelter, and brought them home. He is the subject of one of the most searching stories in the whole desert literature, the tale told in the Life of Abba Daniel of Sketis, in which Daniel, thinking to multiply so much good, prays God to give Eulogius wealth, and pledges his own soul for the man's salvation — whereupon Eulogius finds a buried hoard, rises to high office at Constantinople, and loses his charity altogether, until the loss of everything sends him back to the chisel and the lantern. He lived, the synaxarion says, more than a hundred years, and reposed in peace in his own country in the sixth century. His feast is April 27.

• John of Kathara

  John the Confessor, abbot of the monastery τῶν Καθαρῶν, "of the Pure," was one of the iconodule superiors broken by the second iconoclasm of the ninth century. Born about 778 at Irenopolis in the Decapolis of Coele-Syria, he was brought as a young monk into the orbit of the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (787) and of the court of the Empress Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius, was ordained priest, and was set over the monastery of Kathara in the reign of Nicephorus I. When Leo V the Armenian revived the war on the holy icons, John's monastery was plundered and his community scattered; brought before the emperor, he rebuked him to his face and foretold his violent end, and was thrown into prison, then into the fortress of Pentadaktylon for eighteen months, then into the fortress of Kriotauron for two years. Leo's murder vindicated the prophecy; but John's confession was not finished, and under Theophilus the iconoclast patriarch John VII the Grammarian banished him at last to the island of Aphousia in the Propontis, where he reposed in peace about the year 839. His feast is April 27, and the Menaion's verse for him plays on the name of his house: suffering, it says, made John pure, who presided over the Pure.

• Lazarus of the Four Days

  Lazarus of Bethany, "the Four-Days-Dead" (ὁ τετραήμερος) and "the friend of Christ," is the man whom the Lord raised from the tomb four days after his death (John 11) — the last and greatest sign before the Passion, and the Church's pledge of the general resurrection. Brother of Martha and Mary, he afterwards fled the plots of the high priests, was made first bishop of Kition in Cyprus by the apostles, shepherded that church some thirty years, and reposed in peace about the year 63. His principal feast is the movable Lazarus Saturday, the eve of Palm Sunday; October 17 commemorates the translation of his relics from Kition to Constantinople by the emperor Leo VI the Wise in 898.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Asic, bishop of Elphin (490)
• Holy martyr Newlyna of Cornwall, (5th C)
• St. Enoder (Cynider) (6th C)
• St. Winewald, abbot of Beverley (751)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings