3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Patrick, Bishop of Prussa

• Caluf of Egypt

  Caluf was a Christian of Thebes in Upper Egypt, put to death in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian about the year 303. Brought before the governor of the city and ordered to sacrifice, he refused; he was hung head downward and beaten, and when he was asked how he could bear it, he answered that he endured everything in expectation of the life to come. Since neither promises nor torture moved him, he was thrown into a fire and gave up his soul in it. Nothing else of him is transmitted: he is one of the very many Egyptian martyrs of the Great Persecution whose memory the Church kept when their histories were already lost.

• Cornelius of Komel

  Cornelius of Komel (1457 – 19 May 1537) was the founder of the monastery of the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Komel forest south of Vologda, and the most influential teacher of monks in the Russian north in his generation. Born of the boyar family Kriukov at Rostov and formed at the monastery of Cyril of White Lake, he spent some twenty years seeking a solitude that the fame of his own holiness kept taking from him, and settled at last in 1497 in an abandoned robbers' hut in the Komel woods. There he built two churches, fed the whole countryside through a famine, and wrote for his brotherhood a Rule — one of the earliest original Russian monastic rules — which quietly takes what it needs from Joseph of Volokolamsk and from Nilus of Sora, the two men whose disciples were then dividing Russian monasticism between them. From his community came a whole generation of founders: Cassian and Laurence of Komel, Cyril of Novoezersk, Gennadius of Kostroma, Adrian of Poshekhonye and Herodion of Iloezersk. He died at eighty, praying for the deliverance of his house from a Tatar raid, and his commemoration was established by the Church on 25 January 1600.

• Cornelius of Paleostrov

  Cornelius of Paleostrov was a monk of Pskov who at the end of the fourteenth century crossed into the Olonets country and became the founder of monastic life on Palei Island in Lake Onega — the house afterwards known as the Paleostrovsky monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God. He raised two churches for the brethren who gathered to him, one of the Nativity of the Theotokos and one of the Prophet Elias, and passed his own last years apart from them in a cave on the island, in chains and unbroken prayer. He reposed about 1420; his disciple Abramius brought his relics up from the cave into the monastery church and was in time buried beside him, and the two are honoured together as the founders of the house.

• Demetrius Donskoy

  Demetrius Ivanovich (12 October 1350 – 19 May 1389), Grand Prince of Moscow, is honoured by the Russian Church as a right-believing prince: the ruler who, having received the blessing of Sergius of Radonezh, defeated the army of Mamai on the field of Kulikovo between the Don and the Nepryadva on 8 September 1380, and so broke for the first time the assumption that the Horde could not be beaten in the open field. He came to the throne a child of nine and was brought up under the guardianship of the metropolitan Alexis of Moscow; he built the first stone walls of the Kremlin, gathered the Russian principalities under Moscow, and paid for his victory two years later when Tokhtamysh burned the city. He died at thirty-eight, and the epithet Donskoy, "of the Don," which he earned at Kulikovo, has been his name ever since. He was numbered among the saints in 1988, at the millennium of the Baptism of Rus.

• Euphrosyne of Moscow

  Eudokia Dmitrievna (c. 1353 – 1407), daughter of the grand prince of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod, was the wife of Dmitri Donskoy, the victor of Kulikovo, and after his early death the guide of her sons and of the principality of Moscow through eighteen dangerous years. Beneath the dress of a grand princess she wore iron chains and kept a hidden ascetic discipline, and she spent her wealth on churches: the stone church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in the Kremlin, raised in memory of Kulikovo, and above all the Ascension Convent within the Kremlin walls, which she founded and which became for five centuries the burial place of the women of the Muscovite house. When her children were grown she took the monastic habit there, on 17 May 1407, with the name Euphrosyne — "gladness" — and reposed seven weeks later, on 7 July, at the age of fifty-four. Her commemoration on May 17 is the feast of that tonsure.

• 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.

• John of Gothia

  John, bishop of the Goths of the Crimea, is one of the very few named figures through whom the history of the Gothic Church in the Crimea can be seen at all. Born at Partenit under the mountain of Ayu-Dag on the southern Crimean coast, he was consecrated bishop about 758 — not in the Empire, where the hierarchy was then iconoclast under Constantine V Copronymus, but in Georgia, which had kept clear of the heresy — and governed the Gothic see of Doros in the Crimean mountains. In 787 he led his people in a revolt against the Khazars, who then held the peninsula: the rising took the fortress of Doros and the mountain passes, but it collapsed within the year, and John was imprisoned at Phoulloi. He escaped across the Black Sea to Amastris in Paphlagonia, lived there some four years, and died there about 791, having foretold his own death within forty days of hearing that the Khazar ruler was dead. His relics were carried home to Partenit, to the church of the Apostles Peter and Paul which he had built at the foot of Ayu-Dag.

• John of Uglich

  John of Uglich (c. 1477 – 19 May 1523) was a prince of the house of Moscow who spent thirty-two years in prison for no fault of his own and was numbered among the saints for the manner in which he bore it. He was the elder son of Andrew Vasilyevich the Great, appanage prince of Uglich; when Andrew was arrested in 1491 by his brother the Grand Prince Ivan III, the two boys were taken with him, and John — a child of about fourteen — passed the whole of the rest of his life in confinement, first at Pereslavl-Zalessky and then in the Saviour-Priluki monastery near Vologda, in chains. He is remembered as having accepted it without bitterness, giving himself to prayer and to the services of the monastery that was also his prison; shortly before his death he was tonsured into the great schema with the name Ignatius, and he died at about forty-six. He was buried beside Demetrius of Priluki, and healings were reported at his tomb.

• 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.

• Memnon the Wonderworker

  Memnon was an ascetic of the Egyptian desert who from his youth gave himself to the monastic life, was set over one of the Egyptian monasteries as abbot, and became famous for the gifts that followed his labours: clairvoyance, and a wonderworking power over the calamities of the countryside. The synaxarion remembers three of his miracles in particular — a spring of water opened in the waterless wilderness at his prayer, a plague of locusts destroyed as it stripped the harvest, and shipwrecked men saved who called on his name at sea — and adds that after his death the mere invocation of his name drove away locusts and broke the deceits of the demons. He is commemorated as "Memnon the Wonderworker," and no fuller Life of him has come down.

• 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.

• Nina of Georgia

  Nina (Nino, c. 280 – c. 335) is the Enlightener of Georgia, the Equal-to-the-Apostles whose preaching converted the kingdom of Iberia (eastern Georgia) to Christ in the first quarter of the fourth century. A Cappadocian by birth, kinswoman of the Great-martyr George and, by the Georgian tradition, niece of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, she came to Iberia a lone captive maiden, bearing a cross of grapevine twigs bound with her own hair. By healing, prayer, and the quiet witness of her ascetic life she won first the poor and the sick, then Queen Nana, whom she cured, and at last King Mirian, struck blind and lost in a sudden darkness while hunting and restored to sight when he called upon "the God of Nina." Iberia was declared a Christian kingdom about the year 326; a bishop and clergy were sought from Constantine the Great, and the first cathedral rose at Mtskheta over the buried Robe of Christ, at the Life-giving Pillar (Svetitskhoveli). Nina withdrew to Bodbe in Kakheti, where she reposed and is buried. Her grapevine cross is the emblem of Georgian Christianity, and she is one of the few women the Church honours as Equal-to-the-Apostles.

• Patrick of Prusa

  Patrick, bishop of Prusa in Bithynia, was put to death with three of his priests — Acacius, Menander and Polyaenus — at the famous hot springs of that city, in the early persecutions; the received notices place him in the first century, about the year 100. What has made his passion memorable is not the manner of his death but the argument that preceded it: brought to the springs and ordered to sacrifice to the gods who were thought to warm them, Patrick answered the governor Julius with a discourse on divine providence — that the one Creator made both the fire beneath the earth and the healing waters above it, the one prepared for the punishment of the impenitent and the other given freely for the good of all men. He was thrown into the boiling water and came out unharmed; and when that failed, he and the three priests were beheaded and so received their crowns together.

• 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.

• Sergius of Shukhtom

  Sergius of Shukhtom (c. 1530 – 19 May 1609) was a schema-monk of the Vologda north whose long life divided into two halves: some fifty years of ascetic wandering and pilgrimage, in the course of which he worshipped at the holy places of Palestine, Constantinople and Greece and at Solovki in the White Sea, and six last years of stability in the little monastery of Shukhtom near Cherepovets, where he was tonsured in 1603 by Archimandrite Isaiah and given the name Sergius. His asceticism was of the severest northern kind — perpetual fasting, and sleep taken only sitting up — and the tradition credits him with unceasing prayer, clairvoyance and the working of miracles. He died at seventy-nine and was buried beneath the floor of the monastery church, which after the monastery's suppression became the parish church of the Protection of the Mother of God; his shrine remained there, and he is honoured among the saints of the Vologda land.

• 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.

• Theotima

  Theotima is one of the saints of whom the Church has kept only the name, the manner of death and the day. The Greek synaxarion for May 19 records her in a single clause — "the holy martyr Theotima is perfected by the sword" — and the calendars add a date of about 311, at the very end of the Great Persecution. Nothing else has come down: not her city, not the persecutor, not her age or state of life. She is entered here at that value, without supplement, because the alternative to an honest short entry is an invented long one.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Dunstan, 25th archbishop of Canterbury (988)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings