5th Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• St Nicephorus the Confessor

  Nicephorus the Confessor (c. 758 – 828) was Patriarch of Constantinople from 806 to 815 and, after Tarasius, the second of the great iconodule patriarchs to lead the Church. Born of a confessing family — his father had suffered exile for the holy icons — he served as imperial secretary, took part in the Seventh Ecumenical Council as a lay commissioner, and was raised from the lay state to the patriarchal throne. When the emperor Leo V the Armenian revived iconoclasm, Nicephorus resisted to his own ruin: refusing to surrender the images, he was deposed in 815 and exiled across the Bosphorus, where for thirteen years he wrote the great refutations of the heresy — and where, with his Breviarium and chronological tables, he left works of history besides. He reposed in exile in 828. After the Triumph of Orthodoxy (843), the Empress Theodora and Patriarch Methodius brought his relics home to the capital on 13 March 846, incorrupt, and laid them among the patriarchs in the Church of the Holy Apostles. He is kept on June 2 (repose) and March 13 (the translation of his relics).

• Holy New Martyr Constantine (1819)

  Constantine (†2 June 1819) was born a Muslim in the village of Ypsilometopo on Lesbos, and was healed in his blindness as a boy by the holy water of the Christians. Working afterwards as a greengrocer in Smyrna, he came to love the worship of the Church, and made his way to Mount Athos, where he was catechised at the Skete of Kavsokalyvia and baptised by the exiled Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V, receiving the name Constantine. Not content to be saved alone, he went back among his own people to bring his brothers and sisters to Christ; he was recognised, denounced, tortured with a red-hot iron cap, and sent to Constantinople, where — having invited his judge to become a Christian — he was hanged on 2 June 1819. He is one of the last of the New Martyrs of the Ottoman yoke, and one of the small and precious company of them who came to Christ out of Islam.

• Hieromartyr Erazmo of Ochrid (303)

• Erasmus of Formia

  Erasmus (†c. 303), bishop of Formia in Campania, is one of the most widely venerated and least securely documented of the martyrs of the great persecution. The tradition the Orthodox calendars have received makes him a bishop who fled the persecution to Mount Lebanon and lived there seven years in hiding; who was brought at an angel's bidding out of concealment, seized, and tried before Diocletian and afterwards before Maximian; who was scourged, smeared with pitch and set alight, shut in a spiked cask and rolled downhill, and each time preserved; who converted great multitudes — the Slavic and Greek notices say twenty thousand — by his endurance; and who at length was brought to Formia and reposed there. In the West he became Saint Elmo, patron of sailors, and one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers; the Orthodox books keep him on May 4, and the OCA styles him confessor rather than martyr, since the tradition has him die of his sufferings rather than by the sword.

• John the New of Suceava

  John the New (c. 1300 – c. 1330/1332) was a Greek merchant of Trebizond who was tortured to death at Cetatea Albă — the Asprokastron of the Greeks, the Akkerman of the Turks, the Belgorod of the Slavs, at the mouth of the Dniester — for refusing to abandon Christ for the religion of its Tatar governor. Denounced out of commercial envy by the Western shipmaster who had carried him there, he was beaten with rods until his flesh came away, dragged through the streets tied to a wild horse, and beheaded in the open street; and the pillar of light that stood over his body that night is the first of the wonders reported of him. Some seventy years later Alexander the Good, Voivode of Moldavia, brought his relics to Suceava, where they remain — and where they made a foreign merchant-martyr into the heavenly patron of Moldavia and of Bukovina, "the protector of all the Moldavian land." He is honoured on June 2 for his martyrdom and, in Romanian usage, on June 24 for the bringing of his relics.

• Juliana of Vyazma

  Juliana (†21 December 1406) was the wife of Prince Simeon Mstislavich of Vyazma, and died at Torzhok defending her marriage and her chastity against Yuri Svyatoslavich, the dispossessed Prince of Smolensk. Sheltering in the same town as his exiled kinsmen, Yuri conceived a passion for her; when she refused him he killed her husband at table and turned on her, and when she wounded him with a knife he cut off her hands and feet with his sword and had her body thrown into the frozen Tvertsa. In the spring her body was found — the tradition says floating against the current — and was buried at the Transfiguration Cathedral of Torzhok, where healings were reported at her tomb through four centuries until the Church uncovered her relics and glorified her on 2 June 1819. She is honoured among the Wonderworkers of Novy Torg and is one of the Russian Church's patrons of the sanctity of marriage.

• Photini the Samaritan Woman

  Photini (first century – c. 66) is the name the Church gives to the Samaritan woman whom Christ met at Jacob's Well near Sychar and to whom, alone among all to whom he spoke, he openly declared himself the Messiah (John 4). Tradition holds that she was baptized with the name Photini, "the enlightened," and became a fearless preacher of the Gospel — carrying it, with her two sons and her five sisters, as far as Carthage and at last to Rome in the days of Nero. There, the tradition relates, the whole company confessed Christ before the emperor, converted his daughter Domnina and the officer Sebastian sent to break them, and after fearful tortures were martyred about the year 66 — Photini herself, it is said, cast at the end into a dry well, the well of her witness answering the well of her calling. She is honoured as Great-Martyr and Equal-to-the-Apostles. Her fixed commemoration is February 26; her principal feast is the movable Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, the fourth Sunday after Pascha, on which the Church reads the Gospel of the Well.

• Pothinus, Blandina and the Martyrs of Lyons

  In the year 177, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Christians of Lugdunum (Lyons) and Vienne in Gaul were seized by the mob and the magistrates and destroyed in the amphitheatre at the annual provincial games. Their bishop, the aged Pothinus — a Greek of Asia, and by tradition a hearer of Polycarp — was beaten and died in prison; the slave-girl Blandina, whose own mistress had feared she would prove too weak to confess, outlasted every torturer in the city and was killed last of all; and with them suffered Sanctus the deacon of Vienne, Maturus the newly baptised, Attalus of Pergamum, Alexander the Phrygian physician, Biblis who denied and then recovered her confession, the boy Ponticus, the nobleman Vettius Epagathus and the ascetic Alcibiades. Their bodies were burnt and the ashes swept into the Rhône. The letter in which the surviving Christians of Vienne and Lyons told the story to the churches of Asia — preserved by Eusebius — is one of the greatest documents of the early Church, and the company is kept on June 2 in East and West alike.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Odo the Good, 22nd archbishop of Canterbury (959)
• St. Adalgis (c.686)
• St. Bodfan (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings