Prophet Hosea

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Prophet Hosea

  Hosea son of Beeri prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century before Christ and stands first among the Twelve Minor Prophets. At God's command he made his own broken marriage the living sign of Israel's unfaithfulness and of God's unconquerable love: he took "a wife of whoredoms," Gomer, and gave their children names that were oracles — Jezreel, "Not-pitied," "Not-my-people" — and then bought his estranged wife back, as God would buy back his estranged people. The Fathers heard in his book the great texts of the Gospel before the Gospel: "Out of Egypt I called my son," "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," "After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up," and "O death, where is thy sting?"

• Holy Martyrs Cosmas and Damian, the Unmercenaries of Cilicia (4th c.)

  Cosmas and Damian of Arabia (†c. 287) are the third of the three pairs of holy unmercenary physicians of that name whom the Byzantine calendar venerates. Arab brothers and physicians who healed freely in the name of Christ, they travelled through the cities and villages preaching as they healed, until they were seized in Cilicia and brought before the governor Lysias. Refusing to sacrifice, they were beaten and cast into the sea, and, delivered unharmed, were finally beheaded together with their three brothers Leontius, Anthimus and Eutropius. They are commemorated on October 17, and are not to be confused with the unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Mesopotamia (November 1) or of Rome (July 1).

• Andrew of Crete the Martyr

  Andrew of Crete (†767), called "of Krisis" after the quarter of Constantinople where his relics came to rest, was a Cretan monk who gave his life for the holy icons under the iconoclast emperor Constantine V Copronymus. Hearing that the emperor was imprisoning the pious as if they were criminals, he came to the capital and denounced the persecutor to his face in the church of the martyr Mamas, answering the charge of wood-worship with the confession that whoever suffers for the icon of Christ suffers for Christ himself. Scourged and dragged through the streets to execution, he died when a fanatic cut off his foot. He is not to be confused with his earlier namesake, Andrew of Crete the hymnographer of the Great Canon (†740, July 4).

• Etheldreda of Ely

  Etheldreda — Æthelthryth in her own tongue, Audrey in the mouths of later Englishmen — was a princess of the royal house of East Anglia who passed through two marriages without surrendering the virginity she had vowed, was for twelve years queen of Northumbria, and at last obtained her husband's leave to take the veil. In 673 she founded the double monastery of Ely on the island in the fens that had come to her as a marriage gift, and ruled it as abbess with a severity she imposed first on herself: one meal a day, wool rather than linen, and prayer from the night office until daybreak. She died on 23 June 679 of a tumour in the neck, which she received as the just penalty for the necklaces of her girlhood. Sixteen years later her sister Seaxburh raised her body and found it incorrupt, the surgeon's incision healed to a scar. Bede, who tells her story at length and adds a hymn of his own composition in her honour, made her the most celebrated of Anglo-Saxon women saints; Ely remained her city, and her name survives, by an odd descent, in the English word tawdry.

• 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.

• Sexburga of Ely

  Sexburga was a daughter of Anna, King of the East Angles, one of the most remarkable saint-bearing families of the English Church, and became Queen of Kent by her marriage to Eorcenberht. Widowed in 664, she founded the monastery of Minster-in-Sheppey on the Thames estuary and took the veil there. She afterwards went to Ely, where her sister Æthelthryth (Etheldreda) was abbess, and on her sister's death succeeded her in the rule. In 695 she carried out the translation of Æthelthryth's body, which was found incorrupt sixteen years after burial — the episode Bede records at length, and one of the foundation narratives of English monastic veneration. She reposed at Ely on 6 July 699.

• Shushanik of Georgia

  Shushanik — the Slavic books call her Susanna — was an Armenian noblewoman, daughter of the general Vardan Mamikonian who fell at Avarayr, and wife of Varsken, the pitiakhsh or viceroy of the Georgian march of Gugark. When Varsken went to the court of the Persian king Peroz and there apostatised to Zoroastrianism, promising to bring his wife and four children over with him, she left the palace, shut herself in a cell beside the church at Tsurtavi, and would not be moved. Her husband beat her, dragged her by the hair, chained her, and finally shut her in a fortress prison, where she lay six years, ministering by her prayers to the sick who were brought to her window, and died of her treatment on 17 October 475. The account of it was written within a decade by her confessor, the priest Iakob Tsurtaveli, who saw the whole thing: The Martyrdom of Shushanik is the oldest surviving work of Georgian literature and one of the most immediate martyr-acts in any language. Her relics were translated to the Metekhi church at Tbilisi in 578.

British Isles and Ireland

• SS Ethelred (Ailred) and Ethelbert, Princes of Kent (c.640)
• St. Regulus (Rule), who brought the relics of St. Andrew to Scotland (4th C)
• St. Colman, abbot-bishop of Kilroot (5th C)
• St. Louthiern, bishop (6th C)
• St. Nothelm, 10th archbishop of Canterbury (739)

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