Apostles of the 70 Philemon, Archippus, Apphia; St Michael, Prince of Tver

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Apostles of the 70 Philemon, Archippus, Apphia

  Philemon and his wife Apphia were a Christian couple of Colossae in Phrygia whose house became the church addressed in the Apostle Paul's shortest surviving letter, the Epistle to Philemon; Archippus, greeted in the same letter as Paul's "fellow soldier," is remembered as their son, and Onesimus is the runaway slave whose return the letter pleads for, later himself a bishop and martyr. Counted among the Seventy Apostles, Philemon and Archippus laboured for the Gospel throughout Phrygia — Philemon becoming, by the tradition, bishop of Gaza — and under Nero the three of Colossae received the crown of martyrdom, Archippus cut down with knives and Philemon and Apphia stoned. They are commemorated together on November 22 and again on February 19; Onesimus keeps his own principal feast on February 15.

• Saint of the day

  St Michael, Prince of Tver

• Holy Martyrs Cecilia, Valerian, Tiburtius and Maximus, at Rome (3rd c.)

  Cecilia was a Roman noblewoman of the early third century who, having vowed her virginity to Christ, converted on her wedding night her betrothed husband Valerian, then his brother Tiburtius, and finally the officer Maximus set to guard them — all four sealing their confession with martyrdom under an eparch named Almachius, in the days of Bishop Urban of Rome. Valerian, Tiburtius and Maximus were beheaded; Cecilia, surviving an attempt to suffocate her in her own bath-house and three strokes of the sword, died of her wounds after three days. One of the most venerated virgin-martyrs of the ancient Roman Church and, through a later reading of her Acts, honoured as the patroness of sacred music, she is a pre-schism Western saint whose memory the Eastern calendars keep on November 22.

• Holy Prince and Passion-Bearer Peter Yaropolk (1086)

• Archippus of Colossae

  Archippus was an apostle of the Seventy and a minister of the church of Colossae in Phrygia, greeted by the Apostle Paul as "our fellow soldier" (Philemon 2) and charged in the Epistle to the Colossians to "take heed to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord, that thou fulfil it" (Colossians 4:17). The Byzantine tradition remembers him as the son of Philemon and Apphia, in whose house the Colossian church assembled, and numbers him with his father among the Seventy. Under Nero he received the crown of martyrdom at Colossae, dragged before the mob and stoned to death — the hymnography singing that he "longed for the cornerstone Stone" and so "was battered with stones for love of Him." He is kept with the whole Colossian household on November 22, and again on February 19, where the day is led by his own name and his proper hymns.

• Michael the Soldier of Bulgaria

  Michael the Soldier (†c. 866) was one of the first Bulgarians to embrace Christianity, a native of Potuka who lived in the reign of the Byzantine emperor Michael III. A soldier by calling and, from the age of twenty-four, the commander of a troop, he was famed both for bravery in battle and for a life of prayer, fasting and almsgiving; the tradition remembers him routing an enemy host after prayer when his allies had fled, and delivering a district from a monstrous beast that its people had worshipped, whom he converted to Christ. He reposed in peace soon after and worked many healings at his tomb. His relics were carried from Potuka to Trnovo in 1206, and long after to Wallachia; the Church keeps him among the righteous on November 22.

• Onesimus the Apostle

  Onesimus (Greek Ὀνήσιμος, "useful, profitable") is the runaway slave of the Epistle to Philemon: a servant of Philemon of Colossae who fled his master, reached the imprisoned Apostle Paul at Rome, was there converted and baptized, and was sent back to Colossae bearing Paul's tender letter of intercession — the New Testament's shortest and most personal epistle, in which the Apostle plays on the slave's name and begs that he be received "not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 16). Freed and returned to Paul's service, Onesimus became in time a preacher of the Gospel and a bishop — by the received tradition the successor of Timothy at Ephesus — and is numbered among the Seventy Apostles. Under the emperor Trajan he was seized, brought to Rome, and tried before the eparch Tertyllus; there, about the year 109, his legs were crushed with clubs and he received the crown of martyrdom. He is kept on February 15, and with the Colossian household on November 22.

• Procopius the Reader

  Procopius the Reader (†303) was a reader of the church of Jerusalem, born at Scythopolis, who led a strict ascetic life and was granted the gift of casting out demons. Arrested in the first days of the great persecution of Diocletian and brought before the governor at Caesarea in Palestine, he refused to sacrifice to the idols and was beheaded — the first martyr of that persecution in Palestine, whose death Eusebius witnessed and recorded. He is commemorated on November 22 and is to be distinguished from the far more widely venerated Procopius the Great Martyr of Caesarea, commemorated July 8.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Deiniol the Younger, abbot of Bangor (621)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings