Holy Prophet Daniel and Three Holy Youths

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Holy Prophet Daniel and Three Holy Youths

  Ananias, Azarias and Misael — by their Hebrew names Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, and by the Babylonian names given them in exile Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego — were three youths of the royal house of Judah, companions of the prophet Daniel in the Babylonian captivity. Refusing to worship the golden image set up by Nebuchadnezzar, they were cast into a furnace heated sevenfold, and were preserved unburnt by an angel, "the fourth… like a son of God," walking with them in the flame. Their hymn of praise from the fire — the Song of the Three Youths — became one of the biblical canticles of the Church and the foundation of the seventh and eighth odes of every canon. The furnace that could not consume them is read as an image of the Virgin Womb that bore the fire of the Godhead unconsumed, and their feast on December 17 stands with Daniel's at the gate of the Nativity.

• Saint of the day

  Daniel the Prophet

  Daniel, of the royal seed of Judah, was carried to Babylon as a youth in the first deportation under Nebuchadnezzar (c. 605 BC) and rose to serve four kings of Babylon and Persia while remaining faithful to the God of Israel. The last of the four Great Prophets, he is known for interpreting Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the great statue shattered by "a stone cut without hands," for his night among the lions from which God delivered him unharmed, and for the apocalyptic visions of the four beasts and the Son of Man coming on the clouds. The Church reads him as a foremost prophet of the Incarnation and commemorates him, together with the Three Holy Youths his companions, on December 17, eight days before the Nativity of Christ his visions foretold.

• Our Holy Father Dionysius the New of Zakinthos (1624)

  Dionysius (c. 1547–1622) was a nobleman of the Ionian island of Zakynthos who became a monk and then Archbishop of Aegina, but soon resigned his see to return to the monastic quiet of his native islands. He is remembered above all for one act of Gospel forgiveness: when the man who had murdered his own brother fled to him for refuge, not knowing whose house it was, Dionysius sheltered and released him rather than deliver him to justice. His incorrupt relics remain on Zakynthos, of which he is the patron saint and heavenly protector, and he is venerated across the Greek world as "the saint of forgiveness."

• Patermuthius, Coprius and Alexander

  Three Egyptians who suffered under Julian the Apostate (361–363): Patermuthius, in his youth the captain of a band of robbers, who repented, was baptised, went into the desert and gave the rest of his life to nursing the sick and burying the dead; Coprius, the priest who was his disciple and the eyewitness who wrote down his deeds — the man who walked unhurt into a fire to confound a Manichaean; and Alexander, a soldier of the guard who, watching Coprius tortured, confessed Christ on the spot and was burnt alive. Coprius, deceived by the emperor's plea that he too had once served Christ, denied the faith and then, brought to himself by his elder's tears, confessed it again and died for it. Patermuthius and Coprius were beheaded. Their memory is kept on July 9 in the Slavonic and American calendars and on December 17 in the received Greek books.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Tydecho (6th C)
• St. Briach, disciple of St. Tudwal (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings