Second Sunday of Lent

Saints commemorated

• St Theophylactus, Bishop of Nicomedia

  Theophylact (mid-8th century – c. 842/845) was bishop of Nicomedia in Bithynia and one of the leading confessors of the second Iconoclasm. A gifted disciple of the Patriarch Tarasius of Constantinople, he was trained in monastic life at a house on the Black Sea coast together with his friend Michael, later bishop of Synada, and was raised by Tarasius to the see of Nicomedia, which he governed with a boundless charity — building hospices, hospitals, and homes for strangers, and tending the lepers with his own hands. When the emperor Leo V the Armenian renewed the war on the holy images, Theophylact stood with the Patriarch Nicephorus against him, and to his face foretold the sudden and violent end that overtook the emperor. For this confession he was banished to the fortress of Strobilos, where he endured some thirty years and reposed still in exile, about the year 842 or 845. After the restoration of the icons his relics were carried back in honour to Nicomedia. The Church keeps him on March 8.

• Hieromartyr Theodoretus (362)

  Theodoretus (†c. 362) — Theodoret the Presbyter — was a priest of the church of Antioch and keeper of its sacred vessels, martyred under Julian the Apostate. When Julian's uncle, also named Julian, Count of the East, came to Antioch to seize and plunder the treasures of the Christian churches and shut their doors, the priest Theodoret refused to abandon his flock, gathering and strengthening the faithful in secret. Arrested and brought before the Count, he confessed Christ boldly, denounced the emperor's apostasy, and endured the rack, the tearing of his flesh, and burning torches without flinching, foretelling the wretched deaths that soon overtook both the Count and the emperor. He was beheaded about the year 362. An Antiochian martyr of the last pagan persecution, he is commemorated on March 3.

• Antony of the Kiev Caves

  Antony of the Kiev Caves (983–1073) is the father of monasticism in the land of Rus'. Born at Liubech near Chernigov and baptised Antipas, he went as a young man to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, and was sent back by his abbot with the word that he should carry the Holy Mountain's way of life to his own people. Settling in a cave dug in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo, he lived on bread and water and drew disciples he had not sought; from that hole in the earth grew the Monastery of the Caves, the mother-house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, whose second founder and organiser was his disciple Theodosius. Antony himself never governed it: he appointed abbots and withdrew again into seclusion, and to the end preferred the cave to the church he had caused to be built. He reposed in 1073, and by a providence the tradition has never tried to explain away, his relics have never been uncovered.

• Athanasius of Murom

  Athanasius (fifteenth century) was an abbot of the Murom (Muromsky) Monastery on Lake Onega — the house founded in the previous century by the Greek elder Lazarus of Murom — where he laboured in the monastic life and governed the brotherhood. Little is recorded of him beyond his office and his sanctity; he is remembered in the Russian Church together with the founder Lazarus on March 8, the two venerables of Murom kept on one day.

• Dometius the Wonderworker

  Dometius was a monastic saint of the fourth century, commemorated on March 8 and styled by the tradition a wonderworker. Very little is transmitted of him: the Greek Menaion keeps him among the day's saints as a venerable monk (hosios), and the Slavic reckoning for the day remembers a Dometius of Persia in the same century. Because of the bare notice and the shared name, the tradition itself is uncertain whether the Dometius of March 8 is a distinct ascetic or the same as Dometius the Persian, the venerable-martyr of the reign of Julian the Apostate more fully commemorated on August 7; the question is recorded here rather than resolved.

• Euthymius of Sardis

  Euthymius (c. 754 – 831) was metropolitan of Sardis in Lydia and one of the most steadfast defenders of the holy icons through the second iconoclast persecution. A confessor at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 787), he spent the last quarter-century of his life in a succession of exiles under four emperors — Nicephorus I, Leo V, Michael II, and Theophilus — refusing to the end to abandon the veneration of images. Under Theophilus he was scourged so cruelly that he died of the wounds, on December 26, 831, and the Church honours him as both confessor and hieromartyr, reckoning him among the first martyrs of the renewed iconoclasm. His Life was written soon after by Methodius, later patriarch of Constantinople, who had known him.

• Gregory Palamas

  Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359), Archbishop of Thessalonica, is the great theologian of the Orthodox spiritual tradition and the defender of the hesychasts — the monks of Mount Athos who, in stillness and unceasing prayer, were granted to behold the uncreated light of God. When the Calabrian philosopher Barlaam derided their experience and denied that the divine light was anything but a created symbol, Gregory answered with the distinction that would become dogma: God is utterly unknowable in his essence, yet truly known and truly partaken in his uncreated energies — the same grace and glory that shone from Christ on Tabor and dwells in the saints. His theology was vindicated by a succession of councils at Constantinople, definitively in 1351, and the Church honours him twice: on November 14, the day of his repose, and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, where his triumph stands as a "second Sunday of Orthodoxy." He is one of several saints named Gregory, to be distinguished from Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (September 30), and from the Theologian, the Dialogist, and Gregory of Nyssa.

• Hermes of the Seventy

  Hermes was one of the Seventy Apostles whom the Lord sent out before his face (Luke 10:1), named by the Apostle Paul in the closing greetings of the Epistle to the Romans — "Salute Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brethren which are with them" (Romans 16:14). The tradition remembers him as a bishop of Dalmatia, a labourer of the apostolic generation who carried the Gospel to the Adriatic coast. The Church keeps his memory on March 8, and again on April 8 among a company of the Seventy, and gathers him with the whole company at the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles on January 4. Because Romans 16:14 names in one breath both a Hermes and a Hermas, he is constantly confused with Hermas of Philippopolis (kept November 5), and with the shadowy Hermas to whom the second-century work The Shepherd is ascribed; the tradition distinguishes all three.

• Lazarus of Murom

  Lazarus of Murom (c. 1286 – 1391) was a Greek monk from Constantinople who became one of the first apostles of monasticism in the far Russian North. Sent, by the tradition, from the imperial city into the lands of Novgorod, he received the blessing of the archbishop Basil Kalika and withdrew to a wild, uninhabited island on the eastern shore of Lake Onega, in the Olonets country, where about the middle of the fourteenth century he founded the Murom (Muromsky) Monastery — one of the oldest religious houses of the Russian North. There he endured great hardship among the pagan Lop and Chud of the region, whom he converted to Christ by his patience and his miracles, and he gathered a brotherhood about him. He reposed, the tradition says, at the great age of a hundred and five, on March 8, 1391. The little wooden church of the Raising of Lazarus he is said to have built with his own hands survives to this day — removed to the island of Kizhi — as the most ancient wooden temple of the Russian North.

• Paul the Confessor of Plousias

  Paul the Confessor (died c. 850) was bishop of Plousias, a city of Bithynia in Asia Minor, and a defender of the holy icons in the second iconoclast persecution of the ninth century. His stand for the images, the tradition notes, was grounded above all in Holy Scripture. For it he was harassed, driven from his see, and — together with the confessor Theophylact, bishop of Nicomedia — sent into exile, where he ended his life as a confessor of the faith, never having yielded the veneration of the icons of Christ and the saints. He is commemorated on March 7.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Felix of Burgundy, bishop of Dunwich and Enlightener of East Anglia (c.648)
• St. Senan, abbot of Scattery (544)
• St. Beoadh, bishop of Ardcane (c.518)
• St. Duthac of Ross (1065)
• St. Rhian of Llanrhian

Troparia & kontakia

Readings