3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• St Stephen, Bishop of Perm

  Stephen, bishop of Great Perm (c. 1340–1396), is the apostle of the Permians and Zyrians — the Finno-Ugric people known today as the Komi, on the Vychegda and the upper Kama in the Russian north-east. A cleric's son from Veliky Ustyug who had heard Zyrian spoken in the markets of his childhood, he was tonsured at Rostov, learned Greek in order to read the Fathers in the original, and there did the thing for which he is remembered: he devised an alphabet for the Permian tongue — the Abur or Anbur script — and translated the Scriptures and the offices into it, so that when he went out to the Vychegda in 1379 he could preach, catechise, baptise, and celebrate the Liturgy in the language of the people he came to. He felled their sacred birch, outfaced their chief sorcerer, was consecrated their first bishop in 1383, founded churches, monasteries, and schools among them, fed them in famine and defended them from tax-farmers and raiders, and died at Moscow on 26 April 1396. He is one of the very few missionaries of medieval Christendom, East or West, to have given a people its literacy in order to give it the Gospel.

• Hieromartyr Basil, bishop of Amasia and Righteous Virgin Glaphyra (322)

  Basil — in the Greek sources Basileus (Βασιλεύς), "the king," not the commoner Basileios — was bishop of Amasea in Pontus in the first decades of the fourth century, a subscriber of the canons of Ancyra (314) and Neocaesarea (c. 315), and one of the hierarchs destroyed in the last persecution the Roman world saw: that of Licinius, who turned on the Church in his eastern half of the empire in the years before his defeat by Constantine. His fall was occasioned by his sheltering the fugitive virgin Glaphyra, a maidservant of the empress Constantia who had fled Licinius's advances to Amasea and spent her mistress's money on the bishop's new church. Summoned to Nicomedia, Basil refused to sacrifice and was beheaded about the year 322; his body, flung into the sea, was recovered at Sinope after an angel three times directed his companion Elpidephorus to it, and was buried in the church he had built. He is honoured on April 26 together with Glaphyra.

• Glaphyra the Virgin

  Glaphyra was a Christian virgin of the imperial household at Nicomedia, a maidservant of the empress Constantia, wife of Licinius and half-sister of Constantine the Great. When the emperor conceived a passion for her, she took refuge with her mistress; and Constantia, putting out the report that the girl had gone mad and was dying, dressed her in men's clothing, gave her money and an escort, and sent her east out of reach. At Amasea in Pontus she was sheltered by the bishop, the hieromartyr Basil, and gave every coin she had to the church he was then building, writing to the empress for more when the funds ran short. That letter betrayed her: Licinius, learning she was alive, sent for her and the bishop together — but Glaphyra was already dead when the order reached the city, about the year 322. Basil was taken and beheaded, and the Church keeps the two of them together on April 26, the virgin whose flight cost the bishop his life.

• Joanna the Myrrhbearer

  Joanna was the wife of Chuza, the steward of Herod Antipas, and one of the women who followed Christ from Galilee, supported His ministry out of their own means, and came to the sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. Saint Luke names her twice and only twice — among the women healed of infirmities who "ministered unto them of their substance" (Luke 8:3), and among those who brought the news of the empty tomb to the apostles and were not believed (Luke 24:10). The tradition adds one act to the Gospel record: that when Herodias had the head of the Forerunner thrown away in an unclean place, it was Joanna who recovered it and buried it in a vessel on the Mount of Olives, where it lay until the First Finding. She reposed in peace in the first century. Her fixed commemoration is June 27; her great commemoration, the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, is movable.

• Joannicius of Devič

  Joannicius (Serbian Joanikije, popularly Janićije) was a Serbian hermit of the first half of the fifteenth century who withdrew from the world as a young man into the gorge of the Ibar, lived in a cave above the Crna Reka — the Black River — and afterwards buried himself deeper still in the forests of the Drenica in Kosovo. There, tradition says, the despot Đurađ Branković brought him a daughter afflicted in her mind; the hermit healed her, and the grateful prince built on the spot the monastery which took its name from the healed maiden — Devič, "the maiden's place." Joannicius reposed there, by the received reckoning on 2 December 1430, and his relics remained in the monastery church, where for five centuries they were sought above all by the mentally ill and the possessed, Serbs and Albanians alike. He is one of the last of the medieval Serbian ascetics, and his shrine became in the twentieth century one of the most bitterly contested holy places in the Balkans. The wider Orthodox calendars keep his memory on April 26.

• Joseph of Arimathea

  Joseph of Arimathea is the rich and noble counsellor — εὐσχήμων βουλευτής — who alone of the Sanhedrin refused to consent to the condemnation of Christ, and who, when the Twelve had scattered, went in to Pontius Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. All four Evangelists record him; the Church names him in every one of her Passion services. With Nicodemus he took the Lord down from the Cross, wound the body in clean linen with the spices, and laid it in his own new tomb, hewn in the rock in a garden beside Golgotha — the sepulchre from which Christ rose, and the holiest place in the Christian world. Tradition adds that he afterwards preached the Gospel and reposed in peace; the Church keeps his memory on July 31 and, with the myrrhbearing women and Nicodemus, on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Mary and Martha, Sisters of Lazarus

  Mary and Martha of Bethany are the sisters of Lazarus the Four-Days-Dead and, with him, the household in which the Lord was most at home. The Gospels give them to the Church in three scenes: Martha serving and Mary sitting at the Lord's feet (Luke 10:38–42); the two sisters meeting Jesus outside their brother's tomb, where Martha makes the confession "I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God" and hears the words "I am the resurrection and the life" (John 11); and the supper six days before the Passover, at which Mary anointed the Lord's feet with the pound of costly spikenard and wiped them with her hair (John 12:1–8). They believed in Christ before the raising of their brother, followed him to the tomb with the myrrhbearing women, and — after the martyrdom of Stephen drove Lazarus from Jerusalem — shared his exile and his preaching. The Church remembers them on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers and, as a fixed commemoration, on June 4.

• Mary Magdalene

  Mary of Magdala, the fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, was delivered by Christ from seven demons and thereafter followed Him and ministered to Him of her own substance. She stood by the Cross when the disciples had fled, watched where the Lord was laid, and came at first light on the third day with the spices — and so became the first human being to see the risen Christ and the first to be sent with the news of the Resurrection. For this the Church calls her ἰσαπόστολος, Equal-to-the-Apostles, and the Fathers name her apostle to the apostles. Tradition carries her afterwards to Rome, where she is said to have testified of the Resurrection before Tiberius with a red egg in her hand, and then to Ephesus, where she laboured beside the Apostle John and reposed in peace; her relics were translated to Constantinople by the emperor Leo VI the Wise.

• Mary of Cleopas

  Mary "of Cleopas" is the woman whom St John names at the foot of the Cross — "his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas" (John 19:25) — and whom the Church numbers among the myrrh-bearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood by at the Crucifixion, watched the burial, and came with spices to the tomb on the first day of the week to hear from the angel that He was risen. The Orthodox tradition makes her a daughter of Joseph the Betrothed by his first marriage, brought up in the same household as the Virgin and her companion from childhood, and afterwards given in marriage to Joseph's younger brother Cleopas; her son is the hieromartyr Simeon, son of Cleopas, second bishop of Jerusalem. She reposed in peace. Her fixed memory is May 23; her great commemoration is the movable Sunday of the Myrrh-bearers.

• Nicodemus the Righteous

  Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, a member of the Sanhedrin, who came to Jesus by night to ask about the Kingdom and received from Him the teaching on being born again of water and the Spirit (John 3). He appears twice more in the Fourth Gospel: pleading in the council that the Law does not condemn a man unheard (John 7:50–51), and coming at last into the open on Great Friday with a hundred pound weight of myrrh and aloes to help Joseph of Arimathea take the body of the Lord from the Cross and lay it in the tomb (John 19:39–42). Tradition has him baptised by the Apostles Peter and John, expelled from the Sanhedrin and driven from Jerusalem, and sheltered in the country house of the teacher Gamaliel, in whose tomb at Kaphar Gamala his relics were found together with those of the Protomartyr Stephen in the year 415.

• Salome the Myrrhbearer

  Salome is the wife of Zebedee and the mother of the apostles James and John, and one of the myrrhbearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood at the Cross when the disciples had fled, and came to the sepulchre before dawn with spices to anoint a body that was not there. The Gospels name her twice by name (Mark 15:40; 16:1) and twice more by description — the mother of the sons of Zebedee who asked for the two thrones (Matthew 20:20–21), and one of the women watching the crucifixion from afar (Matthew 27:56). The tradition makes her a kinswoman of the Theotokos, though it has never agreed on the degree. She lived to see her elder son become the first of the Twelve to be killed for Christ, and reposed in peace. She is commemorated on August 3, and with all the myrrhbearers on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Tamara of Georgia

  Tamara (c. 1166–1213) is the queen under whom Georgia reached the height of its power and holiness, and whom her own people call not queen but king — mepe — because she ruled in her own right. Daughter of George III of the Bagratid house, crowned co-ruler at about twelve and sole sovereign at eighteen, she opened her reign by summoning a council that purged the Church of simony, and closed it having doubled her kingdom: the victories of Shamkor (1195) and Basiani (1203) broke the Muslim coalitions ranged against her, and Georgian arms reached from the Black Sea to the Caspian. She abolished capital punishment and torture, endowed churches and monasteries from Vardzia to Athos, Palestine, Cyprus, Sinai and Antioch, wove vestments with her own hands, and lived beneath the purple as an ascetic. To her court belongs the golden age of Georgian letters, and Shota Rustaveli's Knight in the Panther's Skin is dedicated to her. She reposed in 1213 and is honoured on May 1 and on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Trudpert of Muenstethal (644)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings