St Metrophanes, First Patriarch of Constantinople

Saints commemorated

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  St Metrophanes, First Patriarch of Constantinople

  Metrophanes was bishop of Byzantium in the years when the little see on the Bosporus became the see of the New Rome, and is honoured by the Church as the first Patriarch of Constantinople. The tradition makes him the son of Dometius, a convert brother of the emperor Probus, and the third of his family to hold the throne of Byzantium after his father and his brother Probus. Already extremely aged when the First Ecumenical Council met at Nicaea in 325, he could not attend in person and sent the presbyter Alexander as his vicar; Constantine the Great honoured him, and the Fathers of the Council are said to have confirmed his primacy in the new capital. He named Alexander his successor, foretold the patriarchates of Paul of Constantinople and of Athanasius of Alexandria, and reposed in extreme old age about 326, on June 4.

• Holy Myrrh-bearers Mary and Martha, sisters of St Lazarus (1st c.)

  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.

• Alonius of Scetis

  Alonius is one of the Desert Fathers of Egypt, an ascetic of Scetis of the generation that the Sayings of the Fathers preserves, remembered not for events but for four or five sentences of terrible concision. Of his life the synaxarion says only that he was among the ascetics famous for virtue in the desert, that his sayings are found in the Evergetinos, and that he reposed in peace. Those sayings — "If a man does not say in his heart, In this world there is only I and God, he will not find rest"; "If I had not destroyed everything, I could not have rebuilt myself" — put him among the most quoted of the fathers of the Apophthegmata, and he is commemorated on June 4.

• Astius of Dyrrachium

  Astius was bishop of Dyrrachium — the great Adriatic port at the western end of the Via Egnatia, the modern Durrës in Albania — in the reign of Trajan (98–117), and was crucified for Christ outside his own city. The passion relates that he was forewarned of his suffering in a dream; that he was beaten with leaden rods and with oxhide whips and would not deny Christ; and that his tormentors then smeared his body with honey and hung him on a cross, so that he died under the stings of wasps and flies in the sun. Christians took his body down and buried it with reverence. He is the protomartyr and patron of the church of Durrës and one of the earliest named saints of the Illyrian coast, commemorated on June 4.

• Concordius of Spoleto

  Concordius was the son of a Roman presbyter named Gordian, raised in the faith and made subdeacon by the bishop of Rome; with his father's leave he went to live in retirement near Rome with a kinsman named Eutychius, in prayer and almsgiving. His reputation reached Torquatus, the magistrate of the district, who summoned him, offered him a pagan priesthood and, when Concordius answered by preaching Christ to him, had him beaten and imprisoned. A bishop named Anthimus obtained his release and ordained him presbyter; but Torquatus summoned him again, asked him what he thought of his life, and heard the answer "for me, life is Christ." Chained to the wall of a prison by the neck and hands, he refused after three days to sacrifice, spat upon the image of Zeus brought to him, and was beheaded about the year 175. His relics rest near Spoleto in Umbria, and he is commemorated on June 4.

• Frontasius, Severinus, Severian and Silanus

  Four martyrs of Gaul, honoured as a company: Frontasius, Severinus, Severian and Silanus, sent to preach the word of God in the south of Gaul by Frontonus (Fronto), the bishop of Petragorium — Périgueux in the Périgord. The pagan governor, whom the passion names Squiridonus, arrested them and demanded that they renounce Christ; they answered that they had one desire only, to live or to die for Christ. He had them taken outside the city, bound to pillars, and nails driven into their heads in the form of a crown of thorns, and then beheaded. The tradition adds a cephalophore miracle: that they rose, took up their own heads, carried them to the church of the Mother of God where Bishop Frontonus was at prayer, laid them at his feet, made the sign of the cross and died. They are commemorated on June 4.

• John of Monagria

  John was abbot of the monastery of Monagria, and was put to death by being sewn into a sack and thrown into the sea — the standard penalty of the iconoclast persecution for monks who would not surrender the holy icons. Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite, who preserves the notice, gives no more than this: the office, the manner of death, and the crown of martyrdom. The date usually attached to him is 761, in the reign of Constantine V Copronymus, and the monastery is placed on the Asian shore near Cyzicus. A portion of his skull is kept at the monastery of Panagia Amasgou in Cyprus. He is commemorated on June 4.

• Martyrs of Niculitsel

  Four martyrs of Scythia Minor — Zoticus, Attalus, Camasis and Philip — beheaded by the Roman authorities of Noviodunum on the lower Danube and buried in a brick crypt near the village of Niculitsel in the Dobrogea. Their tomb was discovered in September 1971, when a stream in flood exposed one of the oldest known martyria of the region: a two-storey crypt with the inscription Martyrs of Christ on one wall, the four names scratched on the other, and in the upper chamber a single wooden coffin holding four decapitated bodies. In the lower chamber were the bones of two older, unnamed martyrs, reinterred there about 370–380. The Syriac Martyrology and the Martyrology of Jerome give June 4 as the day of their execution, and that is the day the Church keeps. Their relics were translated in 1971 to the Cocoș monastery.

• Methodius of Peshnosha

  Methodius was a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh and the founder of the Nicholas-Peshnosha monastery on the river Yakhroma, north of Moscow near Dmitrov. Having spent some years under Sergius' direction, he withdrew with his blessing to a marshy solitude beyond the river and built himself a cell there; disciples gathered, and Sergius himself came to visit and counselled him to build a church and gather them into a coenobium. Methodius carried the timber for it on foot through the shallows, and it is from that — peshnosha, "carrying on foot" — that the monastery took its name. He became its abbot in 1391 and reposed in 1392, and was buried in the house he had founded. The spot two versts off where he and Sergius used to talk together is called to this day Beseda, the "conversation-place." His local veneration begins in the late seventeenth century; he is commemorated on June 4 and again on June 14.

• Sophia of Ainos

  Sophia of Ainos in Thrace is the Church's chief example of the ascetic life lived out inside a household and a marriage. Born to wealthy and prominent Christian parents in the tenth or eleventh century, she was married and bore six children, and lost husband and children all together to sickness. She did not despair: she turned the whole of her substance and the whole of her widowhood to the poor, and over some twenty years took in and raised about a hundred orphans, for which she is called the Mother of Orphans. She lived on bread and water, gave away her property, and was granted the sign of the wine-cask that never emptied while she kept the miracle secret. At the end of her life she was tonsured a nun and reposed in peace at the age of fifty-three, on June 4.

• Zosimas of Babylon

  Zosimas was a Cilician who left the world in his youth for Mount Sinai, withdrew from there to a still more solitary place in Lebanon, and was told by an aged ascetic whom he met that he would one day be a bishop in Babylon. Returning to Sinai, he was sent on business to Alexandria, and the Patriarch of Alexandria made him bishop of Babylon in Egypt — the fortress-town at the head of the Delta, in the district that became Old Cairo — where he governed his flock wisely into old age. Feeling his death approach, he returned to Sinai and reposed there in peace. He is commemorated on June 4.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Nennoc of Brecknock (467)
• St. Petroc, abbot of Padstow (6th C)
• St. Breaca of Hayle (6th C)
• St. Berriona the Recluse (6th C)
• SS Croidan, Medan and Degan, companions of St. Petroc
• St. Gonand, Missionary
• St. Cronan the Tanner (617)
• St. Edfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne (721)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings