Prophet Zachariah

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Prophet Zachariah

  Zachariah the priest and his wife Elizabeth were the parents of John the Forerunner and Baptist of the Lord. Luke's Gospel presents them as an aged, childless couple, "both righteous before God"; to Zachariah, serving at the altar of incense, the archangel Gabriel announced the conception of John, and at the child's naming Zachariah's loosed tongue uttered the prophecy known as the Benedictus. Tradition, resting on the second-century Protoevangelium of James, holds that Zachariah was murdered in the temple at Herod's command for refusing to betray his son's hiding place, and that Elizabeth, who had fled with the infant John into the wilderness, reposed forty days after her husband. They are commemorated together on September 5.

• Holy Hieromartyr Athanasius of Brest-Litovsk (1649)

  Athanasius Filippovich, abbot of the monastery of St Symeon at Brest, was the most uncompromising Orthodox voice in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the generation after the Union of Brest (1596), and he paid for it with his life. A learned monk of the Vilna and Pinsk houses, he carried the case of the persecuted Orthodox of the Commonwealth to the Tsar at Moscow and, again and again, to the Diet at Warsaw, interrupting its sessions with prophetic denunciations of the Union and being imprisoned, beaten and deposed for it; his Diariush ("Diary") is a landmark of Ruthenian polemical literature. He was shot in a wood outside Brest on the night of 4–5 September 1648, having been made to dig his own grave. His body was found incorrupt eight months later and brought to his monastery; the Church keeps his martyrdom on September 5 and the uncovering of his relics on July 20. His saying — that the Union would perish and Orthodoxy flourish — is the sentence by which he is remembered.

• Holy Martyrs Abda the bishop, Hormizd and Sunin of Persia (4th c)

  Abdias (Abda, Abidas — the name is glossed Obadiah, "servant of the Lord") was a martyr of the Church of Persia under the Sassanid king Yazdegerd I (399–420). Refusing to renounce Christ and to worship the sun and the sacred fire of the Zoroastrian state religion, he was subjected to many tortures — the synaxaria record that he was beaten with thorny rods — and died of them, giving thanks to God to his last breath that he was counted worthy to suffer for the holy Name. He is commemorated on September 5.

• Boris and Gleb

  Boris and Gleb, sons of Vladimir the Baptizer of Rus' and named Roman and David at the font, were killed in the succession war of 1015 on the orders — so the tradition holds — of their elder brother Svyatopolk, and are honoured as the first canonised saints of the Christian Rus'. Neither died confessing Christ before pagans: both refused to lift a hand against an elder brother and accepted an unjust death in the meekness of the Lord, and for this the Slavic Church gave them a title of its own — passion-bearers (strastoterptsy). Their bodies were gathered at Vyshgorod beside the church of St Basil, where miracles began at once; the translations of their relics into new churches in 1072 and 1115 are kept on May 2, and their murder on July 24. Around them grew the earliest cycle of Russian hagiography — the Chronicle tale, the anonymous Tale and Passion and Encomium, and Nestor's Lesson — and with it the ideal of the innocent, non-resisting prince that shaped the sanctity of Rus' for six centuries.

• Juventinus and Maximus

  Juventinus and Maximus were soldiers of the imperial guard of Julian the Apostate, martyred at Antioch about the year 363. When Julian, wintering at Antioch before his Persian campaign, set about defiling the city's food and wells with idolatrous sprinklings, the two guardsmen lamented his apostasy at table; denounced to the emperor, they refused to retract or to sacrifice, and after imprisonment and beatings were put to death by night. Their veneration at Antioch is attested within a generation by John Chrysostom, who preached a homily in their honour at their tomb. They are commemorated on September 5.

• Sarbelus of Edessa

  Sarbelus (Syriac Sharbil) was the chief pagan priest of Edessa in Mesopotamia under the emperor Trajan (98–117), converted to Christ with his sister Bebaia by Barsimaeus, bishop of Edessa. Renouncing the idols whose most honoured servant he had been, he was arrested, subjected to prolonged and savage tortures, and put to death, his sister receiving the crown of martyrdom with him. He is commemorated on September 5, and again with Bebaia on October 15 and with Barsimaeus on January 29.

• Tathuil and Bebaia

  Tathuil (Thathuil, in some sources Thiphael) and his sister Bebaia were martyrs of the second century, remembered for bold and fruitful preaching of Christ among the pagans. The notices place their deaths in the period of Trajan and Hadrian (98–138): after prolonged torture Tathuil was hanged upon a tree and cut with a saw, and Bebaia was killed by a spear-thrust to the neck. They are commemorated together on September 5.

• Urban, Theodore, Medimnus and their Companions

  Urban, Theodore and Medimnus, with seventy-seven companions, were a delegation of eighty clergy of Constantinople who suffered around the year 370 under the Arian emperor Valens. Sent to Nicomedia to plead for the persecuted Orthodox of the capital, they were, at the emperor's secret order, put aboard a ship by the prefect Modestus as if for exile; at sea the crew fired the vessel and abandoned it, and all eighty were burned together in the Gulf of Nicomedia. Their martyrdom, recorded by the church historians Socrates and Sozomen, is commemorated on September 5.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings