17th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Callistratus and Companions

  Callistratus (†c. 304) is the chief martyr of September 27: a Roman soldier of Carthaginian and Christian descent whose secret night prayers betrayed him to his commander in the Diocletianic persecution. Sewn into a sack and cast into the sea, he was delivered when the sack tore open on a rock and, the passio relates, was borne to land by dolphins — a wonder that converted forty-nine soldiers of his cohort. Imprisoned and tortured with them, he catechised his converts until all fifty were cut down by the sword at night. The company is commemorated together, and a church later rose over the place of their suffering, as Callistratus had foretold.

• Ven. Sabbatius of Solovetsk

  Sabbatius of Solovki (†1435) was the first hermit of the Solovki islands in the White Sea and, with Herman and Zosimas, is venerated as a founder of the great Solovetsky monastery, the fortress of monasticism in the Russian far north. A monk of the White Lake monastery of Cyril and then of Valaam on Lake Ladoga, he twice fled the esteem of the brethren, and in old age crossed the harsh sea with the hermit Herman to settle the uninhabited island. After six years of struggle there he reposed on September 27, 1435, at a chapel on the river Vyg, having sought out the Holy Mysteries in his last days; his relics were later carried to the monastery his successors built.

• Holy Apostles Mark, Aristarchus and Zenas of the Seventy

  Aristarchus of the Seventy was a Macedonian of Thessalonica and one of the most constant companions of the apostle Paul: seized by the Ephesus mob in the riot of the silversmiths, he accompanied Paul through Greece and to Jerusalem, sailed with him on the prisoner's voyage to Rome, and is greeted in the epistles as Paul's "fellow prisoner" and "fellow worker." The Byzantine tradition numbers him among the Seventy and makes him bishop of Apamea in Syria; the tradition of his April feast holds that he was beheaded at Rome under Nero, at the time of Paul's own martyrdom. He is commemorated on September 27 with the apostles Mark and Zenas, on April 15 with Pudens and Trophimus, and with all the Seventy on January 4.

• Holy New Martyr Aquilina (1764)

  Aquilina of Zagliveri (c. 1746–1764) is one of the virgin new-martyrs of the Ottoman period: a girl of the village of Zagliveri near Thessalonica whose father, having killed a Turkish neighbour in a quarrel, escaped execution by accepting Islam, while her mother raised her secretly in the faith of Christ. Pressed at eighteen to follow her father's conversion, she refused before the judge with the confession that she would never deny Christ, was beaten with rods in repeated sessions until her body was broken, and died of her wounds on September 27, 1764, at the age of about eighteen. She is commemorated on the day of her death.

• Epicharis of Rome

  Epicharis (†c. 300) was a Christian woman of Rome — the synaxarion tradition styles her the wife of a senator — martyred in the reign of Diocletian. Arrested by the prefect Caesarius and confessing Christ with courage, she was hung up and her body raked with iron hooks and beaten; her torturers, the account relates, were struck down by an angel of the Lord at her prayer, and she was finally beheaded. Her commemoration on September 27 stands in the Synaxarion of Constantinople and the received Menaion beside that of the martyr Callistratus and his company.

• John Mark of the Seventy

  The apostle Mark of the Seventy, "also called John" — the John Mark of the Acts of the Apostles — was a Jerusalem Christian of the first generation, in whose mother Mary's house the Church gathered, and an early companion of Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journeys. The Byzantine tradition numbers him among the Seventy and makes him bishop of Byblos in Phoenicia, where such grace attended him that, like Peter's, his very shadow healed the sick. He is commemorated on September 27 with the apostles Aristarchus and Zenas, and with all the Seventy on January 4. The synaxaria distinguish him from Mark the Evangelist and from Mark the cousin of Barnabas, though the three are tangled in both tradition and scholarship.

• Zenas of the Seventy

  Zenas of the Seventy, called "the lawyer," is known from a single verse of the New Testament: Paul's charge to Titus to "send Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey with haste, that they lack nothing" (Titus 3:13). The title marks him as a learned man — trained either in Jewish law or in Roman jurisprudence — and the tradition assigns him the conduct of juridical matters in the affairs of the church. The Byzantine calendar numbers him among the Seventy and makes him bishop of Diospolis, the ancient Lydda in Palestine. He is commemorated on September 27 with the apostles Mark and Aristarchus, and with all the Seventy on January 4.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Barrog, Hermit of Barry (6th C)
• St. Sigebert, King of the East Angles and Martyr (635)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings