Sunday of Zacchaeus

Saints commemorated

• St Cyril, Teacher of the Slavs

  Cyril (c. 826 – 869), born Constantine at Thessalonica and known in his own day as the Philosopher, was the Byzantine scholar-monk who, with his elder brother Methodius, became the apostle of the Slavs. Trained in the imperial schools of Constantinople under Photius and Leo the Mathematician, he served as librarian of Hagia Sophia and teacher of philosophy, and was sent on embassies of disputation to the Arabs and the Khazars. Answering the request of Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia for teachers in the Slavic tongue, he devised the first Slavic alphabet — the Glagolitic — and with it translated the Gospel, the Epistle, the Psalter, and the services into Slavonic, opening the Scriptures and the Liturgy to a whole family of nations in their own language. Against the "trilingual" party that would confine worship to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, he defended the right of every tongue to praise God. He carried the relics of Clement of Rome, which he had recovered in the Crimea, to Rome, where the Pope blessed the Slavonic books; there he fell ill, received the great schema with the name Cyril, and reposed on February 14, 869, and was buried in the Basilica of San Clemente. From his Glagolitic sprang the Cyrillic script that bears his name.

• Our Holy Father Auxentius (470)

  Auxentius (late fourth century – c. 470) was a Syrian-born ascetic who rose from the imperial guard of Constantinople to become one of the most celebrated hermits of his age. A soldier of the Scholarian guard at the court of the emperor Theodosius the Younger, honoured for his piety and his friendship with the holy men of the capital, he left the world for the monastic life and withdrew across the Bosphorus to a mountain near Chalcedon in Bithynia — the height that would afterwards bear his name — where he lived as a recluse in a cliffside cell. Sought out against his will by crowds who came for healing and counsel, he became a wonderworker and a spiritual father, guided communities of monks and nuns, and was summoned to bear witness to the Orthodox faith at the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451). His disciple Vendemianus continued his life on the mountain for forty-two years after him. Auxentius reposed about the year 470 and is kept on February 14.

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• Venerable Maron the Hermit of Syria (ca. 423)

  Maron (mid-fourth century – c. 410) was a Syrian hermit of the region of Cyrrhus, north-east of Antioch, and one of the great fathers of the ascetic movement of Syria whose life is recorded by his near-contemporary Theodoret of Cyrrhus. He embraced an open-air asceticism on a mountaintop, sheltering only in a small tent, and gave himself to prayer, fasting, and vigil under the naked sky; God granted him a striking gift of healing — of fevers and chills, of bodily disease, and of those tormented by demons — so that crowds streamed to him from the whole country. Around him grew a garden of ascetics, disciples who carried his manner of life through the hills of Cyrrhus, and he was honoured as a friend and correspondent of John Chrysostom, who wrote to him in tender affection from his exile. When Maron died, the neighbouring villages contended for his body as for a treasure. From the monastery that later bore his name — Beth-Maron on the Orontes — descends the great Christian community of Lebanon that still calls itself, after him, the Maronites. He is kept in the Byzantine calendar on February 14.

• Abraham of Carrhae

  Abraham (fourth century – c. 422), called the Hermit and afterwards bishop of Carrhae, was a Syrian ascetic of the region of Cyrrhus whose life is told by his younger contemporary and fellow-countryman Theodoret of Cyrrhus. Beginning as a solitary, he undertook a bold missionary labour: entering a wholly pagan village of Lebanon in the guise of a travelling merchant, he endured beatings, secretly discharged the villagers' crushing tax-debt, and by patience and charity won the whole place to Christ, building a church before he withdrew. His fame carried him to the episcopate of Carrhae (Harran) in Mesopotamia — a byword for stubborn paganism — which he tamed by the same union of asceticism and gentleness. Summoned at last to Constantinople by the emperor Theodosius the Younger, he was honoured there and reposed in the capital about the year 422. He is kept on February 14, with the hermits Maron and Auxentius.

• Isaac the Recluse of the Kiev Caves

  Isaac (†c. 1090), born Chern, a wealthy merchant of Toropets in the Pskov land, gave away his goods and came to the Kiev Caves in the days of Saints Anthony and Theodosius, receiving the tonsure from Anthony's own hand. He shut himself in a tiny cave-cell, clothed in a raw goatskin, tasting a single prosphoron every other day, in an asceticism so extreme that it became his snare: demons appeared to him as angels of light and as Christ, and, when he bowed to them, seized him and drove him in a wild "game" of pipes and drums until he fell half-dead. Found near death and nursed for years back to strength — for two of them he lay speechless and helpless — Isaac rose from his fall a humbler man, took up menial labour in the monastery kitchen, embraced the way of the fool-for-Christ, and won at the last a true mastery over the demons that had once deceived him. He reposed about 1090 and rests in the Near Caves; he is kept on February 14.

• Michael and Theodore of Chernigov

  Michael Vsevolodovich, Prince of Chernigov and for a time Grand Prince of Kiev, and Theodore, his boyar and faithful counsellor, were put to death at the camp of Batu Khan in 1245/6, in the first generation of the Mongol yoke over Rus'. Summoned to the Horde to receive the khan's charter for his principality, Michael was willing to bow to the khan as an earthly ruler but refused the pagan rites demanded of arriving princes — passage between the purification fires and veneration of the Mongols' idols and elements — and was beaten and beheaded; Theodore, offered his master's principality if he would conform, followed him in the same confession and death. The protomartyrs of the Horde, glorified as wonderworkers of Chernigov, their relics have rested since the sixteenth century in the Moscow Kremlin.

• Twelve Greeks of the Kiev Caves

  The Twelve Greeks are the company of Byzantine master-builders who, according to the Kiev Caves Patericon, were sent from Constantinople to raise the Great Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God at the Kiev Caves Monastery. The tradition holds that the Theotokos herself appeared to them at the church of Blachernae, gave them gold for the journey and an icon of her Dormition, and sent them to Saints Anthony and Theodosius at Kiev in the year 1073, foretelling that she would be buried — that is, have her church and her wonderworking icon — in that place. The Greek masters built and (with the Greek iconographers who came after them) adorned the cathedral that became the heart of the Lavra and the mother-church of Russian monasticism; and, remaining at the Caves, they received the monastic tonsure, ended their days there, and were numbered among the venerable Fathers of the Caves, in whose Near Caves they rest. They are commemorated on February 14.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Conran, bishop of the Orkney Islands

Troparia & kontakia

Readings