Bright Thursday

Saints commemorated

• Righteous Job the Longsuffering

  Job, called by the Church the Long-suffering (ὁ πολύαθλος, "of many contests"), is the righteous man of the land of Uz — blameless, upright, God-fearing and turning away from evil — whom God permitted Satan to strip of children, wealth and health, and who through the whole ruin blessed the Name that had given and had taken away. Seated on the ash-heap outside his city, scraping his sores with a potsherd, contradicted by his wife and lectured by his friends, he neither cursed God nor accepted their arithmetic of guilt, but demanded to speak with God himself — and was answered out of the whirlwind. His book, one of the summits of Israel's wisdom writing, is read through the first days of Holy Week, because the Church sees in the innocent sufferer who is vindicated and restored the shadow of the innocent Sufferer who is buried and raised. He is commemorated on May 6.

• St Job, abbot and wonderworker of Pochaev (1651)

• Holy Martyr Barbarus the Soldier, with Bacchus, Callimachus and Dionysius (362)

  Barbarus was a soldier of the Roman army under Julian the Apostate who, having won honour for the emperor by killing a barbarian champion in single combat, was rewarded with the command to sacrifice to the idols and refused, confessing Christ. Neither the tearing of his flesh nor the wheel of fire could hold him, and at the sight of his deliverance three of his fellow-soldiers — Bacchus their commander, Callimachus and Dionysius — confessed Christ and were beheaded on the spot. Barbarus was tormented seven days longer and then beheaded by the sword, about the year 362; his body was laid at Methone in the Peloponnese, and the four are commemorated together on May 6.

• St. Sophia the Righteous (1974)

• Barbarus the Myrrh-streamer

  Barbarus was a brigand of Thessaly who for years lived by robbery, extortion and murder, and who, sitting in his cave among his plunder, was struck by the thought of death and judgement and broke. He confessed his crimes to a village priest, was received, and spent twelve years in the woods as a wild beast — naked, on all fours, eating grass — in expiation. There he was shot by merchants who took the shape in the long grass for game; he died blessing them, asking only that his priest be told, and from his grave there flowed a healing myrrh that gave him his epithet. He is commemorated on May 6, and his relics are kept at the monastery of Kellia near Larissa.

• Micah of Radonezh

  Micah was among the first disciples of Sergius of Radonezh, and the one who shared his cell. The tradition remembers him for nothing but meekness of soul and purity of heart — and for one thing that no other man in Russia could claim: he was present, and the only witness, when the Mother of God appeared to Saint Sergius with the Apostles Peter and John and promised that his monastery would never be forsaken. He reposed on 6 May 1385, in his master's lifetime, and was buried beside the Trinity church; in 1734 a small church of the Appearance of the Mother of God was built over his grave, where his relics rest to this day. He is commemorated on May 6.

• Sabbas of Serbia

  Sabbas (Sava, c. 1174 – 1236), born Rastko Nemanjić, youngest son of the Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, is the father of the Serbian Church and the most beloved of Serbian saints. As a youth he fled the court for Mount Athos and was tonsured a monk; there, joined by his abdicated father — the monk Symeon — he refounded the ruined monastery of Hilandar as the great Serbian house of the Holy Mountain. Returning home with his father's relics, he reconciled his warring brothers, reformed the monastic life of Serbia from Studenica, and in 1219 obtained from the exiled Patriarch of Constantinople at Nicaea the autocephaly of the Serbian Church and his own consecration as its first archbishop. He gave his people their law in the Zakonopravilo, its churches their order and hymnody, and its national memory its shape, writing the Life of his father the founder-saint. He died on pilgrimage at Tarnovo in Bulgaria in 1236; his relics, translated to Mileševa, worked wonders until the Turks, to break the Serbs, burned them at Belgrade in 1594 — the act that made him more than ever the symbol of the nation. He is commemorated on January 14, the leavetaking of the Theophany.

• Seraphim of Domvou

  Seraphim, in the world Sotiris, was born in 1527 in a village of Boeotia and gave his whole life to the monasteries of central Greece under Ottoman rule: first the house of the Prophet Elias on Mount Karkaras, then the Holy Unmercenaries, then the great monastery of the Transfiguration on Mount Sagmata near Thebes, where he was tonsured and ordained deacon and priest. In his last years he withdrew to the wild western slopes of Helicon, to the place called Domvou, built a church of the Saviour and a few cells, and gathered a brotherhood which he taught for ten years. He reposed on 6 May 1602, aged seventy-five, on the feast of Mid-Pentecost. His head and a portion of his relics are venerated at the monastery that bears his name in Boeotia, and further relics at the Agathonos monastery in Phthiotis.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Edbert, bishop of Lindisfarne (698)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings