3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Theodore the Sanctified

  Theodore the Sanctified (c. 314 – 368) was the beloved disciple of Pachomius the Great and, after him, the man who held the Pachomian koinonia together. Born to wealth at Latopolis in the Upper Thebaid, he came to Tabennisi as a youth of about eighteen and became Pachomius's closest companion and "the comforter of the brothers." A single lapse — consenting, while his father was still alive, to be spoken of as his successor — cost him years of penance and taught him the humility that his later office demanded. When the confederation of monasteries fell into revolt under Horsiesios, Theodore was called out of retirement to govern it; he ruled from Pbow for some eighteen years, restored its unity and discipline, never claimed the title of father for himself, and stood at the side of Athanasius the Great in the Arian struggle. At his repose Horsiesios resumed the leadership he had laid down.

• Trans. Rel. Ephraim, Abbot of Perekop

  Ephraim of Perekom (1412–1492) was a monastic founder of the Novgorod land, the builder of the Perekom monastery of St Nicholas on the marshy western shore of Lake Ilmen. Born at Kashin in Tver and baptised Eustathius, he left his father's house as a young man, was tested at Kalyazin, and took the habit at the monastery of Sabbas of Vishera, where he received the name Ephraim. About 1450 he went out to the mouth of the river Verenda and settled in the wet forest by the Black River; brethren gathered, the archbishop of Novgorod ordained him priest, and the community dug a channel through the low ground to carry the water away — the perekop that gave the house, and its founder, their name. He reposed on 26 September 1492 and was numbered among the saints at the Moscow council of 1549; May 16 keeps the translation of his relics, made when the flooding of the lake at last forced the monastery to move.

• Our Holy Father Theodore the Sanctified (368), disciple of St Pachomius the Great

• St Nicholas Mystikos, Patriarch of Constantinople (930)

  Nicholas the Mystikos (852 – 15 May 925) was twice Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and is honoured as a saint for the one act that cost him his throne: his refusal to bless the fourth marriage of the emperor Leo VI the Wise. A kinsman and pupil of Photios the Great, he had served as mystikos — the emperor's confidential secretary, whence his surname — before his elevation in 901. When Leo, having buried three wives, took a fourth, Nicholas baptised the child of that union, the future Constantine VII, but shut the emperor out of the church; for this he was deposed and exiled in 907. Restored on Leo's death in 912, he was for a time head of the regency for the boy emperor, negotiated with Simeon of Bulgaria at the walls of the City, and lived to preside over the Tomos of Union of 920, which closed the schism his own resistance had begun by forbidding fourth marriages outright in the Church's law.

• Blessed Musa the Maiden (5th c.)

  Musa was a Roman girl of the fifth century whose whole story is one page of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, told to him by her own brother, the monk Probus. The Mother of God appeared to the child in a vision, among a company of girls of her own age dressed in white, and asked whether she wished to be one of them and to live in her train. Musa said that she did, and was given a rule for it: to leave off the frivolity and the light words of her age, and to wait — for in thirty days she would come. The girl changed, so completely that her household could not account for it. On the twenty-fifth day she took a fever; on the thirtieth the Theotokos came again with the same company, and Musa, answering "I come, Lady, I come," gave up her spirit. She is one of the very few children in the calendar who are neither martyrs nor monastics, and is commemorated on May 16.

• St Brendan the Voyager, abbot of Clonfert (ca. 577)

• Alexander of Jerusalem

  Alexander of Jerusalem (died c. 251) was a bishop of the early third century, remembered as a disciple of Clement of Alexandria and fellow-student of Origen, as the founder of the first great Christian theological library, and as a confessor who twice suffered imprisonment for the faith. First bishop in Cappadocia and then, uniquely for his age, coadjutor and successor to the aged Narcissus of Jerusalem, he governed that Church for nearly four decades before dying in prison at Caesarea during the persecution of Decius.

• Cassian of Komel

  Cassian of Komel (†1537) was a disciple of Cornelius of Komel and, for a time, abbot of his master's monastery of the Presentation in the Komel forest near Vologda. When Cornelius, old and weary of the honours pressed on him, withdrew to Lake Sura, the brethren chose Cassian to govern in his place, and he did so with the elder's approval and in the elder's spirit, holding the community to prayer, inward attention and the renunciation of worldly cares. When Cornelius returned, Cassian laid down the office without a murmur and took his place again among the obedient. He is commemorated on May 16 with his fellow-disciple Laurence of Komel.

• Forty-four Martyrs of the Lavra of Saint Sabbas

  In the catastrophe that overtook Palestine about the year 614 — the Persian invasion under Chosroes II, the sack of Jerusalem, and the raiding of the countryside by the Arab tribes who came in its train — a band of raiders broke into the Great Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the ravine of the Kedron, seeking the treasure a famous monastery was assumed to possess. Finding nothing, they turned on the monks. Forty-four fathers were killed, some beheaded, others more cruelly, and the community was scattered. Their memory was preserved by one of their own survivors, Antiochus the Monk of the same Lavra, who wrote an account of them, and the Church keeps them on May 16 as venerable-martyrs — monks who did not seek martyrdom but received it in their own cells.

• George of Mitylene

  George the Confessor was bishop of Mitylene on Lesbos in the last phase of the iconoclast struggle, holding the see in the years around 820–829 — that is, through the renewal of the persecution of the holy icons under Leo V the Armenian and Michael II — and suffering for the icons before dying in peace at Mitylene about 842, in the very year the images were restored. He is the second of three bishops of Mitylene named George whom the calendar honours, and the least well documented of them; his relics were still shown at Mitylene in the twelfth century, when the Russian abbot Daniel saw them on his pilgrimage to the East and wrote them down among the wonders of his journey.

• Joanna the Myrrhbearer

  Joanna was the wife of Chuza, the steward of Herod Antipas, and one of the women who followed Christ from Galilee, supported His ministry out of their own means, and came to the sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. Saint Luke names her twice and only twice — among the women healed of infirmities who "ministered unto them of their substance" (Luke 8:3), and among those who brought the news of the empty tomb to the apostles and were not believed (Luke 24:10). The tradition adds one act to the Gospel record: that when Herodias had the head of the Forerunner thrown away in an unclean place, it was Joanna who recovered it and buried it in a vessel on the Mount of Olives, where it lay until the First Finding. She reposed in peace in the first century. Her fixed commemoration is June 27; her great commemoration, the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, is movable.

• Joseph of Arimathea

  Joseph of Arimathea is the rich and noble counsellor — εὐσχήμων βουλευτής — who alone of the Sanhedrin refused to consent to the condemnation of Christ, and who, when the Twelve had scattered, went in to Pontius Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. All four Evangelists record him; the Church names him in every one of her Passion services. With Nicodemus he took the Lord down from the Cross, wound the body in clean linen with the spices, and laid it in his own new tomb, hewn in the rock in a garden beside Golgotha — the sepulchre from which Christ rose, and the holiest place in the Christian world. Tradition adds that he afterwards preached the Gospel and reposed in peace; the Church keeps his memory on July 31 and, with the myrrhbearing women and Nicodemus, on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Laurence of Komel

  Laurence of Komel (†16 May 1548) was a disciple of Cornelius of Komel and, from 1538, abbot of his monastery of the Presentation in the Komel forest near Vologda — chosen unanimously by the brethren on the elder's own recommendation. He governed ten years, enlarged the monastery's charge by taking the small house of Koptevo under it in 1547, brought the community safely out of the way of a Tatar raid and back again when the danger had passed, and through all the business of an abbacy never gave up his own beloved labour of copying books. He reposed on the day of his commemoration, and is kept on May 16 with Cassian of Komel.

• Mary and Martha, Sisters of Lazarus

  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.

• Mary Magdalene

  Mary of Magdala, the fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, was delivered by Christ from seven demons and thereafter followed Him and ministered to Him of her own substance. She stood by the Cross when the disciples had fled, watched where the Lord was laid, and came at first light on the third day with the spices — and so became the first human being to see the risen Christ and the first to be sent with the news of the Resurrection. For this the Church calls her ἰσαπόστολος, Equal-to-the-Apostles, and the Fathers name her apostle to the apostles. Tradition carries her afterwards to Rome, where she is said to have testified of the Resurrection before Tiberius with a red egg in her hand, and then to Ephesus, where she laboured beside the Apostle John and reposed in peace; her relics were translated to Constantinople by the emperor Leo VI the Wise.

• Mary of Cleopas

  Mary "of Cleopas" is the woman whom St John names at the foot of the Cross — "his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas" (John 19:25) — and whom the Church numbers among the myrrh-bearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood by at the Crucifixion, watched the burial, and came with spices to the tomb on the first day of the week to hear from the angel that He was risen. The Orthodox tradition makes her a daughter of Joseph the Betrothed by his first marriage, brought up in the same household as the Virgin and her companion from childhood, and afterwards given in marriage to Joseph's younger brother Cleopas; her son is the hieromartyr Simeon, son of Cleopas, second bishop of Jerusalem. She reposed in peace. Her fixed memory is May 23; her great commemoration is the movable Sunday of the Myrrh-bearers.

• Nicholas of Metsovo

  Nicholas — surnamed Basdanis — was a poor young man of Metsovo in Epirus who, working for a Muslim baker in Trikkala in Thessaly, was worn down by the daily pressure of his employers and denied Christ, accepting Islam. Conscience gave him no rest. He went home to Metsovo, was reconciled to the Church, and lived quietly, carting wood down to Trikkala to sell; but he judged that repentance was not enough where the denial had been public, and after taking counsel with his spiritual father at Meteora — who warned him against rashness and then armed him for what he intended — he went back to Trikkala, provoked the exposure he had been avoiding, and confessed before the kadi that he had been a Muslim and had returned to Christ. A fire was built in the market place and he was burnt alive in it on 16 May 1617. His skull, bought from his executioners by a Christian and hidden in a wall, was recovered the next year and given to the monastery of Varlaam at Meteora, where it is venerated.

• Nicodemus the Righteous

  Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, a member of the Sanhedrin, who came to Jesus by night to ask about the Kingdom and received from Him the teaching on being born again of water and the Spirit (John 3). He appears twice more in the Fourth Gospel: pleading in the council that the Law does not condemn a man unheard (John 7:50–51), and coming at last into the open on Great Friday with a hundred pound weight of myrrh and aloes to help Joseph of Arimathea take the body of the Lord from the Cross and lay it in the tomb (John 19:39–42). Tradition has him baptised by the Apostles Peter and John, expelled from the Sanhedrin and driven from Jerusalem, and sheltered in the country house of the teacher Gamaliel, in whose tomb at Kaphar Gamala his relics were found together with those of the Protomartyr Stephen in the year 415.

• Salome the Myrrhbearer

  Salome is the wife of Zebedee and the mother of the apostles James and John, and one of the myrrhbearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood at the Cross when the disciples had fled, and came to the sepulchre before dawn with spices to anoint a body that was not there. The Gospels name her twice by name (Mark 15:40; 16:1) and twice more by description — the mother of the sons of Zebedee who asked for the two thrones (Matthew 20:20–21), and one of the women watching the crucifixion from afar (Matthew 27:56). The tradition makes her a kinswoman of the Theotokos, though it has never agreed on the degree. She lived to see her elder son become the first of the Twelve to be killed for Christ, and reposed in peace. She is commemorated on August 3, and with all the myrrhbearers on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Tamara of Georgia

  Tamara (c. 1166–1213) is the queen under whom Georgia reached the height of its power and holiness, and whom her own people call not queen but king — mepe — because she ruled in her own right. Daughter of George III of the Bagratid house, crowned co-ruler at about twelve and sole sovereign at eighteen, she opened her reign by summoning a council that purged the Church of simony, and closed it having doubled her kingdom: the victories of Shamkor (1195) and Basiani (1203) broke the Muslim coalitions ranged against her, and Georgian arms reached from the Black Sea to the Caspian. She abolished capital punishment and torture, endowed churches and monasteries from Vardzia to Athos, Palestine, Cyprus, Sinai and Antioch, wove vestments with her own hands, and lived beneath the purple as an ascetic. To her court belongs the golden age of Georgian letters, and Shota Rustaveli's Knight in the Panther's Skin is dedicated to her. She reposed in 1213 and is honoured on May 1 and on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women.

• Vitus, Modestus and Crescentia

  Vitus was a boy of a great pagan house of Sicily or Lucania who was brought to Christ in secret by the two servants who had charge of him — his tutor Modestus and his nurse Crescentia — and who suffered with them about the year 303, in the persecution of Diocletian. The passion relates that his own father tried first indulgence and then torture to break him; that the three fled by sea to Lucania in southern Italy; that Vitus, brought before the emperor, cast a demon out of the emperor's son and was for that repaid with the cauldron and the lions, from which he came out unhurt; and that the three at last gave up their souls together by the river Silarus. In the West Vitus became one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages — patron of Bohemia and of Saxony, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, invoked against the nervous disorder still called St Vitus's dance. In Slavic and Byzantine usage the three are kept on May 16, and in the West on June 15.

• Vukasin of Klepci

  Vukašin was a Serbian peasant of Klepci, a village in Herzegovina above the Neretva, whose household was destroyed in the massacres of 1941 and who was taken to the Jasenovac camp, where he was killed in 1943. He is honoured for the manner of his dying. The account, which came into the Church's hands through the physician who afterwards treated his executioner, relates that the guard, having decided to make sport of him, offered to spare him if he would cry out the salute of the Ustaša state; and that the old man, as he was mutilated piece by piece, answered each demand with the same words — "Do your work, my child" — until his tormentor broke down. The Serbian Church numbered him among the saints in 1998 with the New Martyrs of Jasenovac, and he is commemorated on May 16.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Carantoc the Wonderworker (430)
• St. Carantoc, abbot of Llangranog (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings