Martyr Sabbas Stratelates

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Martyr Sabbas Stratelates

  Sabbas the Stratelates — "the General" — was a Goth by birth who rose by his courage to high command in the Roman army under the emperor Aurelian (270–275). A Christian from his youth, he spent his pay on the poor and his liberty on visiting confessors in prison, and received from God the gift of healing the sick and driving out demons. Denounced to the emperor, he unbuckled and threw down the soldier's belt that was the badge of his rank rather than deny Christ; and when torture — the scourge, the lighted torches, the cauldron of pitch — left him unharmed, seventy soldiers of his own command confessed Christ and were beheaded where they stood. Comforted in prison by a vision of Christ, Sabbas was tortured again the next morning and then drowned in a river, about the year 272.

• Elizabeth the Wonderworker

  Elizabeth the Wonderworker was an ascetic and abbess of the convent of the Holy Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian at Constantinople, born at Heraclea in Thrace of wealthy and long-childless parents who obtained her by prayer and gave her back to God. She kept virginity and an austerity that astonished the capital: a single coarse garment winter and summer, bare feet, no bath, no bread, wine or oil, whole Lents without food, and three years in which she would not so much as raise her eyes to look at the sky. To this life God joined the gift of wonders — she killed a great serpent by her prayer, healed a woman with an issue of blood, and cast out unclean spirits — and after her repose on April 24 both her incorrupt relics and the earth of her grave became a standing remedy for the sick.

• Thomas the Fool-for-Christ of Syria

  Thomas was a monk of Coele-Syria who used to come down to Antioch to collect his monastery's annual allowance from the revenues of the great church, and who bore in that city the feigned madness of the fool-for-Christ. Struck on the head by Anastasius, the oikonomos of the church of Antioch, who had grown tired of him, he answered that neither would he ever receive the money again nor Anastasius pay it — and both came true, Anastasius dying within a day and Thomas himself the following night, in the hospice at Daphne. Buried in the plot kept for strangers, his body was found lying above the two corpses afterwards laid in the same grave; the marvel was reported to the patriarch, his relics were carried into Antioch in festal procession, and the plague then wasting the city ceased at their translation. The Antiochenes kept his feast with great splendour for generations afterwards, and Evagrius Scholasticus, an Antiochene writing within living memory, is the source for all of it.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Mellitus, 3rd archbishop of Canterbury (624)
• St. Egbert of Lindisfarne (729)
• St. Dyfnan, son of King Brychan
• St. Ivo, hermit of Huntingdonshire (1001)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings