Forefeast of Theophany

Saints commemorated

• Prophet Malachi

  Malachi (fifth century before Christ) is the last of the twelve Minor Prophets, and his short book stands last of all the prophets in the Christian ordering of the Old Testament — the seal of prophecy before the four centuries of silence that ended only with John the Forerunner. His name means "my messenger" or "my angel," and both the Greek tradition and the Lives of the Prophets remember him as a young man of such beauty and such gentleness of life that the people called him an angel; the hymns of his feast play throughout on the name. He prophesied in Judah after the return from Babylon, when the second Temple stood again but its worship had grown careless; against the corrupt priests and the faithless people he set the vision of a "pure offering" to be made among all nations, of the "messenger of the covenant" and the Forerunner who would come "in the spirit and power of Elijah," and of the "Sun of Righteousness" rising "with healing in his wings." He is kept on January 3, within the Forefeast of the Theophany.

• Holy Martyr Gordius of Caesarea (4th c.)

  Gordius (†c. 320) was a soldier-martyr of Caesarea in Cappadocia, a centurion of the Roman army who, when the persecution of the Christians broke out, laid down his sword and withdrew into the wilderness to purify himself by fasting and prayer. Judging at last that the hour had come, he came down of his own accord into the crowded amphitheatre of his city on a day of pagan games, and, standing in the midst of the assembled people, cried aloud that he was a Christian and would not deny his Lord. After the questioning of the magistrate and the torments that followed, he was beheaded. His passion is remembered above all because Basil the Great, archbishop of the same Caesarea, preached a celebrated homily in his honour on his feast, before a congregation many of whom still remembered the martyr — one of the great pieces of early Christian martyr-preaching, and the chief source for his life. He is kept on January 3, within the Forefeast of the Theophany.

• Our Holy Mother Genevieve of Paris (ca. 502)

  Genevieve (c. 422 – c. 512) is the great ascetic patroness of Paris, a consecrated virgin of the fifth-century Gallo-Roman Church who is venerated among the pre-Schism saints of the West received into Orthodox commemoration. Born at Nanterre and set apart for God in childhood by the passing bishop Germanus of Auxerre, she took the veil in her mid-teens and gave her long life to prayer, fasting, vigil, and unwearied charity. When Attila and the Huns bore down on Paris in 451, she persuaded the terrified citizens not to flee but to fast and pray, and the horde turned aside from the city; during a later blockade she led a convoy up the Seine to bring back grain and saved the people from famine. Revered by the Frankish kings Childeric and Clovis, devoted to the memory of the martyr Denis, and famed for prophecy and healing, she reposed at a great age about the year 512 and was buried on the hill that still bears her name. She is commemorated on January 3, within the Forefeast of the Theophany.

• Ephraim of Nea Makri

  Ephraim is a fifteenth-century Greek monk of Mount Amomon above the modern Nea Makri in Attica, held to have been tortured to death by Turkish raiders on 5 May 1426. Nothing whatever was known of him until 1950, when the nun Makaria Desipri, excavating the ruins of the abandoned Monastery of the Annunciation on the hill, uncovered a burial she took — on the strength of a series of dreams and visions she reported — to be his, and from which the whole of his transmitted biography derives. A very large popular veneration grew up around the shrine within a generation; the Church of Greece entered him in its calendar in 1998 and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2011. His commemoration is therefore canonically established and liturgically kept, while the historical foundation of his life rests on private revelation and not on any document, and the Church's own recognition of him was cautious and late.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Hywyn, companion of St. Cadfan in Cornwall (6th C)
• St. Finlugh (Finlag) (6th C)
• St. Fintan (6th C)
• SS Fugatius and Damian (2nd C)
• St. Wenog

Troparia & kontakia

Readings