3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• St Theodore the Sykeote

  Theodore the Sykeote (†22 April 613) was the greatest of the holy men of Galatia: born in the village of Sykeon, the son of an innkeeper, he was given from childhood to the martyr George, at whose hill-shrine above the village he became first a boy-ascetic, then a hidden cave-dweller, then the founder of a monastery whose fame filled Asia Minor. He was ordained priest at eighteen, tonsured a monk at Choziba in the Judaean desert, and was at last dragged from his cave to be made Bishop of Anastasiopolis, a burden he bore for some years before obtaining release from the Patriarch to return to his cell. He stood in an iron cage through the winter fast, weighed down with irons; he stopped plagues, locusts, hail and rivers; he cast out demons across the Galatian countryside; he foretold the throne to Maurice and the coming of ruin upon the empire, and blessed Heraclius on his march east. His Life, written by his disciple George of Sykeon, is one of the richest documents of provincial Byzantine society that survives.

• Holy Martyr Leonidas (202)

• Our Holy Father, the monk Vitalis

• Apelles, Lucius and Clement of the Seventy

  Apelles, Lucius and Clement (1st century) are three of the Seventy Apostles, commemorated together on September 10. All three are greeted by name in the letters of Paul: Apelles, "approved in Christ" (Romans 16:10), became bishop of Heraclea; Lucius (Romans 16:21) — whom the Slavic tradition identifies with the Evangelist Luke, while the Greek synaxaria keep him distinct — became bishop of Laodicea in Syria; and Clement, whose name Paul says is "in the book of life" (Philippians 4:3), became bishop of Sardis. Each finished his course as a preacher of the Gospel; no acts of martyrdom are transmitted. They share the day's synaxis listing with no individual propers, and are commemorated again with all the Seventy on January 4.

• 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.

• Luke the Evangelist

  Luke the Evangelist (first century, reposed in Boeotia at the age of 84 by the most ancient account) is the "beloved physician" of Colossians 4:14, the faithful travelling-companion of the Apostle Paul — "only Luke is with me" (2 Timothy 4:11) — and the author of the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, the largest single contribution to the New Testament and the Church's first written history. The tradition, from Eusebius onward, makes him a native of Antioch in Syria, numbers him among the Seventy Apostles and as one of the two disciples of the road to Emmaus, and — from the sixth century — remembers him as the first painter of icons of the Theotokos. His relics were translated from Thebes to the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople in 357 and lie today in Padua, from which a rib was returned to his ancient tomb at Thebes in 1998. His feast is October 18.

• 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.

• Nathanael the Apostle

  Nathanael — "Nathanael of Cana in Galilee," the man of whom Christ said "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile" — is known from the Fourth Gospel alone, where Philip brings him to Jesus under the fig tree (John 1:45–51) and where he stands among the seven disciples at the Sea of Tiberias after the Resurrection (John 21:2). April 22 in the Byzantine calendar keeps not his death but "the remembrance of his coming to know Christ" — the day of his calling. Who he was under his other name the Church has never settled: the printed Greek Menaion says outright that Nathanael "is Simon the Zealot"; the Slavonic and Russian books gloss the same commemoration "Apostle Bartholomew (Nathanael)"; Western tradition since the twelfth century, and almost all modern commentary, identifies him with Bartholomew; and Augustine doubted that he was one of the Twelve at all. This entry keeps the name the calendar keeps, and sets out the identifications without adopting one.

• Nearchus

  Nearchus is a martyr of the third century whom the Byzantine synaxarion commemorates on April 22 in a single line — "the holy martyr Nearchus is perfected by fire" — with one verse of epigram and nothing more. The Greek synaxaristes and the modern hagiographers identify him, with reserve, as the Nearchus of the Passion of St Polyeuctus: the Christian soldier of the Twelfth Legion at Melitene in Armenia whose grief at the thought of being parted from his unbaptised friend brought Polyeuctus to Christ and to martyrdom, and who gathered up his friend's body afterwards. If the identification holds, Nearchus is the instrument of one of the most beloved conversions in the martyrologies, and himself died in the flames some time after the man he had won.

• 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.

• Vitalis of Gaza

  Vitalis (†c. 620) was a monk of the great coenobium of Abba Seridos near Gaza who, at the age of sixty, went to Alexandria and there undertook the strangest and most deliberately scandalous ascetic labour recorded of any Orthodox saint: he wrote down the names of all the prostitutes of the city, hired himself out as a day-labourer, and every evening carried his wage to one of them, paying her not to sin that night, and passing the night himself in prayer in the corner of her room while she slept — binding each to secrecy, and bearing the contempt of the whole city as a fornicating monk. Many of the women were converted. He was struck down at last by a young man who thought he was defending Christ's honour, and died in his hut on his knees, holding a scroll that read "Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come." Only then did the women he had saved come out and tell the truth, and the Patriarch John the Almsgiver, who had refused all along to condemn him on hearsay, buried him with honour.

• Vsevolod-Gabriel of Pskov

  Vsevolod-Gabriel (†1138) was a prince of the house of Kiev — son of Mstislav the Great and grandson of Vladimir Monomakh — who ruled Novgorod and became the first beloved prince of Pskov. Born at Novgorod and given in baptism the name Gabriel, he governed Novgorod for many years as a builder of churches and a protector of the poor, founding the stone Church of Saint John the Forerunner at Opoki and beginning the great works of the city. After a disputed campaign and a falling-out with the turbulent Novgorodians, who expelled him, he was received in Pskov, which took him gladly as its prince; there, in the brief months left to him, he laid the foundation of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, the mother-church of Pskov, and reposed on 11 February 1138. His relics, uncovered incorrupt in 1192 and enshrined in the cathedral he had founded, made Pskov's Trinity Cathedral a place of wonders, and Vsevolod-Gabriel its heavenly patron; his sword, inscribed Honorem meum nemini dabo — "I will yield my honour to no one" — was long kept above his tomb.

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