3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• St Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus

  Epiphanius (c. 310/320 – 403), Bishop of Constantia (ancient Salamis) and metropolitan of Cyprus for some thirty-six years, is the great heresiologist of the early Church and one of the most learned and least comfortable of the Fathers. Formed as a monk in Egypt and Palestine and long abbot of his own monastery near Eleutheropolis, he brought to the episcopate an ascetic's austerity, a prodigious philological learning — Jerome calls him pentaglossos, "five-tongued" — and an implacable hostility to every deviation from the Nicene faith. His Panarion, the "medicine chest" against eighty heresies, and his Ancoratus are irreplaceable: much of what survives of Gnostic, Marcionite, Ebionite and Manichaean literature survives only because Epiphanius quoted it in order to destroy it. In old age his zeal was turned against Origen and, disastrously, exploited by Theophilus of Alexandria against John Chrysostom; he withdrew from that intrigue too late and died at sea on May 12, 403, sailing home. The Seventh Ecumenical Council names him among the Fathers and Teachers of the Church.

• Our Fathers among the Saints Epiphanios, bishop of Cyprus (403) and Germanos, Archbishop of Constantinople (740)

  Germanus (c. 634/640 – c. 740) was Patriarch of Constantinople from 715 to 730 and the first great confessor of the holy icons. Son of a patrician whom the Emperor Constantine IV put to death, castrated as a boy and given to the clergy of the Great Church, he rose to be Metropolitan of Cyzicus and then Ecumenical Patriarch. At a synod in 715 he undid the last vestiges of Monotheletism and restored the honour of the Sixth Council. When Leo III the Isaurian turned against the sacred images, Germanus withstood him for four years — teaching, writing to the iconoclast bishops of Asia Minor, and appealing to Rome — and when the emperor demanded his signature to the decree against the icons in January 730, the old patriarch laid his omophorion on the holy altar and resigned rather than sign, saying that the faith could not be altered without an ecumenical council. He died in retirement at Platanion, some hundred years old. The iconoclast council of 754 anathematised him; the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 read his letters aloud, vindicated him, and entered his name in the diptychs of the saints. He is also one of the notable hymnographers and liturgical commentators of the Greek Church.

• Dionysius of Radonezh

  Dionysius (c. 1570 – 1633), in the world David Zobninovsky, was archimandrite of the Trinity–Saint Sergius Lavra from 1611 and, with Patriarch Hermogenes of Moscow, one of the two churchmen who did most to save Russia in the Time of Troubles. From the Lavra — itself only just delivered from a sixteen-month Polish siege — he turned the monastery into a hospital and refuge for the maimed and homeless of the war, and with the cellarer Abraham Palitsyn sent out the circular letters to Nizhny Novgorod and the Russian towns that helped raise the militia of Minin and Pozharsky and free Moscow. Set in 1616 to correct the printed service-books against the Greek, he was accused of heresy by ignorant opponents, condemned at a council in 1618, imprisoned and put under penance; he was exonerated in 1619 when the Patriarchs Philaret of Moscow and Theophanes of Jerusalem examined the case. He bore it, the accounts insist, without bitterness. He died on May 12, 1633, and is buried at the Lavra.

• Hermogenes of Moscow

  Hermogenes (c. 1530 – 1612) was Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia through the worst years of the Time of Troubles, and a hieromartyr whose steadfastness helped save the Russian state and Church. A priest of Kazan who witnessed and recorded the finding of the wonderworking Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, and afterwards its first metropolitan, he was raised to the patriarchal throne in 1606. When the Polish invaders and their partisans overran Moscow and pressed the Russians to accept a Catholic prince, Władysław, as tsar, Hermogenes refused to bless him unless he became Orthodox, and from his cathedral, and then from prison, sent out letters (gramoty) calling the people to rise in defence of the faith and the fatherland — the summons that kindled the national militia of Minin and Pozharsky. For this the Poles shut him up in the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin and starved him; he died on February 17, 1612, months before Moscow was freed. He was glorified in 1913, and his relics rest in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin. Not to be confused with the new hieromartyr Hermogenes (Dolganev), Bishop of Tobolsk (June 16, †1918), drowned in the river Tura by the Bolsheviks — a different man of a different century, with whom the patriarch is often confused because both bear the name and both died in the hands of an occupying power.

• 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.

• John of Vlachia

  John of Vlachia (Ioan Valahul, 1644 – 1662) is the young martyr of Wallachia who suffered at Constantinople at the age of seventeen. Taken prisoner as a boy when the Ottoman punitive campaign fell upon Wallachia after the revolt of the Voivode Mihnea III, he was bought by a Turkish officer for immoral purposes; resisting, and in extremity defending himself, he killed his captor and was carried to Constantinople and handed over as a slave to the dead man's widow. For two and a half years she pressed him, by flattery and by threat, to deny Christ, accept Islam and marry her. He refused. He was imprisoned, tortured, and at last condemned; the executioners hanged him at Parmak Kapi in Constantinople on May 12, 1662, before he was eighteen years old. His memory was kept by the Greeks of the City and by the Romanians, and the Romanian Orthodox Church canonised him formally in 1950 (the glorification proclaimed in 1955), the first Romanian saint of the modern canonisations; he is honoured as a patron of Romanian youth.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Pancratius of Rome

  Pancratius — in the West Saint Pancras — was a boy of fourteen martyred at Rome in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 304. A native of Phrygia in Asia Minor, orphaned of both parents, he was brought to Rome to live with his uncle Dionysius; both heard the preaching of the Bishop of Rome and were baptised. Arrested in the persecution and refusing to sacrifice, the boy was beheaded and buried on the Via Aurelia, where a church rose over his grave. He became one of the most popular of the young Roman martyrs: Gregory the Great preached in his basilica and had a silver reliquary made for his head, oaths were sworn on his relics in the medieval West, and Augustine of Canterbury dedicated to him among the first churches of the English mission — whence Old Saint Pancras in London and the great railway station that bears the name. In the East he is a short notice of May 12, without a proper service; his cult belongs chiefly to the West.

• Polybius of Rinocorura

  Polybius was the travelling companion, biographer and spiritual son of Epiphanius of Cyprus, and it is largely to him that the Church owes the Life of that great hierarch: after the death of the disciple John, who had begun the record, Polybius continued it, writing down the deeds and miracles of his teacher as he witnessed them. When Epiphanius returned from Constantinople in 403, having withdrawn from the intrigue against John Chrysostom, he sent Polybius away to Egypt with the words "Go into Egypt; and after my death I will take thought for you." Polybius obeyed, left before his master's burial, and in Egypt was consecrated Bishop of Rinocorura on the desert frontier between Egypt and Palestine. He was famous there for asceticism and for wonderworking — the tradition remembers that at his prayer rain fell in a drought and the fields yielded abundantly — and reposed in great old age in the fifth century. He is commemorated on May 12 with Epiphanius.

• Sabinus of Cyprus

  Sabinus was the disciple, biographer and successor of Epiphanius of Cyprus. Tonsured by Epiphanius and his companion in the ascetic life for five years in the wilderness, he wrote down the life and deeds of his teacher; when Epiphanius was set over the Church of Cyprus he ordained Sabinus presbyter, and at Epiphanius's death in 403 Sabinus was raised to the see of Constantia as Archbishop of Cyprus. As hierarch he defended his church against the heretics in the years when Cyprus was contending both for the Nicene faith and for its own autocephaly, and he reposed about the middle of the fifth century. He is commemorated on May 12, the day of his master, with whom the synaxaria always name him.

• 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.

• Theodore of Kythera

  Theodore (c. 870/890 – 922) is the patron saint of the island of Kythera (Cerigo), off the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Born at Koroni in Messenia of a mother long barren, reared in the clergy as a reader, married and the father of two children, and ordained deacon by the Archbishop of Argos, he left family and city for the ascetic life: first in a cell beside the church of the Theotokos at Monemvasia, then, about 921, on Kythera, which the Saracen raids had emptied of its inhabitants. There, alone in the ruined church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, he lived out a single hard year and died on May 12, 922. Sailors putting in at the deserted island found his body incorrupt; in 925 men of Monemvasia buried it with honour, the church was rebuilt under his name, and it became the monastery of Saint Theodore, the mother-shrine of Kythera's Christianity. The island keeps his memory as its first citizen and protector.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Æthelheard, 14th archbishop of Canterbury (805)
• St. Diomna the Teacher (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings