Third Sunday of Lent

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Sabinas of Egypt

• Our Holy Father Christodoulos, Wonderworker of Patmos (1111)

  Christodoulos (c. 1020 – 1093), baptised John, was a Byzantine monk and abbot of the eleventh century and the founder of one of the great houses of Aegean monasticism, the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on Patmos. Formed in the ascetic tradition of Mount Olympus in Bithynia, the Lavra of Saint Sabbas in Palestine, and above all Mount Latros in Caria — where he became the superior of its monks — he was driven westward through the islands by the Seljuk Turkish advance. In 1088 the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, by a golden bull, granted him the deserted island of Patmos, where the Apostle John had received the Revelation, in exchange for his lands on Kos; there Christodoulos built and fortified his monastery and gave it the rule (Hypotyposis) that still governs it. A fresh Turkish raid drove him at the last to Euboea, where he wrote his Testament and reposed on March 16, 1093. His relics were carried back to Patmos, where they remain incorrupt and work wonders, and he is honoured as the Wonderworker of Patmos.

• Holy Apostle Aristobulus of the Seventy, first Bishop of Britain (1st c.)

• Alexander of Rome

  Alexander (†c. 119) was, by the ancient reckoning, the fifth Bishop of Rome after the Apostle Peter, who held the see for about ten years in the early second century and, in the tradition of the Church, suffered martyrdom in the reign of the emperor Hadrian. The Western passion joins to him the priests Eventius and Theodulus, his fellow-sufferers, and remembers his conversion of the prefect Hermes and his household. He is one of the early bishops of Rome venerated throughout the undivided Church; the Byzantine calendar keeps his memory on March 16, the West on May 3. His martyrdom, though held by the tradition, rests on a late and legendary account, and the entry keeps it as such. He is not to be confused with Alexander of Rome the Soldier, the eighteen-year-old martyr of the regiment of the Tiberiani beheaded at Drizipera in Thrace under Maximian and commemorated on May 13 — a different saint who carries the same epithet "of Rome," and whom part of the manuscript tradition wrongly calls a bishop.

• Julian of Anazarbus

  Julian (†c. 305) was a martyr of Cilicia, in the south-east of Asia Minor — a young man of senatorial family from Anazarbus who confessed Christ in the Great Persecution under the Roman governor and, after a year of being dragged from city to city and tortured, was sewn into a sack filled with sand and venomous vipers and scorpions and cast into the sea. The waves bore his body to the Cilician shore (the tradition says to Alexandria), whence his relics were gathered and at last enshrined at Antioch. There, some ninety years later, John Chrysostom preached a celebrated homily in his honour, which remains the chief witness to his martyrdom. He is commemorated on March 16.

• Papas of Lycaonia

  Papas (†c. 305) was a martyr of Laranda in Lycaonia, in the interior of Asia Minor, who suffered in the Great Persecution under Maximian. Seized as a Christian and refusing to sacrifice to the idols, he was cruelly tortured — his feet, the tradition says, were shod with iron shoes driven through with nails, and he was made to run before his persecutors as they moved him from city to city, to Diocaesarea in Isauria. There, at the last, he was bound to a barren tree, which — at the death of the martyr — put forth leaves and bore fruit, a wonder that the tradition keeps as the sign of his crown. He is commemorated on March 16.

• Sabinus of Egypt

  Sabinus (†c. 287) was a martyr of Hermopolis in Egypt — a leading citizen, and by some accounts the governor of the city, who in the persecution laid aside his rank and hid himself with a company of fellow-Christians in a house outside the town. Betrayed for two pieces of gold by a beggar whom he had fed in his need, he was seized, brought before the persecutors, tortured for his confession of Christ, and at the last drowned in the waters of the Nile. His memory is a parable of the treachery repaid for kindness and the crown won through it, and the Church keeps him on March 13.

• Serapion of Novgorod

  Serapion (c. 1450 – 1516) was a Russian monastic saint and hierarch — hegumen of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and afterwards Archbishop of Novgorod — best remembered for his part in the great controversy over the monastic estate that divided the Russian Church in his day. Born near Moscow, married and briefly a parish priest, he was widowed and took the monastic habit, rising through the Dubensk and Trinity-Sergius houses to the see of Novgorod in 1506. His excommunication of the abbot Joseph of Volokolamsk (Joseph of Volotsk), who had removed his monastery from Novgorod's jurisdiction to the Grand Prince's, brought Serapion himself before a council in 1509, which deposed him from his see; he withdrew to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, was reconciled, and reposed there in peace on March 16, 1516. He was later glorified, and his relics rest at the Lavra.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Abban of Kilabban (650)
• St. Finan Lobur, abbot of Swords (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings