3rd Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Simeon, Kinsman of the Lord

  Simeon, son of Clopas, was the second bishop of Jerusalem and a kinsman of the Lord according to the flesh — by the witness of Hegesippus a cousin of Christ, since Clopas was the brother of Joseph the Betrothed. Chosen to the throne of the mother church after the martyrdom of James the Brother of the Lord, he governed the Christians of Judea through the catastrophe of the Jewish War, the flight of the community across the Jordan to Pella, and the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, and held the see for some forty years — the longest bridge in the record between the apostolic generation and the Church of the second century. In the reign of Trajan, denounced by heretics both as a descendant of David and as a Christian, he was tortured for many days before the consular governor Atticus and at last crucified, in the year 107, at the reputed age of one hundred and twenty; his judges, says Hegesippus, marvelled that so old a man could endure. He is honoured as apostle of the Seventy, hierarch and martyr, and his feast is April 27.

• Our Holy Father Stephen, Abbot of the Kiev Caves and Bishop of Vladimir (1094)

  Stephen was a disciple of Theodosius of the Kiev Caves, whom the dying founder named as his own successor at the request of the brotherhood, and who as abbot completed the great church of the Dormition at the Caves monastery and reorganised its life around the new church. Deposed in 1078 by a faction within the community, he answered the injury by praying for those who had driven him out, and founded a new monastery on the Klov stream near Kiev, dedicating its church to the Placing of the Robe of the Theotokos at Blachernae in thanksgiving for the Mother of God's protection of the Caves. About 1091 he was made bishop of Vladimir in Volhynia, took part that same year in the translation of the relics of Theodosius, and for three years governed his see with a reputation for meekness and mercy before his repose on 27 April 1094. He is commemorated on April 27 and among the Saints of Volhynia on October 10.

• Burning of the relics of St Sava I of Serbia by the Turks (1594)

  Sabbas (Sava, c. 1174 – 1236), born Rastko Nemanjić, youngest son of the Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, is the father of the Serbian Church and the most beloved of Serbian saints. As a youth he fled the court for Mount Athos and was tonsured a monk; there, joined by his abdicated father — the monk Symeon — he refounded the ruined monastery of Hilandar as the great Serbian house of the Holy Mountain. Returning home with his father's relics, he reconciled his warring brothers, reformed the monastic life of Serbia from Studenica, and in 1219 obtained from the exiled Patriarch of Constantinople at Nicaea the autocephaly of the Serbian Church and his own consecration as its first archbishop. He gave his people their law in the Zakonopravilo, its churches their order and hymnody, and its national memory its shape, writing the Life of his father the founder-saint. He died on pilgrimage at Tarnovo in Bulgaria in 1236; his relics, translated to Mileševa, worked wonders until the Turks, to break the Serbs, burned them at Belgrade in 1594 — the act that made him more than ever the symbol of the nation. He is commemorated on January 14, the leavetaking of the Theophany.

• Eulogius the Hospitable

  Eulogius, called Xenodochos, "the receiver of strangers," was a stonecutter of the Thebaid in Upper Egypt who earned a single small coin a day by his chisel and spent it all on the poor and on travellers: every evening, his work done and himself still fasting, he went out into the market place — in winter with a lantern in his hand — to find whoever had come into the town without bread or shelter, and brought them home. He is the subject of one of the most searching stories in the whole desert literature, the tale told in the Life of Abba Daniel of Sketis, in which Daniel, thinking to multiply so much good, prays God to give Eulogius wealth, and pledges his own soul for the man's salvation — whereupon Eulogius finds a buried hoard, rises to high office at Constantinople, and loses his charity altogether, until the loss of everything sends him back to the chisel and the lantern. He lived, the synaxarion says, more than a hundred years, and reposed in peace in his own country in the sixth century. His feast is April 27.

• 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 Kathara

  John the Confessor, abbot of the monastery τῶν Καθαρῶν, "of the Pure," was one of the iconodule superiors broken by the second iconoclasm of the ninth century. Born about 778 at Irenopolis in the Decapolis of Coele-Syria, he was brought as a young monk into the orbit of the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (787) and of the court of the Empress Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius, was ordained priest, and was set over the monastery of Kathara in the reign of Nicephorus I. When Leo V the Armenian revived the war on the holy icons, John's monastery was plundered and his community scattered; brought before the emperor, he rebuked him to his face and foretold his violent end, and was thrown into prison, then into the fortress of Pentadaktylon for eighteen months, then into the fortress of Kriotauron for two years. Leo's murder vindicated the prophecy; but John's confession was not finished, and under Theophilus the iconoclast patriarch John VII the Grammarian banished him at last to the island of Aphousia in the Propontis, where he reposed in peace about the year 839. His feast is April 27, and the Menaion's verse for him plays on the name of his house: suffering, it says, made John pure, who presided over the Pure.

• 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.

• 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.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Asic, bishop of Elphin (490)
• Holy martyr Newlyna of Cornwall, (5th C)
• St. Enoder (Cynider) (6th C)
• St. Winewald, abbot of Beverley (751)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings