Second Sunday of Lent

Saints commemorated

• Holy Fathers Slain at St Sabbas Monastery

  On March 20 the Church commemorates the monks of the Great Lavra of Saint Sabas — the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judaean desert — who were massacred by marauding desert nomads about the year 796, in the disordered years of early Abbasid rule over Palestine. Raiders fell twice upon the defenceless community above the Kidron gorge; when the monks yielded up what little the poor house possessed and still the plunderers found no treasure, they turned to torture and slaughter, driving many of the fathers into the cave-church of Saint Nicholas and choking them with the smoke of a fire kindled at its mouth. Some twenty monks died of wounds and suffocation, among them John, Sergius, and Patrick; the survivors, tended by the abbot Thomas, buried their dead and kept the Lavra. The sufferings were set down by an eyewitness monk of the house, Stephen the Sabaite, and the day stands as one of the great witnesses of Palestinian desert monasticism enduring under Muslim rule.

• St Photine the Samaritan Woman (66)

  Photini (first century – c. 66) is the name the Church gives to the Samaritan woman whom Christ met at Jacob's Well near Sychar and to whom, alone among all to whom he spoke, he openly declared himself the Messiah (John 4). Tradition holds that she was baptized with the name Photini, "the enlightened," and became a fearless preacher of the Gospel — carrying it, with her two sons and her five sisters, as far as Carthage and at last to Rome in the days of Nero. There, the tradition relates, the whole company confessed Christ before the emperor, converted his daughter Domnina and the officer Sebastian sent to break them, and after fearful tortures were martyred about the year 66 — Photini herself, it is said, cast at the end into a dry well, the well of her witness answering the well of her calling. She is honoured as Great-Martyr and Equal-to-the-Apostles. Her fixed commemoration is February 26; her principal feast is the movable Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, the fourth Sunday after Pascha, on which the Church reads the Gospel of the Well.

• St Cuthbert the Wonderworker, Bishop of Lindisfarne (687)

  Cuthbert (c. 634 – 687) was the greatest saint of the early English Church and the wonderworker of Northumbria — a shepherd boy who, seeing in a vision the soul of Bishop Aidan borne to heaven, became a monk of Melrose, then prior of Lindisfarne, a tireless missionary among the villages of the north, and at last, drawn against his will from the solitude of the Farne islands, bishop of Lindisfarne. He united in one life the Celtic and the Roman streams of British Christianity, accepting the Roman usages of the Synod of Whitby while keeping the ascetic austerity of the Irish tradition, and he was famed in life and after death for miracles, for his gentleness, and for a familiarity with the wild creatures and the sea that the tradition treasures. He reposed on his hermit's island of Inner Farne on March 20, 687; his body was found incorrupt eleven years later, and his relics, carried through centuries of upheaval, came at last to rest at Durham. He is honoured throughout the Orthodox calendar as a father of the undivided Church.

• Antony of the Kiev Caves

  Antony of the Kiev Caves (983–1073) is the father of monasticism in the land of Rus'. Born at Liubech near Chernigov and baptised Antipas, he went as a young man to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, and was sent back by his abbot with the word that he should carry the Holy Mountain's way of life to his own people. Settling in a cave dug in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo, he lived on bread and water and drew disciples he had not sought; from that hole in the earth grew the Monastery of the Caves, the mother-house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, whose second founder and organiser was his disciple Theodosius. Antony himself never governed it: he appointed abbots and withdrew again into seclusion, and to the end preferred the cave to the church he had caused to be built. He reposed in 1073, and by a providence the tradition has never tried to explain away, his relics have never been uncovered.

• Euphrosynus of Sinozersky

  Euphrosynus (mid-sixteenth century – 1612), born in Karelia and named Ephraim in the world, was a Russian hermit who withdrew into the forests of the Novgorod land and settled beside the remote Blue Lake (Sinozero), where he founded a hermitage of the Holy Trinity and lived in prayer and great austerity. In the anarchy of the Time of Troubles, when Polish-Lithuanian bands and brigands ravaged the northern countryside, Euphrosynus foresaw the coming of the raiders and warned the people who had taken refuge near him to flee; but he himself, together with the monk Jonah, refused to abandon his cell, and awaited the marauders in prayer. When they came, demanding the monastery's supposed treasure, they struck him down before his own cross on March 20, 1612. He is honoured as a venerable-martyr and wonderworker of the Novgorod land.

• Gregory Palamas

  Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359), Archbishop of Thessalonica, is the great theologian of the Orthodox spiritual tradition and the defender of the hesychasts — the monks of Mount Athos who, in stillness and unceasing prayer, were granted to behold the uncreated light of God. When the Calabrian philosopher Barlaam derided their experience and denied that the divine light was anything but a created symbol, Gregory answered with the distinction that would become dogma: God is utterly unknowable in his essence, yet truly known and truly partaken in his uncreated energies — the same grace and glory that shone from Christ on Tabor and dwells in the saints. His theology was vindicated by a succession of councils at Constantinople, definitively in 1351, and the Church honours him twice: on November 14, the day of his repose, and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, where his triumph stands as a "second Sunday of Orthodoxy." He is one of several saints named Gregory, to be distinguished from Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (September 30), and from the Theologian, the Dialogist, and Gregory of Nyssa.

• Nicetas the Confessor of Apollonias

  Nicetas was archbishop of Apollonias in Bithynia in the early ninth century, and one of the confessors of the holy icons in the second iconoclast persecution. When the Emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820) revived the war on the images, Nicetas stood firm in their veneration, refused to submit to the imperial policy, and was for this confession deposed from his see and sent into exile, in which he ended his life. Because he suffered — deprivation, hardship, and banishment — for the faith without dying of it, the Church numbers him among the confessors, and keeps his memory on March 20.

• The Virgin-Martyrs of Amisus

  On March 20 the Church commemorates a company of Christian women martyred at Amisus in Pontus (the Black Sea city, modern Samsun) in the last of the pagan persecutions — seven virgins whose names the calendars hand down as Alexandra, Claudia, Euphrasia, Matrona, Juliana, Euphemia and Theodosia (Theodora). In the persecution under the Emperor Maximian, about the year 310, these women openly confessed Christ before the ruler of the province and, refusing to sacrifice to the idols, were subjected to torture and put to death by fire. Honoured together as virgin-martyrs, they are one of the several companies of women whom the age of the persecutions gave to the Church, and on the Slavonic calendar their memory is joined on this day to that of Photini the Samaritan Woman.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Herbert, hermit of Derwentwater (687)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings