Zacharias of Jerusalem
Our Father among the Saints Zacharias the Confessor, Patriarch of Jerusalem
Patriarch · Bishop · Confessor · b. sixth century — d. c. 632, at Jerusalem
Commemorated 21 February — Repose of the patriarch and confessor
Zacharias (sixth century – c. 632) was Patriarch of Jerusalem through the catastrophe of the Persian conquest of the Holy City. Raised to the throne of James about the year 609, he saw Jerusalem stormed and sacked in 614 by the armies of the Persian king Chosroes II, its churches burned, its people slaughtered, and the Precious and Life-giving Cross carried off into Persia — and he himself was taken captive with it, and led away into a long exile of some fourteen years, from which he wrote letters of consolation and exhortation to his bereaved flock. When the emperor Heraclius at last broke the Persian power, the Cross and the captive patriarch were restored; Zacharias returned to Jerusalem and lived to see the holy Cross set up again in the city, before reposing about the year 632. The Church keeps him as a confessor for all that he endured for Christ, and commemorates him on February 21.
Patriarch on the eve of the storm
Zacharias became Patriarch of Jerusalem about the year 609, succeeding the patriarch Isaac (Isaacius). He came to the throne in the last uneasy years before the great war between the Roman and Persian empires broke over Syria and Palestine. Of his life before his elevation little is transmitted; the record takes him up at the disaster that made his name.
The Persian sack of Jerusalem and the loss of the Cross
In the reign of the emperor Heraclius (610–641), the Persian king Chosroes II (Khosrow II) overran the Roman East. His armies took Antioch and Damascus, and in the spring of 614, under the general Shahrbaraz, they laid siege to Jerusalem. After some weeks the city fell; and there followed one of the great calamities of Christian history — the churches, and above all the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, were burned, tens of thousands of the inhabitants were killed or carried into slavery, and the greatest of the city's treasures, the True Cross of Christ, which the empress Helena had recovered and which had been venerated at the Holy Sepulchre for three centuries, was seized and borne away in triumph to Persia. With it, among the captives, went the Patriarch Zacharias himself, led from his ruined city into the land of his enemies.
The work of raising Jerusalem from its ashes fell, in the patriarch's absence, to the locum tenens Modestus, abbot of the monastery of St Sabbas, who rebuilt the burned shrines and buried the martyred monks — and who would in time succeed Zacharias on the throne.
Captivity and the letters to his flock
Zacharias passed some fourteen years in Persian captivity. The tradition preserves the memory of his pastoral care from exile: even as a prisoner he wrote back to the people of Jerusalem, letters of comfort and of exhortation, bidding them not to despair, to hold fast the faith through the desolation, and to look for the mercy of God — the shepherd, torn from his flock, still shepherding it across the distance of his chains. In this endurance for Christ's sake the Church finds the ground of his title confessor.
The recovery of the Cross and the return
The tide turned with the campaigns of Heraclius, who from 622 carried the war into the heart of Persia and by 628 had utterly broken the power of Chosroes. In the peace that followed the Persian collapse, the Life-giving Cross was surrendered and brought back to Roman territory, and with it the captives — Zacharias among them. In the year 630 the emperor himself carried the recovered Cross in triumph to Jerusalem and restored it, with the returned patriarch, to the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre — the event the whole Church keeps in the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Zacharias, home at last in the city he had been dragged from, did not long survive the joy of it; he reposed about the year 632, and was succeeded by Modestus.
Feast and commemoration
Zacharias is kept on February 21 (church date; Old Calendar civil March 6) as a synaxarion commemoration of the day, with the venerable Timothy of Symbola, whose office the Menaion appoints, and with Eustathius of Antioch, George of Amastris, and John Scholasticus. No proper hymnody is appointed to him; the common of a hierarch-confessor is used. His memory is closely bound to the great feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), which commemorates the Cross's recovery and return that were the crown of his own sufferings, and to his successor Modestus of Jerusalem, the rebuilder of the holy places (December 18). He is not to be confused with the Old Testament prophet Zachariah, nor with Zachariah the father of the Forerunner, the priest of the temple — a different Zacharias of a far earlier age.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
O God of our fathers, thou didst make thy patriarch Zacharias a confessor of thy Cross: for when the enemy carried away the Wood of our salvation, he too was led into bonds, and shepherded his flock from exile; and thou didst bring back both the Cross and thy servant with rejoicing. By his intercessions, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Zacharias is depicted in the type of a Byzantine patriarch of Jerusalem: an aged, grey-bearded bishop in the phelonion or sakkos and the omophorion, blessing or holding the Gospel-book; where the narrative subject is shown, he is figured among the captives led from the burning city, or in the great recovery-of-the-Cross compositions, receiving or standing by as Heraclius restores the holy Wood to Jerusalem. No pre-modern, identity-verified image of Zacharias of Jerusalem — as distinct from the many icons of the prophet Zachariah and of Zachariah the father of the Forerunner — has been located for storage in this collection; the entry is noted as wanting an icon, the distinction from the two Old-Covenant Zachariases being essential to any identification.