Saturday, 14 June 2025

Leavetaking of Pentecost

Saturday of the 1st week after Pentecost

55 days after Pascha · Tone 7 · Liturgy · No Fast (Fast Free)

Saints commemorated

★ Holy Prophet Elisha

10th c. BC

The disciple and spiritual heir of the Prophet Elijah (July 20), his story can be found in II Kings. Unlike most of the Old Testament prophets, he was granted the gift of working many miracles. He reposed in peace at a great age. The Fathers tell us that he was anointed by Elijah in the year 908 BC and reposed in peace at a great age in 839 BC. He was buried in Samaria. Even after his death, miracles of wonderworking were performed through his relics.

Holy and Glorious Prophet Elisha

The holy Prophet Elisha was a son of the wealthy farmer Shaphat of Abel-meholah, in the territory of Manasseh, and lived in the ninth century before Christ during the reigns of Joram, Jehu, Jehoahaz and Jehoash, kings of Israel. After the great Prophet Elijah had been instructed on Mount Horeb that Elisha was to succeed him in the prophetic office, he found him ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen and threw upon him his mantle, in token of the calling. Elisha at once slaughtered the oxen, made of the wood of the plough a sacrifice to the Lord, and followed Elijah, ministering to him as his disciple until the day his master was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. At parting Elijah granted him the request of a double portion of his spirit, and as the mantle fell from the ascending prophet, Elisha took it up, struck the Jordan and crossed dry-shod, while the prophets of Jericho cried out, "The spirit of Elijah rests upon Elisha." For more than fifty years Elisha was a father and a wonderworker to Israel. He healed the bitter spring of Jericho, multiplied the widow's oil, raised the only son of the Shunammite woman from death, fed a hundred men with twenty loaves, cleansed Naaman the Syrian of his leprosy in the Jordan, and made an iron axe-head float upon the water for a poor disciple. He counselled kings, denounced idolatry, and several times confounded the armies of Aram by prayer and prophecy. As the second book of Kings records, the gift of life lingered even in his dead body: a man hastily cast into the prophet's tomb came alive at the touch of his bones. The Church of Christ honours him as the foremost of the prophets after Elijah and as a forerunner of the Saviour, who in his miracles of mercy prefigured the works of the incarnate Word.

Saint Dorotheus of Khilandar

Saint Dorotheus, called "of Hilandar" from the great Serbian monastery on the Holy Mountain in which he lived, was a Serbian monastic of the fourteenth century, a disciple of the school of asceticism that flourished on Athos in the years after the triumph of hesychasm. He entered Hilandar as a young man and was trained in obedience, watchfulness and unceasing prayer under the abbots who succeeded the holy founders Saint Symeon and Saint Sabba of Serbia. About 1356 he was raised to the abbacy of his monastery, and his brethren and the wider Athonite community chose him about the same year as protos, the chief of the Holy Mountain, an office which he held until 1366. In this period he laboured to maintain the order of the Holy Mountain through the troubles of the Serbian and Byzantine dynastic conflicts. After laying down the office of protos, Dorotheus returned with renewed strength to the silent life. With his son Danilo, who had followed him into the monastic state and was afterwards Patriarch of the Serbs (1390 to 1397), he founded in 1382 the monastery of Drenca in central Serbia, dedicated to the Presentation of the Most Holy Theotokos. In its quiet valley he ended his days, leaving behind him a community in which Athonite hesychasm took root in the Serbian lands. The Church of Serbia and the Holy Mountain reckon him among their venerable fathers and keep his memory on this day with the brethren of Hilandar.

Saint Methodius the Confessor, Patriarch of Constantinople

Saint Methodius was born in Syracuse in Sicily in the late eighth century to a wealthy and noble family and was sent as a young man to Constantinople to seek office at court. There he abandoned worldly hopes for the monastic life, made his profession at the monastery of Chenolakkos in Bithynia, and became its abbot. When the second outbreak of iconoclasm under Leo V the Armenian (813 to 820) drove the orthodox confessors from the capital, Methodius was sent to Rome by Saint Nicephorus the Patriarch as his envoy to Pope Paschal I, and lived there as a refugee for some seven years. Returning in 821 with letters from the pope rebuking the iconoclast policy, he was seized by the emperor Michael II, scourged, and shut up in a tomb on the island of Saint Andrew in the Sea of Marmora, where he remained for almost seven years amid the corpses of two robbers, kept alive by an old woman who let bread down to him from above.

Brought out a wreck of a man at the change of reign, he was for a time forced into proximity with the iconoclast court of Theophilus, who valued his learning while persecuting his faith. After the death of Theophilus on 20 January 842, his widow the empress Theodora ruled as regent for her infant son Michael III and sought a champion for the restoration of the holy icons. The orthodox bishops elected Methodius patriarch on 4 March 843; on the first Sunday of Lent that year, by his hand, the icons were restored to Hagia Sophia in a great procession from Blachernae which the Church to this day commemorates as the Sunday of Orthodoxy. Through his last four years Methodius governed the Church with mildness, declining either to persecute the former iconoclasts or to indulge the demands of those who pressed for harsher punishment. A learned man and a copyist of manuscripts, he composed canons, lives of saints and the rite of reception of repentant heretics. He fell asleep in the Lord on 14 June 847 and is honoured by the Church as a Confessor.

Venerable Niphon of Kausokalybia on Mount Athos

Saint Niphon was born in 1315 in the village of Lukove in the region of Himare, then part of the despotate of Epirus and now in southern Albania, of pious Greek Orthodox parents. As a boy he received from a hieromonk in his village both his early letters and the example of the monastic life, and at the age of ten he was tonsured a rasophore. After several years on the rocky island of Geromerion in the company of Saint Neilos Erichiotes, he came about 1335 to the Holy Mountain. There he placed himself under the obedience of the elder Theognostos at the monastery of Vatopedi, learning the strict ascetic discipline of the Athonite fathers, and afterwards was admitted to the most rigorous form of solitary life under Saint Maximos Kausokalybites, the "hut-burner," whose biography he was later to compose. Niphon spent the rest of his long life as a hesychast in the wilderness of Kausokalybia and in a remote cave near the Lavra of Saint Athanasius. In 1345 he was elected protos of Mount Athos. When the Serbian Tsar Stephen Dusan accused him of Bogomil heresy, Saint Gregory Palamas defended him and his orthodoxy was confirmed; a second false accusation under Patriarch Callistus was likewise overturned. He bore both trials with quiet patience and used his peace of soul to persevere in unceasing prayer of the heart. He received the gifts of foresight and of working miracles, foretold the day of his own departure, and reposed in deep old age on 14 June 1411, having fulfilled ninety-six years. His relics remain among the holy treasures of the Athonite skete that bears his name.

St John Mavropos, Metropolitan of Euchaïta

1100

He is commemorated today on the Slavic Calendar; for his life, see October 5, his commemoration on the Greek Calendar.

Daily readings

Epistle

weekly cycle

Romans — Romans 1.7-12

⁷To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. ⁷to all that are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

⁸First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.

⁸First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is proclaimed throughout the whole world. ⁹For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers; ⁹For God is my witness, whom I serve in my spirit in the gospel of his Son, how unceasingly I make mention of you, always in my prayers ¹⁰Making request, if by any means now at length I might have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you. ¹⁰making request, if by any means now at length I may be prospered by the will of God to come unto you. ¹¹For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; ¹¹For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; ¹²That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me. ¹²that is, that I with you may be comforted in you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine.

Gospel

weekly cycle

Matthew — Matthew 5.42-48

⁴²Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. ⁴²Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

⁴³Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

⁴³Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy: ⁴⁴But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; ⁴⁴but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; ⁴⁵That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. ⁴⁵that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. ⁴⁶For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? ⁴⁶For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? ⁴⁷And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? ⁴⁷And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same? ⁴⁸Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. ⁴⁸Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.