Daily Devotional

Scripture Readings

Paschalion — Movable Calendar

The Saturday of the Third Week of the Great Fast

Epistle

The Reading is from the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Hebrews [§ 325]. Brethren:

10 ³²Remind yourselves of the former days in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great contest of sufferings: ³³partly, being made a show of both by reproaches and affliction; and partly, having become partners of those who conducted themselves thus. ³⁴For ye also sympathized with those in bonds and ye yourselves accepted the seizure of your possessions with joy, knowing in yourselves that ye have in the heavens a better and abiding possession. ³⁵Do not begin therefore to cast away your boldness which hath great recompense. ³⁶For ye have need of patience, that, after ye do the will of God, ye might receive for yourselves the promise. ³⁷“For yet a very little while, the One Who cometh will come, and will not delay [cf. Hab. 2:3]. ³⁸“Now the just shall live by faith; and if one should draw himself back, My soul hath no pleasure in him [cf. Hab. 2:4].”

Another Reading for Saturday of the Third Week of the Great Fast in Commemoration of the Departed

The Reading is from the First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians [§ 270].

4 ¹³Brethren, we do not wish you to be ignorant concerning those who have fallen asleep, that ye may not be grieving, even as the rest who have no hope. ¹⁴For if we believe that Jesus died and is risen, so also those who fell asleep through Jesus will God bring with Him. ¹⁵For we say this to you by the word of the Lord, that we the living, the ones remaining over until the coming of the Lord, in no wise shall precede those who fell asleep. ¹⁶For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout of command, with a voice of an archangel, and with a trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. ¹⁷Then we the living, the ones remaining over, shall be carried off together with them in clouds to a meeting of the Lord in the air, and so shall we always be with the Lord.

Gospel

The Reading is from the Holy Gospel according to Saint Mark [§ 8]. At that time:

2 ¹⁴As Jesus passed by, He saw Levi, the son of Alphæos, sitting at the custom-house, and saith to him, “Follow thou Me.” And he rose up and followed Him. ¹⁵And it came to pass, as He was reclining at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners also were reclining together at table with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many, and they followed Him. ¹⁶And after the scribes and the Pharisees saw Him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they were saying to His disciples, “Why is it that He eateth and drinketh with the tax collectors and sinners?” ¹⁷And Jesus, having heard it, saith to them, “They who are strong have no need of a physician, but they who are ill; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Commemoration of the Departed

The Reading is from the Holy Gospel according to Saint John [§ 16]. The Lord said to the Jews who had come to Him:

5 ²⁴“Verily, verily, I say to you, that the one who heareth My word and believeth the One Who sent Me hath everlasting life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed over out of death into life. ²⁵“Verily, verily, I say to you, that an hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they who hear shall live. ²⁶“For even as the Father hath life in Himself, so He also gave to the Son to have life in Himself, ²⁷“and He also gave to Him authority to execute judgment. That He is Son of Man, ²⁸“cease marvelling at this; for an hour is coming in which all those in the graves shall hear His voice, ²⁹“and shall go forth—they who did good things to a resurrection of life, but they who practised bad things to a resurrection of condemnation. ³⁰“I am not able to do anything of Myself. Even as I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the One Who sent Me, the Father.”

Menaion — Fixed Calendar

The commemoration of the holy Martyr Conon of Isauria.

No readings given.

Lives of the Saints (Prologue)

March 18th – Civil Calendar
March 5th – Church Calendar

1. The Holy Martyr Conon of Isauria.

Conon was instructed in the Christian Faith and baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity by the Archangel Michael himself, and he was accompanied by this archangel of God right up to his death. He was so enlightened and fortified by grace of the Holy Spirit that his heart was kept from all things earthly and clave to the spiritual and heavenly. When his parents forced him to marry, he, on the first evening, took a candle and put it under a vessel, then asked his bride: ‘Which is better, light or darkness?’ She answered: ‘Light,’ and he then began to speak to her of the Christian Faith, and of the spiritual life as better and finer than the physical. He succeeded in bringing first her and then his parents to the Christian Faith, and he and his wife lived as brother and sister. His wife and parents soon died, and he withdrew himself entirely from the world and gave himself to prayer, fasting and pondering on God. He performed great wonders, which brought many to Christianity. Among other wonders, evil spirits were forced to serve him. During a persecution he was arrested and tortured, and stabbed all over with knives. The sick anointed themselves with his blood and were healed. He lived for two further years in his own town, and went to the Lord. This wonderful saint lived and suffered in the second century.

2. The Holy Martyr Conon the Gardener.

From Nazareth, he was mild and virtuous, and pleasing to God in all things. During the persecution under Decius he was tortured for Christ, but he remained firm in the Faith and sharply denounced the judges for their folly. With nails through his legs, this good and virtuous saint was bound behind the prince’s chariot and was dragged on and on, until he was utterly spent. Then he made his last prayer to God and gave his soul into His keeping, in 251.

3. Our Holy Father Hesychios the Faster.

He was born near Bursa in the eighth century, but withdrew to a mountain called the hill of Maion, a place with an evil reputation for diabolical apparitions. He built himself a hut there, and a church dedicated to St. Andrew, and also made himself a garden which he cultivated in order to live by his own toil. Miracles were worked through his prayers. He foretold that there would be a women’s monastery in that place after his death. A month before he died, he foretold the day and hour of his death, and at midnight on the day foretold, people saw his hut illumined with an unusual light, and when they came to it, they found him dead. He was buried in the church of St. Andrew, but later Theophylact, the bishop of Amaseia, took him to the town of Amaseia. He departed this life peacefully and went to the kingdom of his God in 790. (In the Greek Synaxarion, he is commemorated on March 6th.)

4. Our Holy Father Mark the Ascetic.

An ascetic and wonder-worker, he was made a monk at the age of forty by his teacher, St. John Chrysostom. Mark spent sixty more years in the Nitrian desert in fasting, prayer and the writing of instructive books. He knew the whole of the holy Scriptures by heart. He was very merciful, and wept for the distress of any one of God’s creatures. He was once weeping for the blind whelp of a hyena when the whelp received its sight. In gratitude, the mother hyena brought him a sheepskin, and the saint forbade the hyena in the future to slaughter the sheep of poor people. He received communion at the hands of an angel. His homilies on the spiritual law, on repentance, on sobriety and so forth fall into the first rank of ecclesiastical literature; the great Patriarch Photius himself held them in high esteem.

FOR CONSIDERATION

Why do some people, well-educated, baptized as Christians, fall away from Christianity into philosophy and learned theories, alleging them to be something truer than Christianity? For two main reasons: either from an utterly superficial knowledge of Christianity, or from sin. A superficial knowledge of Christ rejects Him, and sin flees from Christ like a felon from judgement. Superficial and guilty Christians have often become as bitter enemies of Christianity as are pagans. To the superficial and the guilty it is more comfortable to bathe in the shallow pool of human thought than in the dangerous depths of Christ. Those who sincerely set themselves to follow Christ are constantly invited by Christ to a greater and greater depth, as He once said to the Apostle Peter: ‘Launch out into the deep.’ St. Mark the Ascetic writes that one understands the law of God insofar as one fulfills His commandments. ‘Ignorance urges a man to speak against that which is helpful, and insolence breeds vice.’

Daily Scripture Readings taken from The Orthodox New Testament, translated and published by Holy Apostles Convent, Buena Vista, Colorado, copyright © 2000, used with permission, all rights reserved.

Daily Prologue Readings taken from The Prologue of Ochrid, by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic, translated by Mother Maria, published by Lazarica Press, Birmingham, England, copyright © 1985, all rights reserved. Edited by Dormition Skete.