By Fr. George Dorbarakis
This Holy Martyr lived in the time of the emperors Maximian and Maximus and came from Amaseia of Pontus, from a village called Choumialon. As soon as he was enrolled among the ranks of the Tirones — that is, the newly-recruited soldiers — under the authority of the officer Brynkas, he was examined by him and confessed that Christ is God, while he mocked the objects of pagan reverence as lifeless idols and works of human hands.
And when he was given the opportunity, he did not remain inactive, but conceived and carried out the greatest of deeds: he burned the idol of the so-called mother of the gods, as the pagans madly claim. For this reason he was arrested, and after confessing that he himself was responsible for the arson, first he was scraped while suspended with iron claws, then he was thrown into a furnace of fire, and there he was perfected in martyrdom.
His synaxis is celebrated on the Saturday of the first week of the Fast, when his miracle of the kollyva also took place and he thus saved the Orthodox people from the defiled eating of food sacrificed to idols.
The overwhelming majority of the Church’s hymns today refer to what the name of Saint Theodore declares: gift of God. Saint Theophanes, the hymnographer of his service, constantly stresses that the Saint is “named after divine gifts,” that he “was granted as a gift of God” to people, that he is both “in reality and in name a bearer of divine gifts.” Indeed, already in the first sticheron of Vespers we read:
“Christ granted you to the inhabited world as a gift that brings riches, O Theodore, because God the Benefactor accepted as your gift your precious blood, which was poured out for Him and offered to Him with zeal of piety.”
In other words, according to Theophanes, Theodore is the return-gift of God to the Church, since God received him as a gift and then offered him to all.
The observation of the Holy Hymnographer is very important: whatever we offer to God in love, God does not keep for Himself, but offers it back to us multiplied as a benefaction for us ourselves.
Do we offer Him our prayer? He transforms it into His grace for the healing of our soul and body — and not only for us but also for the whole world.
Do we offer Him — always, of course, with His own strengthening — our obedience as the placing of our will into His will? He takes our obedience and makes it His obedience toward us.
Therefore, according to our faith, there exists no greater benefaction to the human race than the presence of the saints as people offered to God. The saints are the benefactors of humanity, even if the world understands nothing about this. God knows them, accepts them, and makes them our intercessors for the overcoming of whatever difficulties we have in the world.
And the greatest return-gift of God to the world for our greatest gift to Him — the Panagia herself — is His coming to us. That is, she, we always emphasize, by the grace of God offered herself to Him, and He received her and made from her His flesh in order to come into the world as man.
“Your own of Your own we offer unto You, in all and for all.”
Therefore whatever we do for God’s sake is not “lost” time, as some outside the faith believe, but the most precious time of our life. As we said, it returns to us — and indeed multiplied — from our Lord.
We dwell on this truth because this is precisely what Saint Theophanes chiefly emphasizes. And his troparia are very comforting, because they refer to all the dimensions of human life — especially the sorrows and trials we undergo — in which Saint Theodore, as an instrument of God, comes as savior and helper.
“By the God-given grace of your miracles, O Martyr Theodore,” he notes for example, “you extend it to all who run to you in faith, through which we praise you saying: You ransom captives, heal the sick, enrich the poor, and save those at sea.” (Doxastikon of Vespers)
“Deliver me by your intercessions from the affliction that grips me, O martyr of Christ, smoothing all the roughness of my life.” (Ode 3)
And even more, according to Theophanes, Saint Theodore, besides intervening in the external difficulties of life, also intervenes in the internal ones — that is, the psychological and spiritual difficulties — whether they come from demonic attacks or from our own passions. In one of his most beautiful troparia of the sixth ode he observes:
“Having become a most fervent champion of piety and a stern denouncer of the delusion of idols, banish from my soul the phantasms of demons and the images of the passions.”
Seeking the help of Saint Theodore for all the circumstances of our life thus becomes a one-way path (the only course). We have a most powerful intercessor, given to us by our God.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
