By Fr. George Dorbarakis
1. Saint Eustathios the Great Martyr was a military commander in the city of Rome, during the reign of the Emperor Trajan. He was called Plakidas, and his wife was Tatiana. He was very wealthy and, although a pagan, he gave alms to the poor with great joy. Once, when he had gone out hunting, a deer appeared to him, which he began to pursue. Just as he was about to catch it, he saw the honorable Cross of Christ between its antlers, while from the antlers came a voice saying: ‘O Plakidas, why are you pursuing Me? I am Christ.’ After this astonishing event, he believed in Christ and was baptized, and then the warfare against him by the man-slaying devil began: he lost his wealth, saw his wife taken captive, his children were carried away by wild beasts, and he himself found himself in great poverty. God, however, permitted him to find his wife and children again, and also allowed the emperor to seek him out and restore him to his former office. After all these things, the time of his martyrdom came. For he was compelled to sacrifice to the idols, something he immediately refused to do; and for this reason he was thrown into a bronze bull heated by fire, by which martyrdom he also brought his life to an end.
2. Our Church first draws a parallel between Saint Eustathios and the Apostle Paul: just as Paul received a calling from Christ, who appeared to him in a vision while he was persecuting Christians and called him to become a Christian, so too Eustathios received a calling from Him, though through the deer he was pursuing, by which He likewise called him to follow Him. The Hymnographer makes this connection many times: “Your calling, O all-blessed one, was not from men, but Christ called you from heaven, as He once called Paul.” This particular manner of calling also, of course, recalls Saint Constantine. He too was called to turn toward Christianity through the vision of the Cross that God granted him, and indeed with the inscription: “By this conquer.” This is not, we might say, some “scandalous” favoritism on the part of God toward certain people. For although God does not call all people in a similarly direct and astonishing manner, He truly calls everyone, within the bounds of His infinite love, to turn toward Him. The Lord Himself affirmed this: “No one can come to Me,” He said, “unless My Father who sent Me draws him.” Thus, no one becomes a Christian entirely on his own. Only the manner in which a person is called by God differs. God is not a “respecter of persons.”
The Church Hymnographer, however, does not compare Saint Eustathios only with the Apostle Paul. Astonished by all that the Saint endured—the loss of his wife and children, the loss of his property and positions—he recalls the parallel from the Old Testament, the life of the much-suffering Job: “You appeared, O Eustathios, as Job did.” He therefore calls him a new and second Job—“Eustathios, the second Job”—because he too, like the first Job, said in faith concerning everything he suffered: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” To endure such sufferings and to glorify God constitutes the utmost expression of true faith and true patience. It means that you have “placed” your entire existence and your life in the hands of God. The Hymnographer goes even further in what might be considered an exaggeration: he regards Saint Eustathios as greater even than Job: “…truly surpassing Job in virtue, together with your wife and children.” And he is not wrong. For Job, a person of the Old Testament, at a certain point “buckles” and “takes issue” with God, unable to understand what he is suffering. And, on the other hand, he has his wife urging him toward blasphemy. With Saint Eustathios this does not happen: he patiently endures to the end without wavering in his faith in the slightest. The Hymnographer calls him a “pillar of steadfastness” and “unshaken in trials,” having as fellow combatants with him his holy wife Theopiste and his holy children, all of them martyrs of Christ.
What brings Saint Eustathios’ virtue and patience to their culmination, but at the same time places us now in “temptation,” is the Lord’s response to the sufferings that His Saint had endured: “Therefore, at the end of your struggles, as the prize of victory, He granted you the shedding of your blood”! For this reason, the Hymnographer says, after all that you endured in your life, Eustathios, as the final stage of your struggles, the Lord gave you, as the prize of victory, to shed your blood for Him! It is a “temptation” for us, as we said, to follow what the Hymnographer says as he contemplates the Saint’s life: to undergo so many sufferings, to endure them, and to receive as the prize for all this the martyrdom of blood as well! If this does not constitute a paradox for human reason, then we do not know what else to call it. But it is a paradox for human reason. For within the framework of God’s logic, things are understood differently: this is usually how God rewards His genuine servants—by granting them the grace of martyrdom. That is, by leading them to follow precisely in His footsteps. For Christ our Lord was “rewarded” in the same way by God the Father: to ascend the Cross! And, of course, this also constitutes the resurrection of humanity. The great Eustathios was granted the grace to live precisely as Christ did, through His grace, of course. And he enjoys the presence of Christ, together with his loved ones, abundantly in the Kingdom of God.
This “methodology” of God, which we observe in Christ and His Saints, had already been announced in the Old Testament. The Prophet Isaiah, referring to the Messiah and “seeing” His weariness and exhaustion from the sins of humanity, presents God as “answering” His just complaint that He has grown weary by entrusting Him with a new mission, which will bring Him to His Passion. We no longer know what to say. Before the mysteries of God’s counsels, the only thing we can do is bow the knee of heart and body and, in faith, accept the manner in which our God acts, which is so often incomprehensible to us. Yet we understand His love completely.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
