March: Day 1:
Holy Venerable Martyr Eudokia the Samaritan
(On the Benefit of Remembering Death)
By Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko
Holy Venerable Martyr Eudokia the Samaritan
(On the Benefit of Remembering Death)
By Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko
I. The Holy Venerable Martyr Eudokia, whose memory is celebrated today, lived at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century. She was born in the Phoenician city of Heliopolis (now Baalbek), was a Samaritan by origin and faith and was distinguished by her rare beauty. Drawn into the vice of debauchery, she captivated many with her beauty and through this acquired enormous wealth. But God foresaw the possibility of saving Eudokia and led her to salvation. A Christian lived in the same house with Eudokia, only a thin partition separated their dwellings. A certain monk Germanos, returning from a pilgrimage, stopped to spend the night with this Christian. The monk, according to his pious custom, woke up at midnight and prayed, sat down and began to read the Holy Scriptures loudly. He read about the Last Judgment, the blessedness of the righteous and the torment of sinners. From behind the partition, Eudokia heard the reading, the grace of God touched the heart of the sinner, she recognized her sinful state and shuddered at the thought that she, as a sinner, after death, which could end her life at any moment, would face the terrible judgment of God and eternal torment. Early in the morning, Eudokia invited Germanos to her and asked him to help her avoid hellish torment. Germanos advised her to accept baptism, give away all the property that had been acquired through sin, and retire to a monastery. This is what Eudokia did. In the monastery, she devoted all her strength to the labors and feats of monastic life. She was soon made abbess of the monastery. She labored as a saint. Eudokia lived in the monastery for 56 years and converted many pagans to Christ, for which she was beheaded by order of the city governor Vikentios, joyfully giving up her spirit, purified by repentance and a pious life, to Christ God.
II. What, if not the reflection on death, inspired by pious reading, and the General Judgment of God following death, very terrible for sinners and joyful for the righteous, sobered Eudokia from her wicked life and turned her to the path of saving repentance?
a) In order to prove that every person needs to think about death not too late, it is enough to use the ordinary rule of prudence. It requires that we try, as far as possible, to foresee future events that are especially important or difficult for us, and to consider and use in advance the means and methods of meeting them with benefit for ourselves, or at least with safety. The farmer thinks about the harvest before sowing, and adapts the sowing to receiving the most abundant harvest possible. In summer he thinks about winter, and is concerned how to fill the poverty of winter with the abundance of summer. Does not everyone need to think and care more about how not to miss the summer of life and to prepare what is needed for the barren and severe winter of death, how to produce a good and reliable sowing in this mortal life, so that at the decisive time of resurrection and judgment, to reap, as Saint John of Damascus says, the grains of everlasting nourishment, or, if you prefer, so that we ourselves may germinate, grow, blossom and ripen into good wheat, which the reaping angels will gather into the heavenly granaries.
b) But we often allow ourselves to be careless in observing the rules of prudence, thinking that a certain carelessness for a time is not a disaster. Therefore, it is necessary to prove to you more urgently how necessary the thought of death is for us, and how dangerous it is to neglect and lose it. It is so necessary that not only earthly, mortal life, but also heavenly, immortal life could not stand without the thought of death. God created man in perfection, worthy of the all-perfect Creator; introduced him into the paradise of sweetness; gave him the fruit of the tree of life for incorruption; protected him from the dangerous Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by the commandment not to eat of this fruit. But this was not enough. Paradise life would not be safe: to protect it, it was necessary to appoint a formidable guard - the thought of death. "In that day in which you eat of it, you will surely die" (Gen. 2:17), said the Lord, and the life of Paradise was safe, as long as the thought of death stood near it. But as soon as the original murderer managed to remove the thought of death from people with his cunning: “You will not surely die” (Gen. 3:4), he immediately killed the life of Paradise with sin.
What happened to Adam, it is natural that it should happen to us, because we are the natural heirs of Adam, unless grace and faith make us heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. Will a man, hereditarily inclined to sin, be more firm against temptation than a man who is still sinless; tempted to sin, if he rejects the help that was necessary for this? Of course not! So if you strengthen and protect yourself with a prudent and pious thought about death, as with a vigilant guard, then, without a doubt, it will help you to protect yourself, although not entirely from death, which through Adam's transgression entered the world and all men, but from everything that makes death terrible, disastrous, death in the full sense. However if, neglecting the thought of death, you will rush past it only for sensual pleasures, for earthly acquisitions, for the dreams of your imagination, then finally, instead of fear from one thought of death, which you fled, you will suddenly and inevitably meet with the horrors of real death, not only physical death, which is more a sign of death than death itself, but also a second death, spiritual, eternal, "where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:44).
III. From this reflection the question may arise: will the thought of death, which God Himself once placed as a fence against the invasion of sin and death into the world, be sufficiently strong and useful, when sin and death have already entered the world and reign in it? To this the pious Old Testament sage gives us a decisive answer, who says: "In all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin" (Sirach 7:36).
Through the prayers of the Holy Venerable Martyr Eudokia, may the Lord strengthen in our souls the saving memory of death.
Source: A Complete Annual Cycle of Short Teachings, Composed for Each Day of the Year. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
