The church celebrates the memories of St. John Moschos and St. Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, on this day. Greetings also on the First Sunday in Great Lent and the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which marks the restoration of the veneration of icons in Byzantium under Empress Theodora and her son, Emperor Michael III, in 843. Any Jordanville seminarian who spent the first week of Great Lent going to Holy Trinity Cathedral must have at least vague memories of St. John Moschos. There is a substantial number of readings by the bishop during this week from St. John’s Spiritual Meadow. These writings became a point of reference for some of our clergy and churchmen when thinking about contemporary ecclesiastical and spiritual challenges. Written at the beginning of the seventh century, they are valuable historical documents of Byzantine Palestine (roughly modern-day Israel) in the decades before it fell to the first Islamic Caliphate. Saint John took his vows in the monastery of St. Theodosios, which still stands near Jerusalem. He traveled extensively with his disciple Sophronios. After the invasion of Syria by Khosrow II, Sts. John and Sophronios headed to Alexandria, where they became assistants to Patriarch St. John V (III) the Merciful in his efforts to reintroduce Chalcedonian Orthodoxy to Egypt. During the Patriarchate of St. John, the number of Orthodox churches in Egypt increased from 7 to 70. St. John’s biographer speaks of many “villages, churches and monasteries, which these good shepherds [John and Sophronios – S.K.] tried to take out of the mouths of wild animals” (the followers of Monophysite Patriarch Severus of Antioch, d. 538, whom Oriental Orthodox consider a saint). In the biographies of St. John, it is reported that after the Persian sack of Jerusalem in 614, due to the growing Persian threat to Alexandria, he and Sophronios, together with St. John the Merciful, crossed over from Egypt to Cyprus. From there, St. John stopped off on the Mediterranean islands, went to Rome, and died there around 620. His disciple St. Sophronios, fulfilling the will of his abba, took his body back to Palestine to bury it at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. They reached Palestine, but could not proceed further due to an uprising of Samaritans. Thus, St. John was buried at St. Theodosios Laura. In 628, Emperor Heraklios defeated the Persians, only to have a short respite before suffering a defeat from the Army of Islam in 636 at the Yarmuk River (in modern-day Iraq). In 634, in the window between the two events, the learned monk Sophronios was elected Patriarch of Jerusalem with the approval of the imperial authorities. Although both Heraklios and Patriarch Sergios of Constantinople professed the heretical doctrine of monothelitism (the teaching that the God-man Christ only had one will), St. Sophronios did not subscribe to it, as the doctrine was designed to appease the Monophysites. But he disputed Orthodox theology in its akribeia (exactness) even after the emperor and patriarch prohibited talking about Christ’s energies in their Psephos. St. Sophronios saw the capture of Roman lands by the “Sacarens” as a punishment for this doctrinal idiosyncrasy. In late 636 or early 637, he negotiated with Caliph Omar the surrender of the Holy City. The same year, St. Sophronios passed away. The struggle against monothelitism was continued by another friend of St. John Moschos and St. Sophronios: St. Maximus the Confessor. In dealing with a situation when the Roman Empire was losing territories, in the words of David Olster, St. Sophronios offered hope in his sermons “by disassociating the empire from the Christian community and creating a new Christian identity that was Roman no longer.” Christians in Russia after the revolution had to go through the same process rapidly. The same was never fully accomplished in the diaspora and now, with a strong resurgent imperial mindset in Russia, things will be getting even more complicated. Another legacy of St. Sophronios is connected with this period of the church calendar we are going through. It is the life of St. Mary of Egypt which is read at the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete on the Fifth Week of Great Lent. Sources: S.S.Kim, “Ioann Moskh,” Pravoslavnaia Entsiklopedia. Booth, Phil, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Transformation of the Classical Heritage Book 52). University of California Press, 2013. | 
