Ode 6. The Irmos.

Kontakion. Tone 1. By Romanos.

‘The Elder having seen with his eyes, the salvation that had come to the people, cried aloud to you, ‘O Christ, who come from God, ‘You are my God!’’

‘You have been set up in Sion as a stumbling stone and rock of offence for the disobedient, unbreakable salvation of believers.

‘Truly bearing the imprint of him who begot you before the ages, through compassion for mortals you have now put on their weakness.

‘I have worshipped you, Son of the Most High, Son of a Virgin, God become a little child. Now release me in peace.’

You sanctified a virgin womb by your birth,

And fittingly blessed Symeon’s hands;

You have come now too and saved us, O Christ God.

But give peace to your commonwealth in times of war,

And strengthen its Rulers, whose friend you are,

Only Lover of mankind.

Let us run to the Mother of God if we wish to see her Son

Being brought to Symeon.

From heaven the Bodiless Ones are amazed as they look on him and say,

‘Wondrous and marvellous, incomprehensible, ineffable are the things we now see,

For the One who created Adam is being carried as a babe;

The uncontainable is contained in the arms of the elder;

He who is in the uncircumscribed bosom of his Father

Is willingly circumscribed in flesh, but not in godhead,

The only Lover of mankind’.

On the 2nd of the month, the Meeting of our Lord, Jesus Christ, when the righteous Symeon received him into his arms.

The hands of Symeon that carry you

The Father’s bosom typify, my Christ.

Forty days having passed since the incarnation of the Lord’s salvation, the nativity from the Ever-Virgin without husband, our Lord Jesus Christ was brought on this most honoured day into the temple by his all-pure Mother and the just Joseph, in accordance with the shadowy letter of the Law. When the aged Symeon, the Elder, to whom it had been revealed by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death until he had seen the Lord’s Christ, had received him in his arms and given thanks and glory to God, he cried out, ‘Now, Master, you release your servant according to your word’. And after his great joys he departed from life here, having received heavenly and unending in exchange for those of earth. This assembly is held in the revered house of our immaculate Lady, Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary, which is in Vlachernae.

On the same day, Commemoration of the holy Martyr, Agathodoros.

To Agathσdoros, a gift to God

Through blood, I give a gift out of my words.

As a young man he was brought before the Governor of Tyana, and because of his confession of Christ, he was flogged. Then he was placed on a burning brazier. His tongue was cut out with a knife. His teeth were pulled out with forceps. The skin of his face was removed with a razor. His thighs and legs were smashed. His sides were pierced through with a pole. The membrane of his brain received red hot skewers. And so he yielded his spirit to God.

To God the glory and the might to the ages. Amen.