11Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians. Our heart is enlarged.
12You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections.
13Now in return—I speak as to my children—you also open your hearts.
14Don’t be unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what fellowship do righteousness and iniquity have? Or what fellowship does light have with darkness?
15What agreement does Christ have with Belial? Or what portion does a believer have with an unbeliever?
16What agreement does a temple of God have with idols? For you are a temple of the living God. Even as God said, “I will dwell in them and walk in them. I will be their God and they will be my people.”
Mark 1.23-28
(Gospel)
23Immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out,
24saying, “Ha! What do we have to do with you, Jesus, you Nazarene? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God!”
25Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet, and come out of him!”
26The unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.
27They were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? What can this new doctrine be? For with authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!”
28The report of him went out immediately into all the region of Galilee and its surrounding area.
Commemorations
Hieromartyr Eutyches (1st c.)
He was a disciple and friend of St John the Theologian, and worked with the Apostle Paul, and is himself named as an Apostle though he is not one of the Seventy. He travelled widely in the ministry of the Gospel of Christ, suffering many imprisonments and tortures. He died in Sebastia, the place of his birth. The Prologue says that he was beheaded, the Great Horologion that he reposed in peace “in deep old age.”
Trans. Rel. Peter, Metr. Kiev
See December 21 for his life.
New Hieromartyr Kosmas of Aitolia, Equal-to-the-Apostles (1779)
This recent Equal to the Apostles was born in Mega Dendron (Great Tree) in Aetolia. He became a monk on Mt Athos, where he lived and prayed for many years. But he was troubled by the ignorance of the Gospel that had fallen on many of the Orthodox people, living under the oppression of the Ottoman Turks. He went to Constantinople, where he studied the rhetorical arts and received the blessing of Patriarch Seraphim II to preach the Gospel. He travelled throughout Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Albania, preaching at every town he visited. Often not only Greeks but many Muslims would come to hear him, so great was his reputation for holiness. Though he always sought the blessing of the local bishop and the local Turkish governor before he preached in an area, his strong condemnations of dishonest business practices aroused the enmity of Orthodox Christian and Jewish merchants, who falsely accused him to the authorities. He was strangled by the Turks and thrown into a river in Albania, but his wonderworking relics were preserved. He reposed at the age of sixty-five.