The Fifth Sunday and the Great Canon: Mary’s Liturgical Enthronement

Mary of Egypt holds a place in Great Lent that belongs to no other saint. She owns the Fifth Sunday of the Fast, and on the Thursday of the Fifth Week — “the Standing” — her Life is read in full in church alongside the complete Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. Hers is the only saint’s vita appointed for liturgical reading in the Orthodox year. This file traces that enthronement: the Sunday and its hymnography, the Thursday “Standing,” the logic of pairing the great canon of repentance with the great icon of repentance, and the troparion and kontakion the Church sings to her.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Fifth Sunday of Great Lent

The Lenten Triodion assigns each Sunday of the Fast a commemoration that carries the season forward; the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent is the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, 1978; see Orthodoxy Guide: Great Lent — The Sundays of Great Lent). Coming after the Sunday of St. John Climacus and immediately before Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday, it sets the supreme example of radical repentance before the faithful at the very moment the Fast turns toward Holy Week. The placement is pastoral: as the long discipline nears its end and weariness sets in, the Church holds up not a theologian or a hierarch but a converted harlot who spent forty-seven years in the desert — the proof that no one has repented too late or struggled too long.

The Orthodoxy guide records the commemoration in its survey of the Lenten Sundays: “Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt — Fifth Sunday. Commemorates the great penitent who lived in the desert … after a life of sin, a model of radical repentance” (Orthodoxy Guide: Great Lent).

The Thursday of the Great Canon: “The Standing”

The more remarkable observance falls on the Thursday of the Fifth Week (served, in parish practice, on the Wednesday evening) — the service known in Slavic usage as the Standing of St. Mary of Egypt (Stoyanie Marii Yegipetskoi) or simply “the Standing.” Two things happen at this one Matins. First, the entire Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete — all 250 troparia, which during the first week of Lent had been distributed across four evenings — is sung in a single service (see Orthodoxy Guide: Great Lent — The Great Canon (complete reading)). Second, the Life of St. Mary of Egypt is read in full, divided into two parts: the first after the kathisma, the second after the third ode of the Canon (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, 1978). The service can run three hours or more.

This is Mary’s unique honor. The reading of an entire saint’s Life within a liturgical service — not a brief synaxarion notice but the whole vita — is appointed for no other saint in the Orthodox year. The Life is, in this precise sense, the only one liturgically enthroned.

When the Practice Arose

The pairing of the Life with the Canon at the Standing is not original to the service but entered the Byzantine Typikon in the high Middle Ages. The Typikon scholarship locates the change between two eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic rules: the Typikon of Alexios the Studite (early eleventh century) does not yet appoint the reading of the Life, while the Typikon of Evergetis (late eleventh / early twelfth century) does — so the liturgical reading of Mary’s vita is, in its present form, an eleventh-to-twelfth-century development (Getcha, The Typikon Decoded, 2012; cf. the survey in OrthoChristian, “The Standing of St. Mary of Egypt,” which tracks the same Studite-to-Evergetis transition). This is consistent with the broader history of the Byzantine office, which took its developed Lenten shape through exactly these Studite and Evergetine reforms.

The Logic of the Pairing: Canon of Repentance, Icon of Repentance

Why Mary, and why with Andrew’s Canon? The answer the tradition gives is a matched pair. The Great Canon is the supreme poem of repentance — a sweeping meditation that runs through the whole of Scripture, from Adam to the Apostles, turning each figure into a mirror for the penitent soul, with the refrain “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me” (Orthodoxy Guide: Great Lent — Clean Week and the Great Canon). The Life of Mary of Egypt is the supreme narrative of repentance — a single soul carried from the depths to sanctity. As the liturgical commentators put it, Mary “manifested in her life the ideal of true and profound repentance which St. Andrew portrayed in his Canon” (cf. OrthoChristian, “The Standing of St. Mary of Egypt”; Getcha, The Typikon Decoded, 2012). The Canon supplies the theology of repentance in lyric; the Life supplies its embodiment in flesh. Together they form, on a single night near the Fast’s end, the most concentrated meditation on metanoia in the entire liturgical year.

There is, too, a thread of tradition connecting the two figures historically: St. Andrew of Crete (c. 660–740) is held to have been a disciple of the Sophronian Jerusalem milieu from which the Life came, and the early diffusion of both Canon and Life is associated with the same circle (so the liturgical tradition reports; the specific transmission is the tradition’s claim rather than independently documented history — see Methodology §3.5).

The Fifth Week as Mary’s Week

The placement is more than a single Thursday. The whole Fifth Week of Great Lent has, in effect, become Mary’s week and the week of the season’s two greatest hymnographic monuments. The Thursday “Standing” pairs her Life with Andrew’s Canon; and the Saturday of the same week is the Saturday of the Akathist, when the entire Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos — the prototype of all later akathists — is sung (Orthodoxy Guide: Great Lent — The Akathist to the Theotokos). The two are not unrelated. Mary’s own conversion was sealed before an icon of the Mother of God and sustained by the Theotokos through the desert (see Mary and the Theotokos); the kontakion of her Sunday praises her precisely for offering the Theotokos to Christ as intercessor. The Fifth Week thus binds together the great icon of repentance and the great hymn to the Mother of God who made that repentance possible — a Marian and penitential climax set just before the Fast turns to Lazarus Saturday and the road to the Cross.

The Uniqueness of the Honor

It bears stressing how singular Mary’s liturgical position is. Many saints have a Sunday or a feast; Mary has both a Lenten Sunday and a weekday “Standing.” Many saints are commemorated with a synaxarion notice — a paragraph or two read at Matins; Mary alone has her entire Life appointed for liturgical reading, in two long installments, within the year’s most solemn penitential service. The Church does not read the full Life of any apostle, martyr, or hierarch in this way. The honor is reserved for the penitent — which is itself a theological statement. The Church chooses, for this unique liturgical enthronement, not a figure of office or learning but a converted sinner, and it does so in Lent, the season in which every Christian is summoned to recognize themselves in her. To read Mary’s Life in church is to hold up a mirror; the uniqueness of the honor is the uniqueness of the Church’s wager that repentance, not achievement, is the heart of the Gospel.

The Troparion and Kontakion

The hymnography appointed for Mary’s commemoration sings her conversion in the Church’s own voice.

Troparion (Tone 8):

“In you, O Mother, was preserved with exactness what was according to the image; for you took up the Cross and followed Christ. By so doing, you taught us to disregard the flesh, for it passes away, but to care instead for the soul, since it is immortal. Therefore, O holy Mary, your spirit rejoices with the angels.”

(Troparion, Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, 1978; text per OCA liturgical propers.)

Kontakion (Tone 3):

“Having been a sinful woman, you became a Bride of Christ through repentance. Longing for the life of the angels, you defeated demons by the weapon of the Cross. Therefore, O most glorious Mary, you are a Bride of the Kingdom.”

(Kontakion, Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, 1978; text per OCA liturgical propers.)

The troparion’s “what was according to the image” (to kat’ eikona) reads Mary’s repentance as the restoration of the divine image in her — the very logic of metanoia as renewal (Orthodoxy Guide: Confession). The kontakion sings the harlot-saint paradox without embarrassment — “Having been a sinful woman, you became a Bride of Christ” — the same delight in the great sinner made great saint that runs through the whole tradition (see Metanoia Embodied: The Harlot-Saint Paradox). A distinct set of troparia, with its own acrostic, belongs to the Thursday “Standing” itself, separate from these Sunday propers (OrthoChristian, “The Standing of St. Mary of Egypt”; The Lenten Triodion).

It is worth observing how the hymnography refuses to leave Mary’s past unspoken even at the height of her praise. The kontakion opens with the bare fact — “Having been a sinful woman” — and only then turns to the glory. This is characteristic of the Lenten Triodion’s penitential honesty: it does not flatter the saint by veiling what she was, because the whole point of her commemoration is the distance traversed. The faithful are not asked to admire an unattainable purity but to recognize, in a woman who began where many of them feel themselves to be, the proof that the same grace is offered to them. The troparion’s reading of her repentance as the restoration of the divine image (to kat’ eikona) completes the logic: what sin had defaced in her, repentance restored — not by making her someone else, but by making her, at last, fully herself.

References

The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1978; South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press.
Getcha, Job. The Typikon Decoded: An Explanation of Byzantine Liturgical Practice. Trans. Paul Meyendorff. Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012.
Andrew of Crete, St. The Great Canon. Various translations.
The Life of St. Mary of Egypt. Trans. Maria Kouli. In Holy Women of Byzantium, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996.
Troparion and Kontakion for the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent (St. Mary of Egypt). Orthodox Church in America, liturgical propers (oca.org); cf. The Lenten Triodion.
“The Standing of St. Mary of Egypt.” OrthoChristian.com (used to locate the Studite-to-Evergetis Typikon transition; chronology cross-checked against Getcha, The Typikon Decoded).