The Prophets as Saints of the Church

The Old Testament prophets are not, for Orthodoxy, merely authors of ancient books but saints — venerated by name, each with a feast day, painted on the icon screen, invoked in prayer. This file sets out the fact of their veneration, an emphasis largely lost in the Christian West, and the two great Sundays before the Nativity on which the Church honors them together as those who awaited and foretold the Christ.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Saints with Feast Days

To an observer formed in Western Christianity, one of the quiet surprises of the Orthodox calendar is that the Old Testament righteous are commemorated as saints in exactly the way the martyrs and bishops are: with a fixed feast day, a troparion and kontakion, appointed readings, and an icon. The Church does not merely study the prophets; she venerates them. The prophet Elijah is kept on 20 July, Elisha on 14 June, Moses the God-seer on 4 September, Isaiah on 9 May, Jeremiah on 1 May, Ezekiel on 21 July, Daniel and the Three Holy Youths on 17 December, Jonah on 22 September, Habakkuk on 2 December, Zechariah the Sickle-Seer on 8 February, Malachi on 3 January, and King David among the Forefathers of Christ — to name only the most prominent (Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, oca.org, s.vv. the respective dates; The Menaion, the fixed-feast service books). Each of these is a saint’s day: at Vespers and Matins the prophet is hymned as a friend of God, his prophecies of Christ are drawn out, and the faithful ask his intercession.

This is a real difference of emphasis between East and West, and it is worth stating plainly and without polemic. The Roman calendar historically commemorated relatively few of the Old Testament figures liturgically — the prophets appear in the Roman Martyrology and Elijah is honored especially in the Carmelite tradition, but the dense, name-by-name veneration of the prophets as saints of the Church, with proper hymnography, is a mark of the Byzantine tradition more than the Latin (see the survey in the Liturgical Arts Journal, “The Presence of Old Testament Righteous in the Liturgical Calendar… of East and West,” 2021, noting the fuller Eastern commemoration). For the Orthodox the reason is theological: the prophets belong to the one Church of all ages. They are not figures of a superseded dispensation but members of the same body, “so great a cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), who “obtained a good report through faith” (Hebrews 11:39) and who — the Church confesses — received the preaching of the descended Christ in Hades and were led by Him into the Kingdom.

Why the Church Venerates Them

The ground of this veneration is the christological reading of the Old Testament (see What a Prophet Is). Because the prophets spoke by the Spirit of Christ and foretold His coming, they are honored as those who served the mystery of the Incarnation before it was accomplished — the friends who prepared His way across the centuries. The hymnography for their feasts is saturated with this: the prophet is praised not only for his own holiness but for having foreseen and proclaimed the Christ, so that his feast is, in a sense, a feast of expectation fulfilled. Ezekiel’s closed gate, Isaiah’s virgin, Daniel’s stone cut without hands, David’s Lord at the right hand — the prophecies themselves are sung back as the content of the prophet’s sanctity (see The Prophets in Orthodox Worship).

There is also a theology of the descent into Hades at work. Orthodox tradition holds that when Christ died and descended into Hades He preached to and delivered the righteous of the Old Covenant — the prophets and patriarchs who had awaited Him — an event depicted in the Paschal icon of the Anastasis, where Christ raises Adam and Eve and is surrounded by the kings and prophets, David and Solomon and John the Forerunner among them (see Icons and Iconoclasm; and, on the Forerunner’s own preaching in Hades, St. John the Forerunner). The prophets are thus not saints by anticipation only but saints in fact, already numbered among the redeemed; their veneration is of a piece with the veneration of the New Testament saints, because for the Church there is one communion of saints spanning both Testaments.

The Two Sundays Before the Nativity

The veneration of the prophets and Old Testament righteous reaches its liturgical climax in the two Sundays that immediately precede the feast of the Nativity of Christ, when the Church gathers the whole line of those who awaited the Messiah into a single commemoration.

The first is the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers (Kyriakē tōn Propatorōn), the second Sunday before the Nativity — the Sunday that falls between 11 and 17 December. On it the Church commemorates the ancestors of Christ according to the flesh and all the righteous of the Old Covenant: Adam and Eve, Abel, Seth, Enoch, Noah, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, and the prophets — with the Three Holy Youths and the Prophet Daniel especially prominent, since their deliverance from the furnace was read by the Fathers as a type of the Nativity and of the Church preserved unharmed in the fire (Sunday of the Forefathers, OrthodoxWiki; John Sanidopoulos, “Sunday of the Holy Forefathers of Christ,” johnsanidopoulos.com; the Gospel of the day is the parable of the Great Supper, Luke 14:16–24, read of the calling of all peoples to the Messianic banquet).

The second is the Sunday of the Holy Fathers (Kyriakē tōn Paterōn), the Sunday immediately before the Nativity — the Sunday falling between 18 and 24 December. On it the same company is commemorated, now focused through the genealogy of Christ: the appointed Gospel is the opening of St. Matthew, the “book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1–25), read so that the whole line “from Abraham through David to Joseph the Betrothed and the Theotokos” is proclaimed at the very threshold of the feast (Sunday of the Fathers, OrthodoxWiki; John Sanidopoulos, “Sunday of the Holy Fathers Before the Nativity of Christ,” johnsanidopoulos.com). The logic of the two Sundays is that the Nativity does not fall from the sky: it is the harvest of a long expectation, and the prophets who watered that expectation are honored as the feast approaches. The hymnography names them one after another — “Let us praise Daniel and the Three Youths… Isaiah who saw God, and the whole choir of the prophets” — so that the Church, before she keeps the birth of Christ, first keeps the memory of all who longed to see His day.

Closely joined to these is the Sunday after the Nativity, on which the Church commemorates the holy and righteous David the King, together with Joseph the Betrothed and James the Brother of the Lord; when there is no Sunday between 25 December and 1 January the commemoration is kept on 26 December (Commemoration of the Righteous David the King, Joseph the Betrothed, and James, OCA, oca.org). David — prophet as well as king, and the ancestor in whose “city” and “house” the Messiah was born — thus stands on both sides of the feast: among the Forefathers who awaited the Christ, and among the near kin who received Him (see David the Psalmist-Prophet).

A Communion Across the Testaments

The upshot is that Orthodoxy does not keep the Old Testament at the distance of “background.” The prophets are addressed in the second person in the services, painted at eye level on the iconostasis, and held up to the faithful as intercessors and models — men and women in whom the Spirit of Christ was already at work, and who are now, with all the saints, alive to God. The rest of this compendium follows them as the Church follows them: as saints with names and feasts, whose prophecies the Church still sings, whose tombs and traditions she has treasured (and about which she is honest — see the source-critical treatment of the Lives of the Prophets in The Prophets in Icon, Relic, and Legend), and whose seal and fulfilment she finds in John the Forerunner and, beyond him, in Christ.

See Also

References

  • Orthodox Church in America. Lives of the Saints and Troparia and Kontakia, oca.org (feast dates and propers for Elijah 20 July, Elisha 14 June, Moses 4 September, Isaiah 9 May, Jeremiah 1 May, Ezekiel 21 July, Daniel and the Three Youths 17 December, Jonah 22 September, Habakkuk 2 December, Zechariah 8 February, Malachi 3 January; the Sunday after Nativity commemoration of David).
  • “Sunday of the Forefathers” and “Sunday of the Fathers,” OrthodoxWiki (the two Sundays before Nativity; the persons commemorated; the appointed Gospels).
  • Sanidopoulos, John. “Sunday of the Holy Forefathers of Christ” and “Sunday of the Holy Fathers Before the Nativity of Christ,” johnsanidopoulos.com. (The theology and content of the two Sundays.)
  • “The Presence of Old Testament Righteous in the Liturgical Calendar and Liturgical Art of East and West.” Liturgical Arts Journal, 2021. (The comparative East–West veneration of the Old Testament righteous.)
  • The Holy Bible, KJV (Hebrews 11:39; 12:1; Luke 14:16–24; Matthew 1:1–25).