On August 24th the holy Church celebrates the memory of Eutyches. Eutyches was originally a disciple of the Apostle John the Theologian, and spent no little time at his feet, learning from him, trying to understand the things of God. Later on, he sought out the Apostle Paul, and there is a connection which is made between Eutyches and Eutychus who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, who was one who was up on the third floor of a place where St. Paul was preaching and fell asleep and fell to the ground. St. Paul threw himself upon him and said, “No, his life is still within him,” and brought him back from what would surely have been death.

Eutyches followed Paul for a while and learned many things from him, and then ended being back in the area of Ephesus where St. John the Theologian had retired to after receiving his revelation on the isle of Patmos. The first bishop that St. John consecrated was of course the famous Polycarp. But not long after, he also appointed Eutyches to be a minister of the things of God in that area. So Eutyches continued on as a priest.

Today he is also considered an apostle of sorts, even though he is not one of the Twelve and is not one of the 70 Apostles, yet his apostolic zeal has ranked him in the eyes of the Church with those who were indeed part of the 70. Eutyches struggled many, many years for the things of the Church, and eventually of course he ran into a big obstacle, as almost all of the Christians of that age did, with the pagans. His preaching was the responsibility of many in his community who wanted to see some of the pagan temples brought down, and indeed they were, directly as a result of what Eutyches said and did.

But Eutyches also struggled in a great manner to establish the Christian churches in the area at the time, but the pagans, seeing the very adverse effect his preaching was having on their existence, came at him with full force. They tried to burn him, they tried to torture him in many, many different ways, and finally they were successful in shearing off his head. So Eutyches ended his life in a glorious manner, perhaps after hearing from the Apostle John himself the fact that he was sorry that he was not going to go out of this world by martyrdom but instead laid himself down in a cross-life grave and had his body covered up all the way to the head, where he then reposed. We know this because Eutyches was one of the ones responsible for the burial of St. John. But St. John obviously knew that many of the other apostles, if not all of them, had met their deaths in martyrdom, yet the Lord’s will was not for that to happen to the glorious Theologian.

Eutyches, though, as one of the successors of John, was probably anxious to find an end in that regard, because he had to know, amidst all the struggles that he encountered with the pagans and all of the abuse that they heaped upon him and all of the dangers that they posed for him and his flock, that that was going to be the only way out of this life for him, and indeed that proved [to be] the case. There are a plethora of people that are mentioned in connection with the holy Scriptures that we don’t know a lot about, yet this connection with St. Eutyches and St. Paul, and then before and after St. Paul with St. John, is one that is really intriguing, because it makes us wonder: how many others were there that perhaps get just a cursory mention in the Bible, yet the Church has remembered further on down the line in terms of the things that they did and the activities that they pursued for our Lord Jesus Christ?

You could have no better instructors in the Gospel than John the Theologian and Paul the Apostle, so maybe it was inevitable that by taking those teachings to heart, those God-uttered words of these holy personages, that martyrdom was going to be the logical conclusion for a life that was so dedicated to the propagation of the holy faith of our Lord Jesus Christ. By his prayers, may we all learn the same way he did, and even if our ends don’t take us to martyrdom, may we be found worthy in our Lord’s eyes by the way that we live our life in his name, that we may also achieve a glorious end in heaven.