The Mass of the Common of Many Martyrs, Salus autem justorum, gives the Church an Epistle that reads less like doctrine and more like an old soldier speaking to his company before a second battle: Rememoramini autem pristinos dies. “Call to mind the former days” (Heb. 10:32). The Apostle does not open with a new command. He opens with memory. He reminds the Hebrews of what they have already endured, so they will not lose their nerve for what is still coming. On the feast of St. Januarius, bishop of Benevento, beheaded with his companions at Pozzuoli around the year 305, the passage fits almost too well, as though it had been written as his epitaph.
I. Being illuminated
“Call to mind the former days, wherein, being illuminated, you endured a great fight of afflictions.”
Illuminati, in Greek phōtisthentes, is not a vague word for coming to understand something. For the early Church it was a technical name for baptism. St. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, says plainly that the washing of regeneration “is called illumination, because they who learn these things are illuminated in their understandings” (1 Apology 61). St. Gregory Nazianzen gave his great oration on baptism the same title, On Holy Lights, and calls the sacrament the illumination of the soul (Oratio 40).
The Apostle is therefore saying something sharp. The persecution did not come to the Hebrews after years of fervour, when they might be supposed ready for it. It came at once, when they were barely out of the font. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this epistle, dwells on exactly this point. They had scarcely been enlightened when the contest began, and they held firm with no long training behind them. If they could do that as novices, he asks, how can they give way now?
That is the logic of the passage. Grace received is a pledge of grace to come. The God who carried you through the first fight has not changed His mind about you.
II. A spectacle, and companions of the spectacle
The next verses describe two ways of suffering for Christ, and today’s feast shows both.
“On the one hand indeed, by reproaches and tribulations, were made a gazingstock.” The Latin is spectaculum facti, and the Greek theatrizomenoi is sharper still: “made into a theatre,” exhibited as a show. Chrysostom observes that reproach wounds many men more deeply than stripes. The body can be steeled against pain. It is much harder to be steeled against contempt, against being made ridiculous before a crowd. St. Paul had used the same image of himself: “we are made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men” (1 Cor. 4:9).
For St. Januarius the image was literal. According to the Acts preserved in the Neapolitan tradition, he and his companions were led into the amphitheatre at Pozzuoli to be torn by wild beasts before the people. The beasts, the account says, would not touch them. They were taken out and beheaded near the Solfatara, the smoking volcanic crater above the town.
“And on the other, became companions of them that were used in such sort. For you both had compassion on them that were in bands.” This is the second kind of suffering, and it is the one that actually brought Januarius to his death. The tradition holds that Sossius, a deacon of Misenum, had been imprisoned for the faith. Januarius, a bishop from a neighbouring see, went to visit him in his chains, together with his deacon Festus and his lector Desiderius. That act of compassion for a man in bonds is what exposed him to the governor. Proculus, a deacon of Pozzuoli, and two laymen, Eutyches and Acutius, protested the sentence and were condemned with them. None of them was the first target. Each of them was taken because he would not stand apart from a brother who was suffering.
Chrysostom presses this point too. Those who stand beside the afflicted share their crown, even when the blow falls on another. The Church has never counted solidarity with the persecuted as a lesser thing than being persecuted. The Epistle calls it companionship, socii, and the martyrology of today shows what it can cost.
It is fair to add, as the older hagiographers did not always do, that the Acts of St. Januarius survive in versions written long after the event and carry legendary colour. That is no reason to doubt the martyrdom. His cult at Naples is ancient and unbroken, and the Roman Martyrology names the bishop and his companions without hesitation. The famous liquefaction of the relic of his blood, recorded since 1389 and awaited in the cathedral of Naples on this very day, is a phenomenon the Church permits the faithful to venerate while pronouncing nothing on its nature. The faith rests on the martyrdom, not on the phial. St. Augustine gives the rule: Martyres veros non facit poena, sed causa, “it is not the punishment but the cause that makes true martyrs” (Enarr. in Ps. 34, s. 2).
III. A better and a lasting substance
“And took with joy the being stripped of your own goods, knowing that you have a better and a lasting substance.”
This verse is where the passage stops describing the past and diagnoses the present. The Hebrews did not endure the plundering of their property through gritted teeth. They took it cum gaudio, with joy. Why? Because they had made a calculation, and made it correctly. Meliorem et manentem substantiam: they owned something that could not be seized.
Then comes the warning, and it is the centre of the Epistle: “Do not therefore lose your confidence, which hath a great reward. For patience is necessary for you.”
The danger the Apostle fears is not a sudden apostasy under torture. It is erosion. The first fervour fades, the reward seems slow in coming, and a man who once gave up his goods with joy slowly begins to hold back. So he quotes Habakkuk: “Yet a little and a very little while, and he that is to come, will come, and will not delay. But my just man liveth by faith; but if he withdraw himself, he shall not please my soul.” The Greek word behind subtraxerit se means to shrink back, to lower the sail. It is the vice of the man who does not quite deny Christ but stops putting his full weight on Him.
IV. In your patience you shall possess your souls
The Gospel of the Mass (Luke 21:9-19) closes on the same word as the Epistle: In patientia vestra possidebitis animas vestras. “In your patience you shall possess your souls.”
St. Gregory the Great preached on this Gospel on a martyr’s feast, and his homily is read in the Breviary’s Common of Martyrs (Hom. in Evang. 35). He calls patience the root and guardian of all the virtues. He defines it precisely: patience is not a passive temperament. It is to bear the evils done to us by others with an even mind, and to bear no grudge against the one who does them. Then he says the thing that brings this feast home to people who will never see an amphitheatre. Even without the sword and the flame, he says, we can be martyrs, if we truly keep patience in our souls.
St. Cyprian, himself a bishop who went to the sword, wrote a whole treatise on this virtue, De bono patientiae, and made the same connection. The patience that endures an insult quietly is the same virtue that, in the day of trial, endures a sentence of death. It is one habit, formed in small matters and proved in great ones.
That is why the Epistle begins with memory. Januarius did not become capable of the amphitheatre at the moment he was sentenced. He was formed for it over a lifetime of smaller fidelities, and at the end he simply did the obvious thing: he went to see a brother in prison. Tertullian’s line was proved again at Pozzuoli, semen est sanguis Christianorum (Apologeticum 50). The blood shed there became the seed of a Church that has kept his name on its lips for seventeen centuries.
V. A word for practice
Few of us will be made a spectacle in an arena. All of us will, at some point, be made small in front of others for the sake of what we believe, and all of us know someone who is “in bands” in some sense: isolated, sick, disgraced, forgotten.
First, remember. Take the Apostle’s advice literally today. Call to mind a specific occasion when God carried you through something you thought you could not bear. Write it down if it helps. Confidence in the next trial is built from honest memory of the last one.
Second, visit someone in bonds. Januarius went to the prison. Find your Sossius: a person in hospital, in a nursing home, in prison, or simply cut off by grief or scandal. Visit, write, or call, this week and not in the abstract. The Epistle counts this as sharing in the martyrs’ contest.
Third, practise Gregory’s martyrdom without the sword. The next time you are slighted or made ridiculous, say nothing in return and bear no grudge. That is the exercise from which martyrs are made.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the feast.
Deus, qui nos annua sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Januarii et Sociorum ejus solemnitate laetificas: concede propitius; ut, quorum gaudemus meritis, accendamur exemplis.
“O God, who dost gladden us by the yearly festival of Thy holy Martyrs Januarius and his companions: mercifully grant that we who rejoice in their merits may be kindled by their example.”
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries, pausing on the Crowning with Thorns, where the King of Martyrs Himself was made a gazingstock and mocked as a spectacle before the soldiers.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens naturally onto two paths. The Church History path treats the Great Persecution under Diocletian, the last and fiercest assault of pagan Rome, in which Januarius and so many others fell. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the Thomistic account of fortitude and patience, and why St. Thomas calls martyrdom the most perfect act of the virtue of fortitude.
Sancte Januari, cum Sociis tuis, orate pro nobis.