Subdeacon Timothy Zelinski
Uncovering of the Relics of St Job of Pochaev
Aug. 28 / Sep. 10, 2025
Holy Trinity Monastery
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!
Dear brothers and sisters,
Today we gathered to celebrate the memory of our heavenly patron, St Job of Pochaev. He is the patron saint of the Church we are praying in. He is the patron saint of this monastic brotherhood. He is the patron saint of our publishing house. Indeed, he is the patron saint of all those who are called to preserve the Orthodox faith anywhere the True Faith is small, practiced by a small few, who live amongst enemies of the faith, in the “valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 22:4)
Words fail us to give St Job the honor he has gained in the sight of God. Sadly, however, very few Orthodox Christians outside Russia have ever heard of St Job. So, it behooves to muster up whatever feeble words we can to speak about this great saint.
To find these words, it would be best to begin with his name. St Job was born as John Zhelezo around the 1551. The surname Zhelezo literally means “iron”, and Divine providence would prove true in giving him this family name, for St Job himself became an iron bulwark against the attacks of the enemy of mankind. Further, we can see that his life recapitulates that of King David, who speaks of his struggle against Goliath in the 151st psalm, “I was small among my brethren, and the youngest in my father’s house… My brethren were tall and fair, but the Lord took no pleasure in them. I went forth to meet the Philistine, and he cursed me by his idols. But I took the sword from him and cut off his head; and I took away reproach from the sons of Israel.”
According to early accounts of his life, he was small in stature, yet strong and vigorous in soul. As a boy, he loved prayerful solitude, and thus at a mere 10 years of age, he fled from his parents’ home to a nearby monastery. He served the brethren so meekly, o faithfully and with such diligence, that the abbot made an extraordinary exemption to the canonical rules for the reception of monastics to the brotherhood, and tonsured him to the lesser schema with the name Job after only two years in the monastery. Young Father Job was only 12 years old. The abbot truly made this exception with wisdom and foresight, for St Job lived the remaining 88 years of his life in the angelic state, passing from glory to glory. Navigating through all of the wiles of youth, he was ordained to the priesthood at the canonical age of 30 — as if to correct the early “infraction” of his speedy tonsure, though he was surely worthy of that honor long before. Shortly thereafter. he was tonsured into the Great Schema, and received again the name John, in honor of the Forerunner, receiving a double blessing from the Baptist of Christ.
Rightly does his troparion speak of the great meaning in the names he was given, “Acquiring the patient endurance of the long-suffering forefather, and emulating the abstinence of the Baptist, and sharing the divine zeal of both, thou wast vouchsafed worthily to receive their names”.
St Job was soon sent away to become the abbot of a neighboring monastery, where his patronage of the Orthodox written word was first revealed. Here, he became spiritual father to Prince Constantine of Ostrog, whose patronage helped to publish the first complete Church Slavonic Bible to come from the irons of the printing press. He did this under the direction of and with the blessing of St Job. Thenceforth, the production and dissemination of the Holy Scriptures, of the writings of the Holy Fathers, of the Lives of the Saints, and of theological and polemic works would become an integral part of St Job’s ministry, and these works form an iron wall protecting the faithful from the onslaught of the Papists, Protestants and even physical attacks from the Muslim Tartars.
As his fame grew, he fled to Mount Pochaev to join the hermits living in caves there, only to elected to the abbacy again, with a pious landowner donating generously to create a proper cenobitic monastery. Included in this donation was the miraculous Pochaev icon that would be the monastery’s protecting veil.
While continuing his duties as spiritual father to a growing brotherhood, and active ministry in printing Orthodox books, he often returned to his “first love” — prayerful solitude. He often withdrew for days at a time to one of the many caves of Mount Pochaev. While his body withered from these incredible feats of asceticism, his soul grew to incredible heights. Wounds on his feet would form after days of standing in prayer in this cave. Sometimes, the flesh of his feet even fell off altogether. These wounds are only the blemish on his incorrupt relics, though perhaps it would be better to call them jewels that he earned from his toil in prayerful solitude.
His preaching to the people in speech and in print, and his tireless intercession for the Orthodox faithful could not but have had its effect in strengthening the faithful in the much-suffering land of Volynia. While the Papists and Protestants used political machinations to steal churches, spread their heresies, and even prevent Orthodox bishops from entering the land, Pochaev remained an impenetrable fortress, continually printing books that strengthened the resolve of faithful living nearby.
As a result, Orthodoxy never disappeared from Volynia, even as the Uniates seized church after church and monastery after monastery. They eventually captured Pochaev itself in 1720, and occupied it for more than century. Knowing how vigorously he fought against their delusions, they sealed his relics away and refused to honor them, while actively preventing the Orthodox from coming to his reliquary. Nonetheless, his miraculous intercessions continually ceaselessly, both for the Orthodox and even for those who had fallen into the Unia, many of whom afterwards came back to the fold of the Church.
Towards the end of their occupation of Pochaev, finding themselves unable to suppress the veneration of St Job, the Papists desperately resorted to one last act of deception. They attempted pass St Job off as one of their own, petitioning the Pope to canonize him as a saint while concealing his writings from the Vatican, lest they find out what St Job truly stood for. Naturally, this plan came to naught, and the monastery soon was soon returned to the Church, where it remains to this very day.
The significance of St Job for our own times is difficult to express. The spiritual battle he waged nearly 500 years ago is in many ways nearly identical to our own. The heresies he devoted his life to combatting are still very much alive today. He was among the first Orthodox writers to address a non-Trinitarian sect that arose from the Reformation. Our own bothersome Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists are very much in the same spirit. And of course, his chief opponents, the Uniates, are very much alive and well, and are again threatening the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, seeking to gain control of Pochaev once again. And sadly, there are some among the Orthodox even now that seek to go into union with Papists again.
St Job’s work in the printing press is also of great significance for us. Besides helping to print the first full Church Slavonic Bible, he was the first to begin compiling apologetic pamphlets covering all of the most essential dogmas of Orthodoxy in simple, understandable language for popular consumption. We continue to produce material in this format to this day. St Job, in many ways, pioneered both the arguments in defense of Orthodoxy against modernity, and the form of its delivery.
And of course, it should go without saying that without Pochaev, there is no Jordanville as we know it. Had not the great fathers that came from Pochaev not arrived at the humble skete built through the tireless the labors of our founders, Fathers Panteleimon and Joseph, this very special place would be look and feel very different.
May we all continue to strive to imitate the strength of his virtue, let us emulate his war against the passions, and let his prayers be for us an iron defense of the Truth. Amen.