Commontide
Liturgical Color: Red
The 4th Sunday of Epiphany
O God, you know that we are set in the midst of many grave dangers, and because of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: Grant that your strength and protection may support us in all dangers and carry us through every temptation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Epiphany
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who took on our mortal flesh to reveal his glory; that he might bring us out of darkness and into his own glorious light.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Twenty-Six Martyrs
Ecumenical Commemoration
Twenty-six Christians were crucified on Nishizaka Hill above Nagasaki harbour on 5 February 1597, by order of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: six Franciscan friars, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen, three of them boys of twelve to fourteen. They were beatified in 1627 and canonized in 1862, the first canonized martyrs of the Far East. Commontide keeps their day on 5 February, with the Anglican calendars.
Christianity arrived in Japan with the Jesuit Francis Xavier in 1549 and grew rapidly, reaching an estimated 300,000 converts by the 1580s. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan's military ruler, viewed Christianity as a destabilizing foreign influence and issued an expulsion edict against missionaries in 1587, though enforcement was sporadic.
In 1596, after a Spanish ship captain boasted that missionaries were advance agents of colonial conquest, Hideyoshi ordered arrests. Twenty-six Christians were seized: six Franciscan friars (four Spanish, one Mexican, one Indian), three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen of various ages, including three boys (Luis Ibaraki, age 12; Antonio de Nagasaki, age 13; and Tomás Kozaki, age 14). After interrogation in Kyoto, they were marched approximately 600 miles to Nagasaki, their ears cut as a mark of shame.
On February 5, 1597, they were crucified on crosses planted on a hill overlooking Nagasaki harbor, with lances delivering the final blows. Contemporary Jesuit witnesses, including Luis Frois, recorded that the martyrs sang hymns, proclaimed their faith, and went to death with constancy. The execution inaugurated waves of increasingly severe persecution (1614, 1622, 1632) that drove Christianity underground for over two centuries. The Twenty-Six were canonized in 1862.
The martyrs are remembered as exemplars of faithfulness unto death. Their mixed composition — foreign missionaries and Japanese converts, adults and children — represents the cross-cultural nature of Japanese Christianity. The Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christian) communities preserved their memory through centuries of persecution.