When it is said
It is sung three times at the Bridegroom services of Holy Week, the week before Easter.
These are the Matins services of Holy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Parishes commonly hold them at night.
It is also said from Monday to Friday in the Midnight Office, the Church’s service of prayer in the night. There it comes just after the Lord’s Prayer.
Where it comes from
No author known
Where it comes from
The hymn is built on Jesus’s parable of the ten virgins, who wait with their lamps for a bridegroom. At midnight a cry goes up that he is coming. The five who brought enough oil go in with him to the wedding, and the door is shut on the rest. The hymn takes the parable’s midnight cry and its shut door and turns them on the singer’s own soul.
Matthew 25:1-13; Hegumen Dionisy (Shlenov), From Time to Eternity, Voprosy Bogosloviya, 2021 (Russian)
Who wrote it, and when?
The hymn’s writer is unknown, but it is old enough to be named in a rule book for monks that St Nikon of the Black Mountain wrote in the second half of the 11th century. The Russian scholar Dionisy Shlenov calls it the Church’s most lasting reading of the parable’s midnight cry.
Hegumen Dionisy (Shlenov), From Time to Eternity, Voprosy Bogosloviya, 2021 (Russian)
What the words mean
Careless, or lazy?
In other English translations the unworthy servant is found “careless” or “heedless”. The Greek verb usually means being slack or idle, and its noun means sluggishness or laziness. The Greek book of hours prints St Basil’s morning prayer in the same Midnight Office. That prayer uses the noun when it asks God to raise our mind from the heavy sleep of laziness.
Liddell, Scott and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon; The Greek Horologion, the Midnight Office
The Scripture in it
At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’
But while they were on their way to buy it, the bridegroom arrived. Those who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet, and the door was shut.
Blessed are those servants whom the master finds on watch when he returns. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve and will have them recline at the table, and he himself will come and wait on them.
And they were calling out to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts; all the earth is full of His glory.”
Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
In Greek
Ἰδοὺ ὁ Νυμφίος ἔρχεται ἐν τῷ μέσῳ τῆς νυκτός,
καὶ μακάριος ὁ δοῦλος, ὃν εὑρήσει γρηγοροῦντα,
ἀνάξιος δὲ πάλιν, ὃν εὑρήσει ῥαθυμοῦντα.
Βλέπε οὖν ψυχή μου, μὴ τῷ ὕπνῳ κατενεχθῇς,
ἵνα μὴ τῷ θανάτῳ παραδοθῇς,
καὶ τῆς βασιλείας ἔξω κλεισθῇς·
ἀλλὰ ἀνάνηψον κράζουσα·
Ἅγιος, Ἅγιος, Ἅγιος εἶ ὁ Θεός,
διὰ τῆς Θεοτόκου ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς.