A righteous saint is someone the Church honors for living a holy life of faith and virtue, usually outside the categories of martyrdom or church leadership. These are the saints who showed us holiness in ordinary circumstances.
The word matters. When the Church calls someone “righteous,” it’s making a specific claim about how that person became holy. Not through dying for the faith. Not through serving as a bishop or abbot. Through faithful obedience to God in the circumstances of everyday life, often in marriage, family, and work.
Think of Righteous Joseph the Betrothed, whose feast we celebrate on December 26. He wasn’t a martyr. He wasn’t a priest. He was a carpenter who found himself betrothed to a virgin carrying God’s own Son. The Gospel of Matthew tells us he was “a righteous man” who didn’t want to shame Mary when he discovered her pregnancy. He listened when the angel spoke to him in dreams. He protected the Theotokos and the Christ child, fled to Egypt, returned to Nazareth, raised Jesus in his trade. His righteousness showed itself in a hundred quiet decisions to trust and obey.
Or consider Righteous Joachim and Anna, Mary’s parents, commemorated September 9. We don’t have much historical detail about them, but the Church honors them as a devout married couple who raised the woman who would bear God. Their holiness was domestic. They prayed, they kept the faith, they loved their daughter. That was enough for the Church to call them righteous and ask their prayers.
What Makes Someone Righteous?
In Orthodox understanding, righteousness isn’t a legal status God declares over you while you stay sinful. It’s a real transformation. God makes us righteous by grace through a life of repentance, prayer, and participation in the sacraments. The righteous saints are people in whom that transformation became visible.
They prayed consistently. They fasted and gave alms. They showed patience under suffering, think of Righteous Job, commemorated October 10, who endured catastrophic loss without cursing God. They lived with integrity in their marriages and families. They obeyed God even when it cost them.
But here’s what’s crucial: they weren’t perfect people who never sinned. Righteousness in the Orthodox sense isn’t sinless perfection. It’s a life oriented toward God, a life of continual repentance and growth in holiness. The righteous saints stumbled and got back up. They confessed and received forgiveness. They kept struggling toward God.
The Church recognizes other types of saints too. Martyrs died for confessing Christ, that’s a different witness. Hierarchs served as bishops and teachers, that’s another calling. Monastics pursued holiness through ascetic struggle in community or solitude. Righteous saints often lived none of those vocations. They were married. They had jobs. Righteous Simeon held the infant Christ in the Temple and recognized Him as the Messiah (we commemorate him February 3, right after the Feast of the Presentation). Righteous Anna the Prophetess, a widow, served in the Temple and spoke about the child to all who were waiting for redemption. These weren’t extraordinary social positions. They were ordinary people living with extraordinary faithfulness.
Why This Matters for Us
If you’re coming from a Protestant background common here in Southeast Texas, you might be used to thinking of saints as a completely different category of Christian, super-believers who achieved something you never could. That’s not how Orthodoxy sees it. The saints are our family. They’re examples, yes, but they’re also companions in the same struggle.
The righteous saints matter especially because most of us won’t be martyrs. Most of us won’t be bishops. Most of us are trying to follow Christ while working at the refinery, raising kids, paying bills, dealing with difficult relatives. The righteous saints show us that holiness happens right there, in those circumstances.
When you’re exhausted from a double shift and your spouse needs you to be present anyway, you can ask Righteous Joseph to pray for you. When you’re raising children and wondering if you’re doing anything right, you can ask Righteous Joachim and Anna to intercede. When everything falls apart and you can’t see God’s purpose, Righteous Job understands.
The Church doesn’t canonize these saints to put them on an unreachable pedestal. We canonize them to say: look, here’s what grace can do in a human life. Here’s what it looks like when someone cooperates with God’s work of transformation over decades. Here’s holiness in a marriage, in a workshop, in a home.
You can read the lives of the righteous saints on the OCA website (oca.org) or check the Antiochian Archdiocese calendar to see when they’re commemorated. Their icons hang in our churches. We sing their praises in the services. And we ask them to pray for us, because they’re alive in Christ and they know exactly how hard it is to pursue righteousness in this world.
They made it. By God’s grace, we can too.
