In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Beloved in Christ, today we celebrate the memory of our Father among the Saints John, Archbishop of Constantinople, whom the Church calls Chrysostom, “the Golden-Mouthed.” Almost every Sunday of the year, when we gather for the Divine Liturgy, we pray the words of the Liturgy that bears his name. His homilies on the Scriptures fill entire shelves. His Paschal sermon is read in every Orthodox church on the night of the Resurrection. Few saints are as present in our daily life as this preacher from Antioch.
The Church gives us for this feast the Gospel of the Good Shepherd: “I am the good shepherd! The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The one who is a hired hand, not a shepherd, and who does not own the sheep, leaves the sheep and flees when he sees the wolf coming” (John 10:11-12). This Gospel speaks first of Christ Himself. It also describes the life of Saint John, who became a shepherd after the heart of the Good Shepherd, and who did not flee when the wolves came.
The Only Good Shepherd
We should begin where the Gospel begins: with Christ. The Catechism of the Orthodox Faith reminds us that Christ is the “chief Shepherd” and the only “good Shepherd,” who permits some of His servants to serve as shepherds of the Church of God, but always in a secondary and representative sense, never in competition with His unique headship. Bishops and priests are not owners of the flock. The flock, as the Catechism says, “is God’s, not the shepherd’s,” purchased with His own blood (Acts 20:28).
The Epistle for the feast takes us further, into the heavenly sanctuary: “Such a high priest was fitting for us: holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners and made higher than the heavens…. He did this once for all, when he offered himself up” (Hebrews 7:26-27). Christ is at once the Shepherd and the sacrifice, the High Priest and the offering. This is why, at every Divine Liturgy, during the Cherubic Hymn, the priest confesses that Christ is the One who offers and is offered, who receives and is distributed. Our worship on earth, as the Catechism teaches, is a participation in the heavenly liturgy of the great High Priest, who presents before the Father His one perfect sacrifice.
A Shepherd Who Did Not Flee
Saint John was born in Antioch around the year 349. His father died when he was an infant, and his mother Anthusa, widowed at a young age, refused to remarry so that she could raise her son. He received the best education of his time and began a brilliant career in rhetoric and law. Yet in the church of Antioch he heard the preaching of the Gospel and recognized the vanity of worldly ambition. He was baptized, gave himself to prayer and asceticism, and was ordained a deacon and then a presbyter. For twelve years he preached in Antioch, and the people hung on his words.
In 398, he was taken, almost by force, to become Archbishop of the imperial capital, Constantinople. There he did what a true shepherd does: he fed the flock with the word of God, he cut the expenses of his own household and gave to the poor, he built hospitals, and he called sinners to repentance, whether they were beggars, clergy, or members of the imperial court. Such a shepherd is never popular with everyone. He was condemned by a council of his enemies, exiled, recalled, and exiled again. Worn out by forced marches, he died on the road on the fourteenth of September, 407. His last words were the summary of his whole life: “Glory to God for all things.”
Saint John lived in an age that resembles our own more than we might think. There was poverty alongside great wealth. There was corruption in government and, sadly, corruption in the Church as well. Christians were divided by heresies and factions. The more things change, the more they remain the same. What did the saint do? He did not despair, and he did not flee. He prayed, he fasted, he preached, and he served. Above all, he showed courage, that quality of the soul without which no other virtue can be practiced for long. The hired hand flees “because he is a hired hand and does not care for the sheep” (John 10:13). The true shepherd stays, because he loves.
Golden Vessels and Golden Souls
We might think of the Church as a rope made of three strands. The Scripture says, “a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Saint John, together with Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory the Theologian, the Three Holy Hierarchs, handed on to us the apostolic faith in three strands that cannot be separated.
The first strand is sound faith: the Orthodox teaching on the Holy Trinity, on Christ, on the Church and her Mysteries, received from the Apostles and confessed in the Creed. Saint John spoke of the Holy Eucharist with burning words, saying in his homilies on the Gospel of John that we should return from the holy Table “like lions breathing fire, having become terrible to the devil.”
The second strand is sound worship. The Liturgy that bears his name, which he shaped and handed down, has been prayed for some sixteen centuries. It gives us the right way to stand before God.
The third strand is sound living, faith working through love. Here Saint John was relentless. In his homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, he wrote: “Do you wish to honor the Body of Christ? Do not ignore Him when He is naked. Do not pay Him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect Him outside where He is cold and ill-clad.” A little further, he explains that God “has no need at all of golden vessels, but of golden souls.” He loved beautiful worship, yet he knew that beautiful worship without mercy is a contradiction. Antioch was a great city with many nominal Christians and many poor, and his constant warning was against a cold heart toward the needy.
We may say that our greatest challenge today is often this third strand. It is possible to hold the right doctrine and to love the right services, and still to live for ourselves. Saint John reminds us that the three strands must stay together, or the rope will break.
He also reminds us of the root of all three: humility. As the Catechism notes, “as St John Chrysostom explains, spiritual poverty is humility.” Only the humble can be shepherded, and only the humble can shepherd others.
Let us thank God for this golden-mouthed shepherd. Let us read the Scriptures as he urged his flock to do, worship with the faith he defended, and serve the poor with the mercy he preached. Let us ask for his courage, so that we do not flee when the wolf comes, and for his gratitude, so that in every circumstance we too may say: “Glory to God for all things.”
Through the prayers of our holy father John Chrysostom, may Christ our God, the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for the sheep, have mercy on us and save us, for to Him belong all glory, honor, and worship, with His Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.