Merciful Like Chrysostom Says Easter Is

St. John Chrysostom died 1611 years ago tomorrow. He was a Syrian. He suffered at the hands of hostile secular rulers. He suffered at the hands of jealous fellow clerics. He lived an endless love affair with Christ, with learning, and with his flock. He bequeathed to us an all-but-bottomless treasury of Christian love, rendered in writing.

At Holy Mass today, we heard the Lord Jesus command us: “Be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful.”

How?

One way to answer that question might be to meditate on another question: To whom does Easter belong? Here is St. John Chrysostom’s answer to that question:

Are there any who are devout lovers of God? Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival! Are there any who are grateful servants? Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord! Are there any weary with fasting? Let them now receive their wages!

If any have toiled from the first hour, let them receive their due reward; if any have come after the third hour, let him with gratitude join in the Feast! And he that arrived after the sixth hour, let him not doubt, for he too shall sustain no loss. And if any delayed until the ninth hour, let him not hesitate, but let him come too. And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, as well as to him that toiled from the first….

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord! First and last alike receive your reward; rich and poor, rejoice together! Sober and slothful, celebrate the day! You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith. Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it. He destroyed Hell when He descended into it…

Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

Hating People, Secularization, and Suicide

If any one does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

The Lord apparently put this another way, on a different occasion. In Matthew, we read that He said, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me, or son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.”

No contradiction between these two statements, though. If we consider family loyalty of the utmost importance, which we naturally do. To put our family ties even in second place, after God, after Christ—doing that can seem, to family members who would insist on having first place, like hatred.

But let’s keep going: If anyone comes to me without hating even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

At yet a different point in His pilgrim life, the Lord Jesus predicted His Passion, and the Jews listening to Him asked, “He is not going to kill himself, is he?”

Whoever does not carry his own cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

Seems to me like we have long since reached the point where successfully interpreting all this is way above my paygrade. So let me quote St. John Chrysostom:

“He means not that we should place a beam of wood on our shoulders, but that we should ever have death before our eyes.”

Always have death before our eyes.

Listen, I love to stay up late and watch election returns as much as the next guy. At the same time, I’m also just as much against “rampant secularism” as the next religious guy. But I think we need to pause and think about what “secularization” really means.

The saeculum, the century, the current age, involves: elections, smartphones, getting married, having children, cars, college basketball seasons, hamburgers, turkeys, Thanksgiving-dinner arguments, highway construction, tv shows and movies, e-mail and appointments, traveling for work and/or pleasure, having a job, sleeping, buying and wearing clothes, catching colds and getting over them.

By all the same tokens, the saeculum, these years in which we live, also provides us with our one and only known opportunity to: praise God, be kind, welcome strangers, help people who need help, seek the truth and stand up for it with courage, learn, read, see beautiful things and listen to beautiful music, grow, expand our minds and hearts by seeking and loving the Good and the True.

To live for this life only is a kind of suicide. By this time next century we will all be dust and ashes. No one will remember even a single one of all the fascinating comments we made.

That said, committing suicide is also a clear form of suicide. These days we have now–they come from God, out of His infinite love. Even the hardest of them–especially the hardest, most painful days—they come as the most precious gifts.

Every second of every minute of every day He gives us serves a purpose: We can love Him and our neighbor right now. Thereby transforming ourselves, little by little, into something that can actually endure forever, like God.

Chariot Race to Heaven

Long before NASCAR, they held chariot races. Sometimes a team of two horses pulled the chariot.

Maybe you will rejoice to learn that, according to St. John Chrysostom, the gospel parable this Sunday actually narrates a head-to-head chariot race.

The Pharisee drives one chariot. The first horse on his two-horse team: Righteousness! The Pharisee fasts, and he tithes, and he does them both above and beyond the call of duty. Jews were bound by divine law to fast once a year. He fasts twice a week! Jews were bound to give 10% of their agricultural produce. He gave 10% of his entire income!

No question. He is righteous. And righteousness is a fast horse.

Problem is, the second horse in the Pharisee’s team is…Pride. “Thank you, Lord, for making me better than other men.” And the particular breed of his pride? Contemptuous. “Not only, Lord, did you make me better than other men in general. You made me better than this particular loser standing in the shadows of the colonnade at the back of the temple courtyard.”

Our Syrian Father

St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine holding aloft the Chair of Peter in Roma

—

St. Paul became a Christian in Syria. St. Peter exercised his authority in Syria before he traveled to Rome. The word “Christian” entered the vocabulary of the human race in Syria.

St. Luke? Syrian.

Know anybody named Damien, Dorothy, Felix, Iggy, Rufus, or Sergio? Then you know someone named after a Syrian saint.

And, 1,606 years ago tomorrow, another Syrian saint entered his eternal reward. The Holy Doctor whose relics and statue adorn St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and whose relics also receive devout visits at Christ our Savior Cathedral in Moscow.

St. John Chrysostom.

Here’s what he said on Easter Sunday morning, around the year AD 400:

Are there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!

Invincible Patience

The Most High is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. (Luke 6:35)

Now, we have to ask the Lord exactly how He means this statement. We know that, when all is said and done, the ungrateful and the wicked will suffer eternal punishment. Although such punishment certainly qualifies as just, it would be a stretcher for us to propose that condemning the wicked to hell counts as ‘kind.’

So, we must ask: How exactly is the Most High kind to the ungrateful and the wicked?

This question touches us personally, because, to be honest, we must count ourselves among the ungrateful and the wicked. Have I shown God the gratitude that He deserves to get from me? Hardly. Have I escaped wickedness altogether? Have to take the Fifth on that one.

So we have a vested interest in grasping how the Most High is kind to the ungrateful and wicked people, like us. In the end, God will judge with justice. But, in the meantime, what does He do?

At Holy Mass today, we commemorate St. John Chrysostom. He lived his long and hard life with, as the Collect puts it, “invincible patience.” His eloquent preaching gained him a wide following. And it led to his bitter exile from the realm. He bore it all patiently.

How did he manage to do that? Bear it all with invincible patience? The good Lord gave John Chrysostom some of His own divine patience.

The Most High is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. As Christ also said, the heavenly Father makes the sun shine and the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike. All the plants grow together until harvest time, weeds as well as wheat. As St. Peter put it, the Lord’s patience is directed to our salvation.

To every living human being, the Most High kindly gives the greatest of all possible gifts. He gives us right here, right now. Right here, right now: the perfect venue for us to express our gratitude to Him and love Him like good little children.

As long as we have a right here right now, we can be grateful and good. He gives and gives and gives us moments in which to repent of all our many evils. He keeps us all alive a great deal longer than we deserve. If the door shuts in our faces when everything is said and done, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Even the damned in hell have to admit that the mercy of the Lord endures forever. Let’s not waste a precious second that the Lord patiently gives us. Every last one of them makes for a perfect opportunity for us to love Him.

Old Men

Hopefully everyone remembers from last year: Today is St. Paul’s feast day.

In one of his letters, St. Paul refers to himself as an “old man.”

This consoles me as I careen through my fortieth year, an old man with rickety knees and a memory like a sieve.

Sometimes I listen to this sweet song, which takes me back to the spring when I was twenty-three:

Even more encouraging is the fact that, in Christ, we live forever.

Here are a few words from St. John Chrysostom about the holy Apostle Paul:

Paul, more than anyone else, has shown us what man really is…Each day he rose up with greater ardor and faced with new eagerness the dangers that threatened him…

As for tyrannical rulers or the people enraged against him, he paid them no more heed than gnats…Death itself and pain and whatever torments might come were but child’s play to him, provided that thereby he might bear some burden for the sake of Christ.

…The men’s basketball season progresses one tough game at a time. That said, I have two words for you, Hoyas fans: National Championship.