Saint John Chrysostom preaches daily while Antioch waits for the emperor's sentence

ANTIOCH, Roman Syria, this spring, 387 AD — Antioch spent this Lent waiting to learn whether the Emperor Theodosius would destroy it. Through those weeks Saint John Chrysostom, a priest of the city, preached almost every day in the Old Church by the river Orontes — twenty-one sermons to people who did not expect to be alive at Easter. He opened one sermon by saying what the hour called for: “The present season is one for tears, and not for words; for lamentation, not for discourse; for prayer, not for preaching.”

The city had brought this on itself in a single morning. On February 26 a herald read out an edict imposing a heavy new tribute on Antioch, to pay for the emperor’s anniversaries — 388 AD would complete the tenth year of his reign. The crowd that had gathered to hear it turned on the images of the imperial family. The statues of Theodosius and of his dead wife Flacilla were battered off their pedestals, and the bronze statue of the empress was hauled over a great part of the town. Roman law did not treat that as damage to property: an emperor’s image stood for the emperor, and destroying it was an offence against his own person, close to treason. Antioch had handed Theodosius the legal ground to do whatever he liked with it.

The rising lasted about three hours. The governor came back with a company of archers, and the crowd melted away before the soldiers had finished forming up.

Before Theodosius had heard anything of the riot, the magistrates of Antioch began punishing the city on their own authority. St. John Chrysostom told his congregation what was being done a few streets away while he spoke: people were dying by the sword and by fire, some were being thrown to wild beasts, and not men only but children. Parents followed their children towards the executions at a distance, afraid to speak for them.

When the news reached the emperor, he took away Antioch’s civic privileges and gave its rank to Laodicea, its neighbour and its rival for centuries. The richer families left for the countryside.

Saint Flavian, the bishop of Antioch, who had ordained St. John Chrysostom priest the year before and set him to preaching at once, went to the emperor’s court at Constantinople to plead for the city. The road ran eight hundred miles, the winter was not over, the bishop was old, Lent needed him at home, and his only sister was dying. He went anyway. St. John Chrysostom told the people what their own part was: “Our Father hath gone thither on this embassy. Let us go on embassy from hence to the Majesty of heaven!”

For seven days after the riot St. John Chrysostom had said nothing from the pulpit. He broke that silence to begin the sermons. “Suffer me to mourn over our present state,” he told them. “We have been silent seven days, even as the friends of Job were. Suffer me to open my mouth to-day, and to bewail this common calamity.”

After that he preached daily, and the crowds grew. The rich were burying their gold or looking for someone to leave it with. St. John Chrysostom told the rich that their money would not save them: “Let your houses stand by you! Let them deliver you from the threatened peril! But they cannot!” To the people who expected to be executed, St. John Chrysostom said that death “is nothing more than a sleep, a journey, a migration, a rest, a tranquil haven.” He closed almost every sermon with one request. He asked the congregation to stop swearing the rash oaths that the people of Antioch swore all day long, on their homes and on their slaves. He told the congregation he would ask the same thing the next day and the day after.

About the middle of Lent the emperor’s commissioners, Hellebichus and Caesarius, arrived with a military force to try the city. They announced the rest of the emperor’s sentence — the baths shut, the hippodrome forbidden — and once the trial began they kept the whole senate of Antioch in prison. Monks came down from the mountains above the city to stand in front of the judges, while Antioch’s Greek philosophers had left it. St. John Chrysostom repeated to his congregation what one of those monks had said to the commissioners: “The Statues which have been thrown down are again set up, and have resumed their proper appearance… but if ye put to death the image of God, how will ye be again able to revoke the deed!” The sentences were suspended until the emperor could be asked. Caesarius rode the eight hundred miles to Constantinople in a week to put the question to him.

The commissioners reported to Theodosius what had been said to them on the city’s behalf, and his anger was quenched. Instead of destroying Antioch, he sent back a letter explaining why he had been angry. St. Flavian, who had reached the court a week before Caesarius, came home to Antioch on Easter Day with a full pardon for the city. St. John Chrysostom preached the last of the sermons that morning: “Blessed be God, Who has granted us this day to celebrate this holy Feast with much joy and gladness; and has restored the head to the body, the shepherd to the sheep.”