The saints

Saint John Chrysostom

Archbishop and Doctor of the Church · Feast day September 13 · About 347 to 407 · Antioch and Constantinople · Also known as John the Golden-Mouthed, Chrysostomos

Saint John Chrysostom, whose name means golden-mouthed, was the greatest preacher of the early church, an archbishop of Constantinople whose fearless sermons on Scripture, wealth, and justice thrilled the poor and enraged the powerful, and cost him his throne and his life in exile. His homilies are still read wherever the Bible is preached, and the liturgy that bears his name is still prayed across the Eastern churches.

Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.2timothy 4:2 (KJV)

The making of a preacher

John was born about the year 347 in Antioch in Syria, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world and a cradle of the early church, the place where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. His father, a high military official, died soon after John's birth, and he was raised by his young widowed mother Anthusa, whose devotion so impressed John's pagan teacher, the famous orator Libanius, that he is said to have marveled at the kind of women the Christians had. John received the very best education in rhetoric under Libanius, who reportedly named John as the pupil he would have wished to succeed him, had the Christians not, as he put it, stolen the young man away.

For John did turn from the brilliant public career that lay open to him. Baptized as a young man, he gave himself instead to the study of Scripture and to prayer, and then went up into the mountains near Antioch to live as a monk, and for a time as a solitary hermit in a cave, where he memorized the whole of the Bible and prayed with such severity, standing for long nights and denying himself sleep, that he permanently ruined his stomach and his health. He came down from the mountains with a body broken for life but a soul saturated in the word of God, and that word would soon pour out of him upon a city.

The golden mouth of Antioch

Ordained a deacon and then a priest in Antioch, John began to preach, and the great city discovered a voice unlike any it had ever heard. He preached his way through book after book of the Bible, taking the text verse by verse and opening it in plain, vivid, burning language that the ordinary porter and shopkeeper could follow as easily as the philosopher. The crowds packed the churches to hear him, interrupting his sermons with applause, which he rebuked them for, telling them the proof of a good sermon was not clapping but changed lives. It was the people of Antioch who gave him the name by which history knows him, Chrysostomos, the golden-mouthed.

His years in Antioch showed what preaching could do. When the people of the city, in a moment of rage over new taxes, rioted and smashed the statues of the emperor and his family, a capital crime that threatened Antioch with destruction, it was John's preaching through the terrible weeks of waiting that steadied and comforted the panicked city, calling it to repentance and to trust in God, while the old bishop went to beg for mercy from the emperor. When word came that the city was pardoned, it was John who had held its soul together. He had learned that the plain word of God, faithfully preached, could calm a mob, console the grieving, and turn a frightened crowd back to their Maker.

Preacher to the poor and the powerful

John's golden mouth was never once used to flatter. He preached relentlessly that the rich are stewards and not owners of their wealth, and that the surplus heaped up in their storehouses belongs by right to the poor who wait at their gates. He told his comfortable hearers that they honored Christ in gold and silver vessels on the altar while they left Christ himself, hungry, naked, and shivering, to die unnoticed in the beggar outside the church door, and that God would not accept the one while they despised the other. The poor of the city loved him fiercely for it, and the wealthy squirmed under his gaze.

He was utterly fearless about it. He never softened the demands of the gospel to keep the favor of the great, and he backed his words with his life, spending the offerings of the church on hospitals, on the poor, and on the sick, and keeping almost nothing for himself. All of his preaching was rooted in the text of Scripture, for he believed that the Bible is a personal letter from God to every soul, and that the neglect of it is the root of nearly every spiritual evil. Read the Scriptures, he urged his people again and again, do not leave them to the monks and the clergy, for there, in the sacred pages, you will find Christ himself waiting to be known and loved.

Archbishop of Constantinople

His fame reached the imperial capital, and in the year 398, against his own will and by something close to a friendly abduction arranged by the court, John was carried off to Constantinople and made its archbishop, the chief bishop of the Eastern empire. He set about reform at once. He cut the luxury of the archbishop's household to the bone, selling off its costly furnishings and giving the money to hospitals and the poor, and he disciplined a comfortable, worldly, and sometimes corrupt clergy, calling them back to the simplicity of the gospel. The common people of the city adored him and crowded to hear him as Antioch had.

But he made powerful enemies with terrible speed. He would not spare the corruption of the imperial court, the greed of officials, or the vanity and extravagance of the wealthy, and his sermons on the sins of proud and grasping women were taken, whether he intended it or not, to strike at the empress Eudoxia herself. Jealous bishops who resented his reforms and an offended court now had common cause against him, and they began to plot the downfall of the preacher whom the people would not stop loving. His very virtues, his refusal to flatter and his care for the poor, became the charges his enemies would use to destroy him.

Two exiles and a long road

His enemies moved against him through the church itself. A packed synod of his rivals, meeting outside the city, condemned John on trumped-up charges and had him banished. But no sooner was he sent away than the people of Constantinople rose in protest, and an earthquake that same night so frightened the empress that she begged for his immediate recall, and he returned in triumph. The peace did not last. When a silver statue of the empress was set up near his cathedral and celebrated with public games that disturbed the worship of the church, John protested from the pulpit, and the final and irreparable break came.

He was condemned a second time and, in the year 404, driven into a harsh and deliberate exile, marched under guard to a remote outpost at the far eastern edge of the empire. His guards had orders that amounted to a slow sentence of death, forcing the frail old man onward in brutal heat and cold, denying him rest, wearing his broken body down. Even from that distant exile his letters and his influence remained so great, and pilgrims came so far to see him, that his enemies ordered him moved again, to an even more desolate place at the very ends of the known world.

Glory to God for all things

The final forced march, in cruel weather and without mercy, finished what decades of fasting, hardship, and the labors of his ministry had begun. John collapsed on the road in the year 407 and died in a small chapel along the way, worn out and far from the people he had shepherded and loved. His last recorded words gathered up the whole meaning of a life of faithfulness through suffering, the same trust he had preached to a frightened Antioch and a hostile court: Glory to God for all things. He blessed God with his final breath, as he had taught his people to bless him in every season, in the season of applause and in the season of exile alike.

The story did not end in that roadside chapel. Some thirty years after his death, the church that had exiled him carried his body back to Constantinople in solemn honor, and the emperor Theodosius the Second, son of the very Eudoxia who had helped drive him out, publicly begged forgiveness in the name of his parents for the sin committed against the saint. The liturgy John shaped is to this day the ordinary form of worship across the Orthodox world, prayed every week by millions, and his homilies on the books of the Bible remain among the treasures of Christian preaching, studied in every tradition sixteen centuries after his golden mouth was silenced.

Why John Chrysostom still matters

John Chrysostom is the patron of preachers and of everyone who must speak an unwelcome truth to power. He proves that the faithful preaching of the plain word of Scripture can shake a city, comfort the poor, and shame the mighty, and that the gospel always has something uncomfortable to say to wealth and to pride. He proves too that faithfulness is not measured by outcomes, for he died a beaten exile and is honored now as one of the greatest of all the fathers. Preach the word, Paul charged Timothy, in season and out of season, and John Chrysostom did exactly that, in the season of the crowd's applause and in the season of the long road into exile, and blessed God for both.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: How to pray · Who is Jesus? · Saints for September 13 · Saint of the day