While admittedly not sporting the kind of title we would find attached to many sermons today (“Excessive Grief at the Death of Friends”!) this message by John Chrysostom is a real gem. The text of his message is I Thessalonians 4:13, where scripture admonishes us not to grieve “like those who have no hope.”
A brief word on Chrysostom. His name literally means “John of the Golden Tongue”. He lived from 347-407 A.D. He was baptized at age 21, and spent 6 years as a hermit in the desert. It is said that he memorized the entire word of God. Although he subsequently had a primary ministry of only 6 consecutive years, he is remembered as one of the greatest preachers of all time. We may gain some lessons from his life: a lengthy time of preparation, spent in giving one’s self to intimate acquaintance with the word of God, is not wasted – we need look no further than the life of Jesus to validate that truth.
I read this particular sermon on “Excessive Grief” from Treasury of the World’s Great Sermons (Warren Wiersbe, ed.). It is a valuable word in several ways:
First, in his introduction he shares a word of wisdom for pastors regarding their sermon selection: “A table with only one sort of food produces satiety, while variety provokes the appetite. That it may be so in regard to our preaching, let us now, after a long period, turn to the blest Paul”. He had been preaching for some time from the Gospels, but for variety’s sake, he now made use of the Pauline Epistles for his text. “Variety is the spice of life”, Cowper wrote – and Chrysostom might say also in sermon text selection! A good piece of advice for ministers who might be tempted to feed their congregations “with only one sort of food” for too long!
In the body of the message itself, Chrysostom addresses his topic head on. To be clear, he does NOT assert that Christians should not grieve at all: “Nor do I say that you should not grieve; I do not condemn dejection, but the intensity of it.” Referencing what he had apparently witnessed personally, he says: “I am ashamed and blush to see unbecoming groups of women pass along the mart, tearing their hair, cutting their arms and cheeks – and all this under the eyes of the Greeks! … What will they not declare concerning us? ‘Are these the men who reason about a resurrection?’” This is a good reminder to us in our day as well that the way we mourn our loved ones is a witness to a watching world!
In the next part of the message he speaks of their funeral services as having “the singing of Psalms, the prayers, the assembling of the brethren” to escort the beloved home the way a multitude would send off a man who was called to some high office. This is not only a great illustration of what a Christian’s view of his fellow believer’s death should be, it is also valuable for its insight into Christian funeral practices in the 4th century: singing Psalms, prayer, and a “sending off” of the beloved to their eternal home.
There are several “nuggets” of truth worth quoting in the sermon, including: “If we must have anguish, we should mourn and lament over those who are living in sin, not over those who have died righteously.”
Chrysostom closed his message with two long illustrations about the attitudes of Job, who lost all of his children in one day, and of Abraham, who was willing to lose his son Isaac. In his telling of Job’s story, we get a glimpse of the rhetorical power which gave rise to his nickname. Speaking of those who must have discovered Job’s slain children, he says: “he saw a hand still holding a cup, and another right hand placed on the table, and the mutilated form of a body, the nose torn away, the head crushed …” and so on. Acknowledging the macabre description, Chrysostom adds: “You suffer emotions and shed tears at merely hearing these things; what must he have endured at the sight of them?” It does not take much to imagine how this speaker held his audience in rapt attention, and earned the appellation, “the Golden Tongue.”
In his conclusion, Chrysostom exemplifies another wise practice for preachers who follow in his path. He acknowledges what perhaps you may be thinking: that it might be hard to address the “excessive grief at the death of friends” when someone in their midst has just passed away. But that he did NOT do! In fact, he concludes by saying, “For I have now addressed you on this subject, though no one is in particular affliction … that when we may fall into such calamity, we may, from the remembrance of what has been said, obtain requisite consolation.” He thus models a valuable and wise pastoral practice: we need not always wait for the occasion to preach a needed word; as much as possible, we should prepare our people in advance with the truth they will inevitably need from the word of God. For as much as this generation seeks to avoid the topic of death, as the pundit has said, the mortality rate is still 100%! We need to prepare ourselves and our people to face death with a Biblical, godly perspective – for our own sake, as well as for the glory of God before a watching world — and this John Chrysostom’s message challenges us to do.
shawnethomas 