Vigils Reading

THE PROOF OF

CHRIST’S DIVINE POWER

From a treatise by St John Chrysostom

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[The success of the Church in to have converted so many nations, to have

won over so many peoples,] is a great thing, truly a great thing. Rather, it

surpasses greatness and provides a proof of [Christ’s] divine power. Let us

suppose that many men were disposed to work together, and no one was

inclined to oppose them. Even under such ideal circumstances, it would have

been a great thing that a world as large as this could suddenly be set free from

the wicked ways which had preoccupied it for so long a time; it would have been

miraculous that it could change over to another and far more difficult way of life.

For two tyrannical factors opposed this change: habit and pleasure. For

many years their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers, their ancestors,

their philosophers, and public speakers had given them a certain way of life. Yet

people were persuaded to reject this, even though it was a difficult thing to do.

They were also persuaded to accept a strange and very hard way of life which

was introduced to replace their old ways. And this was a still more difficult

thing to do.

The new way drove them from luxurious living and led them to fasting; it

drove them from the love of money and led them to poverty; it drove them from

wanton ways and led them to temperance; it drove them away from anger and

led them to mildness; it drove them away from envy and led them to kindliness;

it drove them from the broad way and the wide street and led them onto a way

which was narrow, strait, and steep, despite the fact that they were used to the

wide road.

For the Church did not take a different kind of human being who lived

outside this world and its ways. It took those very men who had grown rotten

here and who had become softer than mud; it told them to travel on the strait

and narrow, the rough road of austerity. And it won them over to this way of life.

How many did the Church win over? Not two, or ten, or twenty, or a

hundred, but almost every man living under the sun. With whose help did it win

them over? With the help of eleven men. And these men are unlettered,

ignorant, ineloquent, undistinguished, and poor. They could not rely on the

fame of their homelands, on any abundance of wealth, or strength of body, or

glorious reputation, or illustrious ancestry. They were neither forceful nor

clever in speech; they could make no parade of knowledge. They were

fishermen and tentmakers, men of a foreign tongue. They did not speak the

same language as those whom they won over to the faith. Their speech – I mean

Hebrew – was strange and different from all others. But it was with the help of

these men that Christ founded this Church which reaches from one end of the

world to the other.