Homilies
Chrysostom's extant homiletical works are vast, including many hundreds of exegetical homilies on both the New Testament (especially the works of Paul the Apostle) and the Old Testament (particularly on Genesis). Among his exegetical works are sixty-seven homilies on Genesis, fifty-nine on the Psalms, ninety on the Gospel of Matthew, eighty-eight on the Gospel of John, and fifty-five on the Acts of the Apostles. The best known of his many homilies is an extremely brief one, the Paschal Homily (Hieratikon), which is read at the first service of Pascha (Easter), the midnight Orthros (Matins), in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The homilies were written down by stenographers and subsequently circulated, revealing a style that tended to be direct and greatly personal, but formed by the rhetorical conventions of his time and place. In general, his homiletical theology displays much characteristics of the Antiochian school (i.e., more literal in interpreting biblical events), but he also uses a good deal of the allegorical interpretation more associated with the Alexandrian school.
John's social and religious world was formed by the continuing and pervasive presence of paganism in the life of the city. One of his regular topics was the paganism in the culture of Constantinople, and in his homilies, he thunders against popular pagan amusements: the theatre, horseraces, and the revelry surrounding holidays. In particular, he criticizes Christians for taking part in such activities:
If you ask [Christians] who is Amos or Obadiah, how many apostles there were or prophets, they stand mute; but if you ask them about the horses or drivers, they answer with more solemnity than sophists or rhetors.
Cyril of Alexandria attributed the destruction of the Ephesian Temple of Artemis to John Chrysostom, referring to him as "the destroyer of the demons and overthrower of the temple of Diana". A later Archbishop of Constantinople, Proclus of Constantinople repeated the allegation, saying "In Ephesus, he despoiled the art of Midas". Both claims are considered spurious.
One of the recurring features of John's homilies is his emphasis on care for the needy: he was "perhaps the most ardent preacher on social justice" of all the eastern fathers. Echoing themes found in the Gospel of Matthew, he calls upon the rich to lay aside materialism in favor of helping the poor, often employing all of his rhetorical skills to shame wealthy people to abandon conspicuous consumption: Do you pay such honor to your excrements as to receive them into a silver chamber-pot when another man made in the image of God is perishing in the cold?
Along these lines, he wrote often about the need for almsgiving and its importance alongside fasting and prayer, e.g. "prayer without almsgiving is unfruitful".
During his first two years as a presbyter in Antioch (386–387), John denounced Jews and Christians in a series of eight homilies delivered to Christians in his congregation who were taking part in Jewish festivals and other Jewish observances. It is disputed whether the main targets were specifically the so called "Judaizers" or Jews in general. His homilies were expressed in the conventional manner, using the uncompromising rhetorical form known as the psogos (Greek: blame, censure).
One of the purposes of these homilies was to prevent Christians from participating in Jewish customs, and thus prevent the perceived erosion of Chrysostom's flock. In his homilies, John criticized those "Judaizing Christians", who were participating in Jewish festivals and taking part in other Jewish observances, such as the shabbat, submitted to circumcision and made pilgrimage to Jewish holy places. There had been a revival of Jewish faith and tolerance in Antioch in 361, so Chrysostom's followers and the greater Christian community were in contact with Jews frequently, and Chrysostom was concerned that this interaction would draw Christians away from their faith identity.
John claimed that synagogues were full of Christians, especially Christian women, on the shabbats and Jewish festivals, because they loved the solemnity of the Jewish liturgy and enjoyed listening to the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, and applauded famous preachers in accordance with the contemporary custom. Due to Chrysostom's stature in the Christian church, both locally and within the greater church hierarchy, his sermons were fairly successful in spreading anti-Jewish sentiment.
In Greek, the homilies are called Kata Ioudaiōn (Κατὰ Ἰουδαίων), which is translated as Adversus Judaeos in Latin and "Against the Jews" in English. The original Benedictine editor of the homilies, Bernard de Montfaucon, gives the following footnote to the title: "A discourse against the Jews; but it was delivered against those who were Judaizing and keeping the fasts with them [the Jews]".
According to Patristics scholars, opposition to any particular view during the late 4th century was conventionally expressed in a manner, using the rhetorical form known as the psogos, whose literary conventions were to vilify opponents in an uncompromising manner; thus, it has been argued that to call Chrysostom an "anti-Semite" is to employ anachronistic terminology in a way incongruous with historical context and record. This does not preclude assertions that Chrysostom's theology was a form of anti-Jewish supersessionism.
His sermons against Jews gave further momentum to the idea that Jews are collectively responsible for the death of Jesus.
John Chrysostom's most notable discourse in this regard is his fourth homily on Romans 1:26, where he argues as follows:
All these affections then were vile, but chiefly the mad lust after males; for the soul is more the sufferer in sins, and more dishonored, than the body in diseases. ... [The men] have done an insult to nature itself. And a yet more disgraceful thing than these is it, when even the women seek after these intercourses, who ought to have more sense of shame than men.
He says the active male victimizes the passive male in a way that leaves him more enduringly dishonored than even a victim of murder since the victim of this act must "live under" the shame of the "insolency". The victim of a murder, by contrast, carries no dishonor. He asserts that punishment will be found in Hell for such transgressors and that women can be guilty of the sin as much as men. Chrysostom argues that the male passive partner has effectively renounced his manhood and become a woman – such an individual deserves to be "driven out and stoned". He attributes the cause to "luxury". "Do not, he means (Paul), because you have heard that they burned, suppose that the evil was only in desire. For the greater part of it came of their luxuriousness, which also kindled into flame their lust".
According to scholar Michael Carden, Chrysostom was particularly influential in shaping early Christian thought that same-sex desire was an evil, claiming that he altered a traditional interpretation of Sodom as a place of inhospitality to one where the sexual transgressions of the Sodomites became paramount. However, other scholars – such as Kruger and Nortjé-Meyer – dispute this, arguing that the author of the Epistle of Jude already interpreted the sin of Sodom as homosexuality in the New Testament.
Yet theologian Stephen Morris calls for a more nuanced interpretation of Chrysostom's attitude towards homosexuality, arguing that "it can be dangerous to assume that an opinion expressed in one homily or tract represents an author's attitude across his entire corpus or career, and Chrysostom's preaching is often situational," and noting that "not infrequently does he contradict himself."
