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Homily 31
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HOMILY 31 "Thana took his sons Abram and Nachor, his son Haran's son Lot, and his daughter-in-law Sarah, his son Abram's wife, and led them from the land of Chaldea to journey into the land of the Canaanites. He went as far as Charran and settled there.'" HANK [282] YOU VERY MUCH both for recelvmg kindly [283] my words about prayer yesterday and for assembling with such enthusiasm for listening. This it is, you see, that renders us, too, more eager and prompts us to spread before you in more generous measure this spiritual banquet. Likewise in the case of a farmer, when he sees the soil and the seeds sprouting a crop, he doesn't stop exerting himself daily by way of providing the necessary attention and being vigilant day and night in case anything should undermine his efforts. Well, in just the same way I too see this spiritual soil of yours so fertile and this spiritual seed sown in the recesses of your mind; and so I am deeply satisfied and at the same time I have extreme anxiety, knowing as I do the wickedness of the crafty enemy of our salvation. You see, he is like the pirates at sea: when they see a ship laden with much cargo and carrying untold wealth, then in particular they give free rein to their scheming so as to sink that cargo and leave the crew empty-handed and bereft of everything. Well, in this fashion the devil too, when he sees great spiritual wealth amassed-li~ely zeal, an alert mind-and this wealth daily increasing, he bites his lip and grinds his teeth, and like a pirate he goes about turning over countless schemes in his I. Gen 11.31 in an expansion of the LXX text, presumably to provide his audience with some of the details Chrysostom has lost by omitting the genealogy in this ch. 11. Speiser notes (Genesis, 79) that this LXX spelling of the city we know as Haran retains a form older than the Hebrew; the NT also adopts it (Acts 7.2, 4). 237 238 ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM mind so as to discover some slight chink in our armor, render us empty and bereft, and strip us of all our spiritual wealth. (2) For this reason, pray, let us stay alert, I beseech you, and the more our spiritual resources increase, the more let our spirit of vigilance be intensified; let us strengthen our defences on all sides against his assaults, and through an irreproachable lifestyle let us win favor from God and thus render ourselves superior to the devil's shafts. He is, remember , an evil beast, and has manifold wiles: when he does not succeed in enticing us to wickedness from the outset and ensnaring us through deception (after all, he doesn't apply force or constraint-far from it-but only deception: when he sees us indifferent, he trips us up), when, then, he does not succeed in undermining our salvation in an open way through wickedness itself, frequently through the very works of virtue that we perform he casts his net and unbeknown to us plunders all our wealth. What, then, is it that I am saying? You see, it is necessary to explain it very clearly so that you may be instructed in his schemes and avoid the harm coming from them. When he sees us showing no interest in barefaced wickedness but rather shunning licentiousness and embracing sobriety, and furthermore rejecting greed, showing distaste for injustice, scorning indulgence, and instead devoting ourselves to prayer and fasting and showing zeal for almsgiving, then he devises another scheme by which he can undermine all our resources and render such good deeds fruitless. I mean, those who with great effort survive his wiles he causes to form an inflated opinion of their good deeds and have regard for human glory, his purpose being to make them lose true glory. You see, the person who has some experience of spiritual things and loses sight of them to consider human glory takes his reward from that source already and no longer has God as his debtor; he enjoyed commendation from the people from whom he sought to be praised, and so deprived himself of the rewards promised from the Lord, preferring the passing [284] esteem of his peers to that of the Creator of all. (3) The Lord himself anticipated this in his teaching on [3...