Chrysostom
Beloved of All
The clamor of your heart is for a sign, for a sudden overturning of earthly courts. You seek a miracle that spares the roof over your children’s heads, and this is a fear that cuts deep. But consider this: what manner of miracle did Job work in sight of the devil, that the adversary was amazed? No miracle indeed, but a life that shone and displayed an endurance firmer than any adamant. The wondering after signs often belongs to a mind that is yet a child, gaping after trifles, but of things very great it has not so much admiration. The greater miracle is not that the house stands, but that the soul stands unshaken when all earthly doors have closed. For can you put the tongue of an evangelist in bonds? Thereby it runs the more. So too, if your hope is bound to a mere building, you have not yet seen how chiefly the Preaching runs when outward things fail.
You stand on many scriptures, yet even the mother of our Lord was quietly rebuked when she sought a miracle from a motive that was not of the hour. “Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come.” The request, you see, ought to come from a place of deeper need, for what is done at the request of one’s temporal fears often causes offense to the spectators of your faith; but when they make the request who have the ultimate need of the soul, the miracle is free from suspicion. Know you not that the miracles, except we be sober, do even harm in many cases? Many were severed from one another, many were carried away with pride. The care of practice and love of virtue so far from generating a mere desire for a sign, does even take it away when it exists.
Therefore, I would have you become both a child and a man: a child in malice and in the anxious cunning that worsens your fear, but a man in mind, for in this way you may become a true man if you be also a child in trusting simplicity. The barren woman became the mother of a numerous progeny not by the miracle she grasped at, but by the promise she was given. That was a type of the Church, whose borders filled the whole world. The habitation of the soul is the Household of faith, and your children’s truest home is not built of wood and stone, which any servant of the law can take, but of the certainty that God’s power is shown most where earthly help is most dead. Look now for the miracle of a delivered and steadfast spirit; that is the open Heaven, and no dead end can close against it.
You stand on many scriptures, yet even the mother of our Lord was quietly rebuked when she sought a miracle from a motive that was not of the hour. “Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come.” The request, you see, ought to come from a place of deeper need, for what is done at the request of one’s temporal fears often causes offense to the spectators of your faith; but when they make the request who have the ultimate need of the soul, the miracle is free from suspicion. Know you not that the miracles, except we be sober, do even harm in many cases? Many were severed from one another, many were carried away with pride. The care of practice and love of virtue so far from generating a mere desire for a sign, does even take it away when it exists.
Therefore, I would have you become both a child and a man: a child in malice and in the anxious cunning that worsens your fear, but a man in mind, for in this way you may become a true man if you be also a child in trusting simplicity. The barren woman became the mother of a numerous progeny not by the miracle she grasped at, but by the promise she was given. That was a type of the Church, whose borders filled the whole world. The habitation of the soul is the Household of faith, and your children’s truest home is not built of wood and stone, which any servant of the law can take, but of the certainty that God’s power is shown most where earthly help is most dead. Look now for the miracle of a delivered and steadfast spirit; that is the open Heaven, and no dead end can close against it.
