Wealth and Almsgiving

Among the Fathers, St. John Chrysostom is the most relentless preacher on wealth and the most concrete on what its possessors owe the poor. From the parable of the rich man and Lazarus he drew the principle that to withhold one’s surplus is not a failure of charity but theft; from the eucharistic assembly he drew the “sacrament of the brother” — the teaching that the poor man is an altar no less holy than the one inside the church. This file presents his key homilies, his theology of property and almsgiving, the begging-and-spectacle social world of his cities, and a modern reception in which both Christian socialists and their critics have claimed him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Sermons on Lazarus

The fullest single sequence of Chrysostom’s social preaching is the set of homilies on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), preached at Antioch — most of them, on internal evidence, around the winter of 388–389, the cycle into which he also folded a sermon occasioned by the earthquake that struck the city. The series circulates in English as seven sermons under the title On Wealth and Poverty (trans. Catharine P. Roth, SVS Popular Patristics 9, 1984), though the manuscript tradition groups the Lazarus material variously and not all seven are strictly on the parable.

Chrysostom’s reading of the parable is exact and uncomfortable. The rich man is not condemned for any crime of commission — he is no extortioner, no defrauder — but for a single sin of omission: he let Lazarus lie at his gate. “This man was punished,” Chrysostom insists, not for his wealth as such but because “he did not share his goods” (Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, First and Second Sermons; trans. Roth, SVS PPS 9). From this he draws his most quoted maxim, in the Second Sermon:

“If you cannot remember everything, instead of everything, I beg you, remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.”

(Chrysostom, Second Sermon on Lazarus and the Rich Man; trans. Roth, On Wealth and Poverty, SVS PPS 9, p. 55; Greek in De Lazaro concio 2 [PG 48:982–992].) The logic is restitution, not benevolence: the surplus already belongs, in justice, to the one who lacks, so that to keep it is to hold stolen goods. This is the same conviction St. Basil the Great had pressed in the Cappadocian famine homilies a generation earlier (see Social Ethics), and Chrysostom carries it further into the texture of daily urban life.

The Sacrament of the Brother: The Altar of the Poor

Chrysostom’s most influential single passage on wealth comes not from the Lazarus cycle but from Homily 50 on the Gospel of Matthew (on Matthew 14:23–24), where he turns from the woman who poured ointment on Christ to his own congregation’s habit of adorning the church building while neglecting the destitute outside its doors. The passage has become the watchword of Orthodox social ethics — what scholarship sometimes calls the “sacrament of the brother,” the recognition of Christ in the poor as a presence parallel to His presence on the altar:

“Would you do honour to Christ’s body? Neglect Him not when naked; do not while here you honour Him with silken garments, neglect Him perishing without of cold and nakedness. For He that said, This is my body, and by His word confirmed the fact, This same said, Ye saw me an hungered, and fed me not; and, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”

(Chrysostom, Homily 50 on Matthew §3–4 [PG 58:508–509]; trans. NPNF I/10.) He presses the comparison to its sharpest point — the poor man is the more proper temple:

“Do not therefore while adorning His house overlook your brother in distress, for he is more properly a temple than the other.”

And he frames the priority in the order of giving for which the homily is best remembered — feed Christ first, adorn His table afterward:

“Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when He Himself is dying of hunger? First fill Him, being an hungered, and then abundantly deck out His table also. Dost thou make Him a cup of gold, while thou givest Him not a cup of cold water?”

(Chrysostom, Homily 50 on Matthew §3–4 [PG 58:508–509]; trans. NPNF I/10. The wording above splices the NPNF rendering with the standard paraphrase “First fill Him… then deck out His table”; the verbatim NPNF text is given here.) Earlier in the same section stands the line often cited on its own: “God hath no need of golden vessels, but of golden souls.” The passage does not disparage liturgical beauty — Chrysostom nowhere tells his people to strip the altar — but it subordinates it absolutely to mercy, and it grounds that subordination in the identity of Christ in the Eucharist with Christ in the poor.

A Theology of Property and Almsgiving

Beneath the rhetoric lies a coherent theology of property. Chrysostom does not teach that ownership is sinful or that all goods should be held in common as a matter of law; he repeatedly assumes a society of owners and addresses them as such. What he denies is absolute ownership. The rich are stewards, not proprietors: God has entrusted some with more precisely so that, by sharing, they may be saved through the poor, and the poor may be sustained through them. Wealth is morally neutral as a possession but lethal as a retention; what damns is not having but hoarding. Almsgiving, on this account, is not a supererogatory virtue added to a complete Christian life but a constitutive act of justice — “the mother of love,” Chrysostom calls it elsewhere, and the indispensable counterpart of prayer and fasting.

He is equally insistent that the giver must not pre-judge the recipient. Against the common impulse to scrutinize beggars for worthiness, Chrysostom argues in the Lazarus sermons that mercy is not to investigate but to relieve: “Need alone is the poor man’s worthiness… we show mercy on him not because of his virtue but because of his misfortune” (Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, Second Sermon; trans. Roth, SVS PPS 9). The point is theologically load-bearing: if alms were wages for virtue, they would cease to be mercy, and the giver would have made himself a judge in the place of God.

Chrysostom’s preaching was addressed to two of the great cities of the late-Roman East — Antioch, where he served as presbyter (386–397), and Constantinople, where he was archbishop (398–404). Both were cities of violent economic contrast: a wealthy curial and aristocratic class, a vast population of laborers and artisans, and a permanent underclass of the destitute, the disabled, and the displaced who begged at church doors, in the marketplace, and outside the public baths. Estimates Chrysostom himself ventures — that the Antiochene church supported some three thousand widows and virgins, and that a tenth of the city’s population was rich and another tenth utterly poor — are preacher’s figures, not census data, but they convey the scale of need he confronted from the pulpit.

Against this poverty he set the city’s appetite for spectacle. Chrysostom’s homilies return obsessively to the theater, the hippodrome, and the racecourse as the rival liturgies of urban life — the places where his congregation spent on entertainers, dancers, and charioteers the money that lay beggars went without. The contrast is one of his standing rhetorical engines: the same Christian who would not give a coin to a starving man at the church gate would lavish a fortune on the stage. The “feed the hungry, then deck the table” logic of Homily 50 is the liturgical form of a complaint he made about the whole economy of his cities’ desires.

Modern Reception: Claimed Both Ways

Because Chrysostom’s language is so absolute, his modern reception has been contested. Christian socialists and advocates of a redistributive social Gospel — from nineteenth-century figures onward — have cited his “withholding is theft” maxim as patristic warrant for their programs; the Homilies on Acts, where he muses admiringly on the common life of the Jerusalem community (Acts 4:32), have been read as anticipating a communitarian economics. Against this, others have insisted that Chrysostom is a preacher of voluntary, personally transformative almsgiving rooted in the salvation of the giver’s own soul, not an advocate of coerced state redistribution, and that he everywhere presupposes private ownership rather than abolishing it.

Both readings seize on something real and both can overreach. Chrysostom is genuinely radical about the claim the poor have on the rich man’s surplus — radical enough that softening it into mere “generosity” misrepresents him. He is also genuinely a preacher of personal conversion who frames almsgiving as the rich man’s own medicine, and reading him as a proto-socialist policy theorist imports categories he did not have. The Orthodox tradition has received him not as the architect of an economic system but as the conscience pressed against every system: the voice insisting that surplus held while a neighbor starves is, in the plainest sense, stolen. This is the patristic strand that the modern Orthodox social documents — the Moscow Patriarchate’s Basis of the Social Concept (2000) and the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s For the Life of the World (2020) — inherit when they ground the care of the poor in justice rather than optional charity (see Social Ethics).

References

John Chrysostom. On Wealth and Poverty. Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Popular Patristics Series 9. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. [The seven Sermons on Lazarus; Second Sermon, p. 55; Greek De Lazaro concio 2 (PG 48:982–992).]
John Chrysostom. Homily 50 on the Gospel of Matthew, §3–4 [PG 58:508–509]. Trans. NPNF First Series, Vol. 10.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles [on Acts 4:32]. Trans. NPNF First Series, Vol. 11. [On the common life of the Jerusalem community.]
J. N. D. Kelly. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom — Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. [Antioch and Constantinople; the social world of his preaching.]
Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen. John Chrysostom. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000. [Chronology and setting of the homilies; translated extracts.]
Russian Orthodox Church. The Basis of the Social Concept (2000); David Bentley Hart and John Chryssavgis, eds., For the Life of the World (2020). [Modern reception of the patristic theology of wealth.]