Homily

After the Gospel has been proclaimed, the preacher — the bishop when he is present, ordinarily the priest, in some places a deacon with a blessing — turns to the people and preaches. Orthodox teaching is emphatic that this is not an intermission: the homily is part of the Liturgy itself and shares in its sacramental character. The Word of God has just been read; now it is broken open and distributed, the way bread is. The congregation is fed twice at every Liturgy — from the Gospel book and from the Chalice — and the homily belongs to the first feeding.

The word itself is modest: Greek homilia means something like "conversation" — a talking-with, not a performance at. At its best the Orthodox homily keeps that character: the pastor opening the day's readings, or the feast, for the actual people in front of him. And because preaching happens inside the Liturgy, it is not a private platform. The preacher speaks with the Church's voice, not his own: his task is to hand on what the Church has received — the apostles' teaching as the Fathers read it — applied to this parish, this week. Personal opinion, politics, and novelty are precisely what the setting excludes.

Preaching after the Scriptures is older than Christianity. It is the pattern of the synagogue, where the appointed passage was read and then expounded — as when Ezra's Levites read the Law "distinctly" and "gave the sense" to the returned exiles (Nehemiah 8:8). Jesus Himself preached this way at Nazareth: He read Isaiah, closed the book, sat down, and preached (Luke 4:16-21); St. Paul, at Troas, preached until midnight (Acts 20:7). And the earliest surviving description of a Christian Sunday service, written by St. Justin Martyr around the year 155, already shows the homily exactly where it stands today: the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read, and when the reader has finished, the presider instructs and exhorts.

The golden age of the Fathers was a golden age of preaching. St. John Chrysostom's very name means "golden-mouthed," and his surviving homilies — preached to real congregations in Antioch and Constantinople, complete with rebukes to inattentive listeners — remain the Church's principal treasury of biblical commentary. Much of what we now read as the Fathers' commentary on Scripture began its life as sermons at the Liturgy.

Practice varies. In most parishes the homily comes directly after the Gospel, its ancient and normative place; in some it is preached at the end of the Liturgy instead — a custom many liturgists gently lament, since it detaches the preaching from the readings it serves. Orthodox homilies are usually brief and tied to the day: the readings, the feast, the saint being commemorated. What the Church asks of the preacher is Chrysostom's substance without requiring his eloquence — "Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season" (2 Timothy 4:2) — and what it asks of the hearer is the same attention the readings themselves demand. A homily is judged, the tradition insists, by whether its hearers repent and love more, not by whether they were impressed.