Overview
About this work
Homily 12 is the final sermon in Chrysostom’s exposition of Colossians. It begins with Paul’s greetings and praise of Epaphras, then expands into a forceful pastoral meditation on tears, the raising of children, marriage, chastity, and the conduct of Christian weddings. Chrysostom contrasts the dignity of marriage with the drunkenness, spectacle, and sexualized entertainment he associated with contemporary wedding customs. The sermon’s striking movement from a Pauline greeting to household and wedding practice shows his characteristic method: biblical exposition becomes direct guidance for the moral life of the Church.
Setting
Historical context
BiblIndex identifies Chrysostom’s Colossians homilies as CPG 4433. The Oxford/NPNF preface places this series at Constantinople, and it notes internal language in the Colossians homilies showing Chrysostom speaking with episcopal responsibility. Homily 12 therefore reflects his pastoral work in the imperial capital, where elite display, public entertainment, household expectations, and Church discipline met in especially visible ways. His criticism of wedding customs should be read against that setting: he defends marriage itself while attacking practices he believed dishonored its holiness and corrupted Christian celebration.
Structure
Contents
The sermon opens by examining Paul’s commendation of Epaphras and the love shown through prayer, labor, and tears. Chrysostom then turns those themes toward parents and households, urging Christians to grieve over sin and to form sons and daughters in virtue. From there he addresses brides, chastity, and the meaning of becoming “one flesh,” before attacking obscene songs, drunkenness, public display, and other wedding entertainments. He closes by proposing a different kind of celebration marked by prayer, modesty, hospitality, good order, and the joyful dignity proper to Christian marriage.
Text & source details
Editions
- Edition
- Original Greek
- Reader label
- Ancient Greek
- Publication
- Patrologia Graeca 62 (Migne), represented by University of the Aegean Digital Patrology / Greek Patrology mirror
- Rights
- Free use is permitted with attribution to the source (Greek notice printed on every page).
- Edition
- Voices of the Fathers Modern English
- Reader label
- Modern English — VOTF
- Translator
- Voices of the Fathers editorial project
- Publication
- Voices of the Fathers
- Date
- 2026
- Rights
- Voices of the Fathers Modern English is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), to the extent copyright and related rights subsist in the translation and associated editorial material. Commercial reuse requires separate permission from Voices of the Fathers. The underlying ancient text and identified public-domain source editions retain their respective status.
- Edition
- NPNF (Broadus), 1889
- Reader label
- English — Broadus (1889)
- Translator
- Oxford translation, heavily revised by John A. Broadus
- Publication
- Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889)
- Date
- 1889
- Rights
- Public domain; CCEL source header states “Rights: Public Domain.”
Text and edition sources
John Chrysostom, Homilies on Colossians; PG 62:379–392; Patrologia Graeca (Migne), Digital Patrology representation.
Applies to: Ancient Greek Free use is permitted with attribution to the source (Greek notice printed on every page). Source websiteHomily 12 on Colossians, Voices of the Fathers Modern English, Voices of the Fathers, 2026, CC BY-NC 4.0.
Applies to: Modern English — VOTF Voices of the Fathers Modern English is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 for noncommercial reuse with attribution, to the extent copyright and related rights subsist in the translation/editorial contribution. Underlying ancient texts and identified public-domain sources retain their own status. Source websiteHomily 12 on Colossians, Voices of the Fathers Modern English, Voices of the Fathers, 2026, CC BY-NC 4.0.
Applies to: Modern English — VOTF Voices of the Fathers Modern English is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), to the extent copyright and related rights subsist in the translation and associated editorial material. Commercial reuse requires separate permission from Voices of the Fathers. The underlying ancient text and identified public-domain source editions retain their respective status. Source websiteNicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889)
Applies to: English — Broadus (1889) CCEL source header: Rights: Public Domain. Source websiteLexical and concordance sources
James Tauber, ed., MorphGNT: SBLGNT Edition, version 6.12 (2017), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.376200.
Morphological parsing and lemmatization are CC BY-SA according to the upstream README; the SBLGNT text is separately governed by the SBLGNT EULA. Voices of the Fathers used the morphology/lemmatization data as an analytical witness, not as the controlling Greek text. Source websiteJohn Jeffrey Dodson, Greek New Testament lexicon data, Biblical Humanities repository.
Public domain according to the upstream repository documentation preserved in the VOTF concordance toolkit. Source websiteOpen Scriptures, Strong's Dictionaries of Hebrew and Greek; Greek XML release data includes Ulrik Petersen’s Strong’s Greek Dictionary in XML.
Upstream provenance retained; used for Strong’s identifiers and associated Greek headword/definition data. No new VOTF license is asserted over the upstream dataset. Source websiteVoices of the Fathers editorial concordance review, 2026.
Overview research
BiblIndex, John Chrysostom, In Epistulam ad Colossenses homiliae 1–12, CPG 4433, PG 62.
Source websitePhilip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, Oxford Preface to Chrysostom’s Homilies on Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians (1889).
Source websiteGreek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, note 17.
Source website