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Homilies of St. John Chrysostom
7.
But I have no fear of death, says one, nor of the act of dying, but of a miserable death, of being beheaded. Did John then, I ask, die miserably? for he was beheaded. Or did Stephen die miserably? for he was stoned; and all the martyrs have thus died wretchedly, according to this objection: since some have ended their lives by fire; and others by the sword; and some cast into the ocean; others down a precipice; and others into the jaws of wild beasts, have so come by their death. To die basely, O man, is not to come to one's end by a violent death, but to die in sin! Hear, at least, the prophet moralising on this very matter, and saying, "The death of sinners is evil." 1 He does not say that a violent death is evil; but what then? "The death of sinners is evil." 2 And justly so; for after the departure from this life, there is an intolerable punishment; undying vengeance, the envenomed worm; the fire unquenchable, the outer darkness, the chains indissoluble; the gnashing of teeth, the tribulation, and the anguish, and the eternal justice. 3
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In this rendering of the Septuagint there is a coincidence with that of the Targum, and the Vulgate, Æthiopic, and Arabic versions. But the Syriac is conformable with the Hebrew. The discrepancy may be accounted for by a slight difference in the reading of the vowel points. ↩
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Ps. xxxiv. 21. This passage is quoted by Bishop Latimer at the close of a sermon upon the epistle for the twenty-third Sunday after Trinity, preached A.D. 1552. His words are, Mors peccatorum pessima. "Death to sinners is the worst thing that can happen unto them." "What meaneth he by that? he signifieth unto us, that the wicked be not enough punished here, therefore it shall be worse with them after their death. So that it shall be a change: they that have their pleasure here, and live according to their desires, they shall come to afflictions in the other world." ↩
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See Hom. III. on Rom. i. 18. ↩