A short homily on Luke 17 in which Origen reads 'losing the soul to save it' as martyrdom and locates the kingdom of God inside the believer's heart, not in an external event.
Homily on Luke 36 is one of Origen's short expository sermons on the Gospel of Luke, delivered to a congregation and preserved (like most of the Luke homilies) only in Jerome's Latin translation. It takes up two connected sayings of Jesus: the paradox that whoever loses his soul in trying to save it will save it, and the Pharisees' question about when the kingdom of God will come.
Origen reads the paradox as a description of martyrdom: the martyrs 'lose' their earthly life precisely by refusing to save it through denial of Christ, and so actually save it, while those who cling to physical survival at the cost of faithfulness lose their soul into gehenna. He backs this with Paul's language about the natural body being sown and the spiritual body raised, and the idea that one who clings to the Lord becomes 'one spirit' with him, treating the saying as a call to transformation rather than mere self-preservation.
He then turns to the kingdom of God, insisting it does not arrive as a visible, locatable event ('look, here it is') but exists within the person. For Origen this is not a comforting platitude but a diagnostic: every soul is ruled by something, whether the kingdom of God or 'the kingdom of sin,' and specific vices (avarice, vainglory, grief, desire) each function as their own rival kingships. The homily ends with a prayer that the congregation be released from the kingdom of the enemy and placed under the kingdom of wisdom, peace, justice, and truth, identified with Christ, the only-begotten Son.
“The kingdom does not arrive in a way that people can say: look, here it is, or look, there it is. For indeed, God's kingdom exists within you.”
— Homily on Luke 36 · read this chapter →
“The martyrs seek ‘to save their own’ and for that reason lose it, in order to save it.”
— Homily on Luke 36 · read this chapter →
“if anyone is tormented by the burning of avarice, he is ruled by avarice. Further, he who is just has justice as his queen”
— Homily on Luke 36 · read this chapter →
“let us pray to God that he may take from us the kingdom of the enemy, and that we may be able to be under the kingdom of God almighty, that is, under the kingdom of wisdom, peace, justice, and truth”
— Homily on Luke 36 · read this chapter →
It is a short sermon on Luke 17 that explains the paradox of losing one's soul in order to save it as a description of martyrdom, and then argues that the kingdom of God is an inward reality rather than a visible, locatable event.
He reads it through the martyrs: they lose their earthly life by refusing to preserve it through denying Christ, and in doing so actually save their soul, while those who cling to survival at the cost of faithfulness lose it into gehenna.
He says it does not come as something people can point to and say 'look, here it is,' but exists within the person; every soul is ruled either by the kingdom of God or by the kingdom of sin and its various vices.
Yes. He describes avarice, vainglory, grief, dread, love, and desire each as forces that can rule and possess a person in place of God's kingdom.
Like most of Origen's homilies on Luke, it survives only in Jerome's Latin translation of the lost Greek original.
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