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“I plead with you. Do not do me an unseasonable kindness.”
So Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote to the Christians in Rome late one summer exactly nineteen hundred years ago. “Let me be fodder for wild beasts—that is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ.”
What a curious request! When he wrote this letter, Ignatius was a prisoner being transported to Rome under sentence, literally, to be fed to the lions. His fear—his short letter to the Romans focuses entirely on this—was that believers in Rome would intervene and prevent his execution. As far as we know, there was no interference, and Ignatius did die in the Coliseum.
But why was Ignatius sentenced to death, and why was he so eager to die? He was certainly not the only person who gave his life for his faith, but he was strangely determined to do so.
As we ponder his choice, we begin to glimpse how everything we encounter—even death itself—can be offered to God and brought to serve the cause of Christ. That’s how Ignatius seems to have lived his life all along.
Legacy of Letters. The ancient sources tell us little about the life of St. Ignatius. Much of the information we have about him—that he was the child Jesus held on his lap in the gospel story, that he was tried by the emperor personally—is really the stuff of legend. The reliable information tells us that he was the third bishop of the Christian community in Antioch, one of the principal cities of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. This would have made Ignatius a very important figure in the church, and indeed, tradition tells us he was a disciple of the apostle John.
Our main source of information, though, is a remarkable set of seven short letters that he wrote during his journey to martyrdom. These letters are a unique window into both his personality and the life of the early church.
Imperial Rome, the world in which the church developed, reached the height of its power in Ignatius’s lifetime. Even so, it was a fragile empire, always on the watch for internal enemies. And though it tolerated a wide spectrum of religious practices, from time to time and place to place, Christianity received special scrutiny.
It was, after all, a religion of the urban poor, and the Roman ruling classes always worried that the poor would become too restless to control. Also, Christians gathered privately once a week to celebrate the Eucharist; these “love feasts” provoked any number of rumors among their pagan neighbors. But most importantly, Christians refused to acknowledge the emperor’s divinity and to show their loyalty by offering sacrifice to his image.
Bishop on Death Row. Serious persecutions of the church were relatively rare in these early years, but the Christians of Antioch apparently suffered one around a.d. 108. It was then that Ignatius, as bishop, was tried and condemned to be executed in Rome.
His sentence was probably somewhat unusual. We know from other records that Christians condemned in a local persecution were ordinarily executed in that community. It must have been an expensive project to assign a guard to Ignatius and to transport him over a period of weeks by land and sea to Rome. This suggests that he was a Christian leader of some prominence and that his execution was intended to send a warning to the larger Christian community.
On his way to Rome, Ignatius passed through the area that is now western Turkey. The thriving Christian communities in this region reached out to him by extending hospitality and sending representatives to visit. Grateful for their concern, Ignatius addressed five of his letters to these local churches.
Curiously, we know from one of his letters that the persecution in Antioch ended during his journey to Rome. In circumstances like this, it was common to release prisoners awaiting execution—perhaps after giving them a whipping or other punishment as a warning for the future. Still, Ignatius remained a prisoner.
In the Apostles’ Footsteps. Ignatius never explained in so many words why he didn’t resist his sentence—even when the persecution that condemned him had passed. And so we wonder what lay behind his plea that no one prevent his execution. Was he just abandoning the work that God had given him as a bishop?
As his letters show, Ignatius was fully aware of how important his work was. Even at this early stage, little more than a generation after the deaths of Peter and Paul, every Christian community had its own bishop, each one assisted by a group of presbyters and deacons. Ignatius insists that Christians cling to their bishop as they would to Christ. “As the Lord did nothing without the Father, … you must do nothing without the bishop,” he writes to one community. And to another: “When you obey the bishop, you are living like Jesus Christ.”
Ignatius was not defending the arbitrary authority of the bishops here but the integrity of the gospel message. He knew that Christian communities need living witnesses to the gospel and credible teachers of the truth and that bishops were to lead the way.
Then as now, the truth revealed by Christ was difficult to accept in its entirety. Our era balks at the immaterial and the supernatural and so rejects the divinity of Jesus in favor of his humanity. In Ignatius’ time, it was more difficult to acknowledge Jesus’ humanity; some teachers affirmed that Jesus was God but insisted that he only appeared to be human.
Throughout his letters, Ignatius insists on the core of the Christian message: God became a human being and died for our sins to restore us to his intimate friendship. For Ignatius, this not only opened up the unimaginable possibility of everlasting life: It also changed the way we look at everything around us. Nothing—not wealth, nor power, nor pride, nor life itself—is worth the loss of God’s friendship.
Something to Die For. Ignatius recognized that his people were facing a two-pronged challenge to their faith, in the form of persecutions and false teachers. This diagnosis required him to give people a reason to believe that the gospel was worth suffering for. In other words, by his life and his serene march to death, he could give people an example. If Ignatius could cheerfully die for this, they could say, surely I can suffer a fine or a beating—or even obey a bishop!
Surely, Ignatius prayed and thought about how his people would do without him. After all, he didn’t have to die. It is quite likely that some alternative could have been arranged. But he must have concluded that he could serve his people better by dying for them than by continuing to live among them.
Ignatius, probably nearing the end of his natural life in any event, wanted to give his people one last gift. While the Romans wanted to make him an example to place fear in the hearts of Christians, he went to his death enthusiastically, setting an entirely different example. He taught them the value of their faith and showed the Romans a courage they did not expect and could not understand.
A Model for Moderns. Today we remember St. Ignatius of Antioch for the way his life ended. In his own time, he was better known for the way he lived—as a man who had given his life to his people decades before it was taken in the arena. In both his living and his dying, then, Ignatius is a model witness who speaks to us across the centuries.
He teaches us to be joyful. Perhaps this seems an odd insight to take away from a man journeying to his death, but this is precisely what makes the lesson powerful. Even though he was about to die, Ignatius was cheerful and confident. His faith did not make him somber; it made him lighthearted, even in the face of worldly failure.
Ignatius also teaches us about truth and gentleness. He was uncompromising, even fierce, about his defense of the gospel, yet at the same time, he praised the faith of each community he visited and gently offered them encouragement to continue.
We live in a world that finds faith puzzling and foreign. As Pope John Paul II observed, our world needs witnesses more than anything else. Ignatius is a model of the sort of witness we need. His joy is attractive in a joyless culture. And his gentleness is effective in a world that no longer accepts authority well.
“I am voluntarily dying for God,” Ignatius wrote to the Roman church. “I am a convict now … but if I suffer, I will be freed by Jesus, and united to him, I will rise in freedom.” Ignatius’ death, freely embraced and cheerfully endured, has captured Christian imaginations for nearly two millennia, but it is his life—joyful, faithful, and gentle—that speaks most powerfully to the modern world.
Robert Kennedy teaches at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.
St. Ignatius, pray for us, that we can be witnesses like you in this world - strong but gentle, faithful teachers of the truth and joyful! Come, Holy Spirit! :-)