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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.
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