God’s Wheat

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. JOHN 12:24

The letter Ignatius sent ahead of him to Rome is unlike the other six. It says almost nothing about bishops or false teachers. It is one long plea, and the plea is astonishing: do not save me. Ignatius feared that the Christians of Rome, out of love for him, would use their influence to have his sentence lifted. “I dread your very love,” he wrote, “lest it do me an injury.” And then came the words for which he is best remembered: “Let me be given to the wild beasts, for through them I can attain unto God. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread.”

Becoming a disciple

To understand these words we must see what Ignatius meant by being a disciple. He had been a Christian for many years and a bishop for some of them. Yet over and over in his letters he says that he is not yet a disciple, or only now beginning to be one. “Now am I beginning to be a disciple,” he writes to the Ephesians, and again to the Romans. To the Trallians he says that for all his knowledge of heavenly things he is “not yet by reason of this a disciple.”

For Ignatius, to be a disciple meant to follow Jesus all the way: to share His sufferings and come at last to where He is. He wanted to be, as he told the Romans, “an imitator of the passion of my God.” Knowledge could not make a man a disciple. Office could not. Only the long obedience of following Christ to the end could do that, and for Ignatius the end was now in sight.

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. MATTHEW 16:24

This is why he could say something so strange as that he was only now beginning. He was not belittling his years of service. He was saying that everything before had been the approach, and the road to Rome was the real thing. The disciple is the one who follows the Master into His death.

The wheat and the bread

The image of wheat and bread is carefully chosen. Wheat is not bread. To become bread it must be ground, and the grinding destroys the grain as grain. Ignatius saw the teeth of the beasts as the millstones that would turn him into something offered to God, pure and whole. The picture takes up the Lord’s own saying about the corn of wheat that must fall into the ground and die. It also echoes, surely on purpose, the language of the eucharist. Ignatius, who called the bread of the Lord’s table the medicine of immortality, saw his own death as a kind of offering of himself.

He uses the same kind of language elsewhere in the letter. He asks the Romans to grant him nothing more than “that I be poured out a libation to God, while there is still an altar ready.” The phrase recalls Paul, writing near his own death.

For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. 2 TIMOTHY 4:6

And like Paul he could see death as gain because Christ was his life. “It is good for me to die for Jesus Christ rather than to reign over the farthest bounds of the earth,” he wrote. “Him I seek, who died on our behalf; Him I desire, who rose again.”

The new birth

One of the most beautiful lines in the letter to Rome speaks of his coming death as a birth. “The pangs of a new birth are upon me,” he says. “Do not hinder me from living; do not desire my death.” By a bold reversal he calls his execution life, and his rescue death. “When I am come thither,” he adds, “then shall I be a man.”

This is the heart of his view of martyrdom. It was not a longing for death as such. It was a longing for Christ, for the full humanity that is found only in Him, and death was the door. In another line he describes the voice he heard within him: “only water living and speaking in me, saying within me, Come to the Father.”

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet what I shall choose I wot not. PHILIPPIANS 1:21–22

Reading him with care

Here more than anywhere in his letters, Ignatius must be read with care, and the reader should not be hurried past the difficulty.

Parts of the letter to Rome are hard to read. He says he will coax the beasts to devour him quickly, and if they are unwilling he will force them. He calls out for fire and cross and the crushing of his whole body. A modern Christian may well find these words disturbing, and it is right to be disturbed by them. There is an intensity here that can look like a desire for death for its own sake.

Several things should be said. First, Ignatius did not seek martyrdom. He was already arrested, condemned and on the road. What he asked was that his friends not try to use influence to rescue him. He was making sense of an end that had already been decided, and choosing to meet it with faith rather than terror.

Second, he knew his own heart was not wholly steady. “Though I desire to suffer, yet I know not whether I am worthy,” he told the Trallians. His vehemence was partly a way of bracing himself.

Third, the church did not make his eagerness a rule. Within fifty years the church of Smyrna, telling the story of its own bishop Polycarp’s death, recorded a man who had given himself up to the authorities unasked and who then lost his nerve and denied the faith; and it said plainly that it did not praise those who hand themselves over, because the gospel does not teach this. Polycarp himself withdrew from the city when the hunt began, and was taken only when he could not escape. That is the wiser pattern, and it is the Lord’s own.

But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another. MATTHEW 10:23

No Christian is called to seek death. Every Christian is called to be ready to lose everything, even life, rather than deny Christ. That readiness is what we should take from Ignatius, not the fierceness of his words about the beasts.

The disciple’s road for us

Few who read these pages will face the arena. Some will, for in many parts of the world today Christians still die for their faith, and they have found strength in Ignatius’s words. For the rest of us, his teaching still speaks. To be a disciple is to follow Christ to the end, and the end always involves some dying: to our pride, to our comfort, to our own way. Ignatius said, “Now I am learning in my bonds to put away every desire.” Every Christian who has been through suffering will know something of that school.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. MATTHEW 16:25

And his fundamental conviction is one we should share: that the Christian life does not end at death but only truly begins.

Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them. REVELATION 14:13

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ignatius said he was only beginning to be a disciple. Ask yourself honestly what following Jesus to the end would mean for you in the coming year.

2. Name one thing in your life that must be ground like wheat — a pride, a comfort, a habit — before you can be offered to God.

3. Pray today for Christians who are in prison or under threat of death for their faith. Learn the name and story of at least one.

4. If you are facing suffering you cannot escape, ask God to help you meet it with faith rather than terror, as Ignatius did.

5. Guard against any spirituality that seeks suffering for its own sake. Read Matthew 10:16–23 and note the Lord’s wisdom as well as His call to courage.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You fell into the ground and died, that You might bring forth much fruit, and You call me to follow You.

Thank You for Your servant Ignatius, who met his death with faith and counted it the beginning of life.

I do not ask for suffering, and I do not seek it; but if it comes, make me ready, and let me not deny You.

Grind away what is not of You in me, and make me pure bread, offered to the Father through You. Amen.