HOMILY for St Ignatius of Antioch
Eph 2:1-10; Ps 99; Luke 12:13-21
In the lectionary at this time we’re reading from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. It’s thought that the apostle wrote his letter during his imprisonment in Rome, so around 62 AD. Just 55 years later, sometime between 107-110 AD, another letter is written to the Church in Ephesus, and the author is the Saint and Bishop and Martyr we honour today, St Ignatius of Antioch.
Antioch was one of the oldest Christian cities, now in south-central Turkey but just 12 miles northwest of the Syrian border. In Roman times, this whole region was known as Syria and Antioch was its capital. Many Jews lived in Antioch, and from this community came the first Christian converts. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that Christians had fled Jerusalem after the martyrdom of St Stephen, c.36 and they went to Antioch. It was here that St Paul and St Barnabas preached, and it was in Antioch that the name ‘Christian’ was first used (cf Acts 11:26). The Christians of Antioch had strong ties to Jerusalem, which was then the ‘headquarters’, so to speak, of the Church, but Antioch also traced its foundation as a ‘diocese’ to St Peter, who tradition says was bishop in Antioch before he went to Rome and became bishop or pope there. So, St Ignatius, as bishop of Antioch was, in a sense, a successor of St Peter too.
Hence, among his writings, seven letters were preserved by the early Christian churches, including a letter that had been written to the Ephesians. From this letter we learn that St Ignatius had come from Syria to the coastal Roman city of Ephesus, bound up as a prisoner, and headed for Rome where he would be fed to the lions in the amphitheatre. Ephesus, we know, was the city where St John the Beloved Disciple had lived with Our Lady after the death and resurrection of Our Lord; Ephesus was another apostolic church founded by St Paul and enriched by apostolic teaching. St Ignatius’s letter tells us that the bishop of Ephesus was someone called Onesimus. This name should ring a bell because St Paul writes his letter to Philemon, one of the writings of the New Testament, and in it he tells his friend Philemon that he had met Philemon’s runaway slave Onesimus in prison, he had converted him to Christianity, and he asked Philemon to treat Onesimus, upon his return to Philemon’s household, as “a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.” The tradition is that this same Onesimus had become a successor of the apostles as bishop in Ephesus when St Ignatius passed through on the way to his execution in Rome.
St Ignatius mentions the bishop because one of the central themes of his letter to the Ephesians, as with St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, is that of unity among Christians, and the focus of that unity, which is not merely spiritual but concrete, is the bishop who he says is put in position “by the will of Jesus Christ”. Just as St Paul says that, through grace, we are each to become “God’s work of art, created in Jesus Christ to live the good life”, so St Ignatius also uses an image drawn from the arts to describe the ‘good life’ for a Church community.
St Ignatius writes, “you should act together in harmony with the mind of the bishop, as you are in fact doing. For your priests [are] attuned to the bishop as strings to a lyre. Therefore in your unanimity and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung. You must join this chorus, every one of you, so that by being harmonious in unanimity and taking your pitch from God you may sing in unison with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father, in order that he may both hear you and, on the basis of what you do well, acknowledge that you are members of his Son. It is, therefore, advantageous for you to be in perfect unity, in order that you may always have a share in God… Let us be careful, then, not to set ourselves in opposition to the bishop, in order that we may be subject to God… It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord Himself.”
There is a dissonant cacophony, and one that repels others from the Church, therefore, when Christians place themselves in opposition to their bishops, and this disunity is certainly not from God but from the Enemy who seeks to divide us, scandalise onlookers, and drive people away from Christ’s holy Church.
Therefore, the voice of today’s apostolic Martyr recalls us to unity in the Church, to treasure it, and to seek it, and to work for unity, as he said, “by being harmonious in unanimity and taking your pitch from God you may sing in unison with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father”. And the key here is to take our pitch from God. Neither the bishop nor the priest nor the lay person has the song or even sets the pitch. Rather, these come from God, and so we must all, as Christians, listen to him.
The Gospel, therefore, warns those who are rich – and we have been made rich in grace, and our bishops and Church leaders have been made rich in their responsibilities and gifts – to remember always that their riches come from God, and that they must account for their lives and their stewardship of things before God. Likewise St Paul says to the Ephesians: “it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God; not by anything that you have done, so that nobody can claim the credit.”
As such, we must become a listening Church, as Pope Francis likes to say, but this means above all listening to God, together (or 'synodally') listening to God's voice in the sacred Scriptures; in the sacred Tradition of the Church; as well as, with humility and prudence, to what the Spirit might be saying to the Church today through our shared experiences. But, as St Ignatius says, this sharing happens when we gather at the Altar together “breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying, but [which causes] that we should live for ever in Jesus Christ.” And that – eternal life in Christ – is our common goal and hope.
