I am God's wheat
Ignatius of Antioch
He is the bishop of Antioch — the third man to hold that post after Peter himself — and he is being marched to Rome in chains by ten Roman soldiers he calls his leopards.
The year is somewhere around 107 AD. The emperor Trajan has decided that Ignatius, leader of one of the most important churches in the empire, should die publicly in the capital. So they take the long road. Through Asia Minor, through Macedonia, through Greece — and at every stop, Christians come out to see him.
This is where it gets strange.
Ignatius doesn't want to be rescued. He writes letters to every church he passes — Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome — and in each one he says some version of the same thing: do not interfere. Do not petition the emperor. Do not steal this from me. He has been a bishop for decades. He has shepherded a church in a dangerous city. And now he has decided that this — being thrown to the lions in the Colosseum — is the most useful thing he can do for Jesus Christ.
The letter to Rome is the most urgent. He knows that church has influence, connections, people who might be able to pull strings. So he writes to them first and he is almost desperate in his pleading. Let me be ground. Let me be bread. Let me finally, actually, fully belong to God.
He arrives in Rome. The crowd fills the arena. The lions do what lions do.
What they could not have known — what Ignatius could not have known — is that his letters would survive. That nineteen centuries later, people would still be reading the words of the man in chains who begged the world to leave him alone so he could die well.
“I am God's wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts so that I may be found pure bread. Entreat Christ on my behalf, that through these instruments I may be found a sacrifice to God.”
— Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans, c. 107 AD
“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Ignatius wasn't suicidal. He wasn't performing courage for an audience. He had simply done the math that Paul did and arrived at the same answer — that a life fully given is worth more than a life carefully preserved.
Most of us spend enormous energy protecting our lives, our reputations, our comfort, our options. Ignatius spent his last journey trying to give all of that away. He wasn't afraid of the lions. He was afraid of arriving at the end with something still held back.
The question he leaves us with isn't whether you're willing to die for your faith. Most of us will never face that.
The question is whether you're willing to stop holding back.