Divine and Human
The Collect for today’s feast day commemorating Ignatius of Antioch (c. 115) is a doozy. Here’s just a snippet:[1]
Almighty God, we praise thy name for… Ignatius of Antioch, who offered himself as grain to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts that he might present to thee the pure bread of sacrifice.
Wow. This Collect holds nothing back in fully capturing the devotion of Ignatius, as it recounts words he wrote to the Church in Rome on his journey to be martyred. Yet, Ignatius’s steadfast trust in the Lord’s promise of salvation is not the only thing worthy of remembering on his feast day.
Living in the late 1st century B.C.E. and appointed as the bishop of Antioch, Ignatius is among the early Church fathers whose fierce advocacy for many tenets of our faith shaped the Church in its infancy.
One such pillar he defended ardently is the mystery of the Incarnation and, specifically, the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. In Ignatius’s day, there was a growing belief among some early Christians that Christ was only divine and that His physical appearance and the suffering he endured were mere illusions. To them, the Divine could not, perhaps even would not, dare stoop to the level of becoming an inherently defective flesh and blood human. Which begs the questions: If Christ was divine, isn’t that enough? Why is Christ’s humanity so critical to our hope found in the Gospel? In no uncertain terms, the meaning of the Cross depends on it.
If Jesus Christ was just divine and not human, then He did not really die and was not resurrected. To remake our human nature and accomplish God’s ultimate mission to restore all things to Him, Jesus Christ suffered the human death of a human slave in our place; for it was we, not He, who were slaves to the powers of sin.
As a representative human being, Jesus, “our substitute,…not only shows us how human will can align itself with the will of God, but also makes it happen, in his own incarnate person.”[2]
Today, let’s thank God for the life and work of Ignatius of Antioch by grounding ourselves in this radical truth of the Gospel: God so loved His cosmos that He sent His Son straight into it, uniting Himself to humans so that it might be redeemed.
[1] For the full Collect and lectionary readings for today’s feast day, see here.
[2] Rutledge, Fleming. "The Crucifixion." 2015. p. 534.
