by CCW | 17 December 2013 22:00
This is the second of two Advent Meditations on the theme “Mary in Holy Waiting”. The first is posted here[1].
Watching and waiting are the spiritual activities of the soul in the season of Advent. They signify our looking towards God, our looking expectantly at the coming of God’s Word and Son. Mary in Advent is in Holy Waiting; a waiting upon the fullness of time, upon the birth of God’s Word and Son through her. Her waiting is the watching and waiting of the Church upon the motions of God’s Word coming to birth in us.
Tonight also marks the commemoration of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch and martyr. His commemoration complements our Advent programme about Mary in Holy Waiting. One of the Apostolic Fathers, that is to say, one of the early figures of the Christian Church who, whether they knew the Apostles personally or directly (some may have, some may have not), nonetheless preserved and transmitted “the apostolic teaching and tradition between the time of the Apostles themselves and the latter years of the second century” (Max Staniforth, To A.L.M. (Intro) to the Apostolic Fathers). Ignatius was martyred, c. 115, after an episcopal career of some forty years. A figure of great renown, we actually know very little about him apart from his character that is revealed in his seven remarkable epistles written on the road to his martyrdom in Rome. We do not even know the exact charge which led to his martyrdom.
His epistles bring out, I suggest, the essential Marian quality of watching and waiting upon the Word and Will of God. Three things stand out in his epistles: his embrace of martyrdom; his insistence upon the three-fold ministry of the Church, especially episcopacy; and his emphasis upon the doctrine of the Incarnation against the Jews and the Docetists – the latter being the term for the earliest heresy of the Church, already attacked in the epistles of John, that claims that the human life of Christ is all a kind of play-acting, a sham, a mere appearance in contrast to reality since the idea of God becoming man is abhorrent where matter is seen as evil and spirit as good and pure.
In many ways, Ignatius’ epistles already point in the direction of a creedal understanding of the Christian faith that will emerge more explicitly in the fourth century. The key doctrine for him is the Incarnation which leads to his conviction about martyrdom and about the ordered life of the Church. His epistles breath that positive spirit of living for and with Christ already signified in Mary’s fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word,” the idea of our life with God because of God’s embrace of our humanity. For Ignatius this wonder contributes to a new sensibility, a conviction about immortality such that martyrdom is the necessary witness to the truth of Christianity, a martyrdom which he enthusiastically accepts like Mary’s “be it unto me according to thy word.” In a world of suicide bombers, this may trouble us but if we look more closely we can see how different this Ignatian/Marian sense of commitment and witness is from these contemporary acts in which martyrdom is really an act of terrorism for political purposes to which religious concepts have been sadly twisted and perverted.
Ignatius is a strong witness to the truth of the Incarnation. “There is only one Physician,” he says:
Very flesh, yet Spirit too;
Uncreated, and yet born;
God-and-Man in One agreed,
Very-life-in-Death indeed,
Fruit of God and Mary’s seed;
At once impassible and torn
By pain and suffering here below;
Jesus Christ, whom as our Lord we know.
(Epistle to the Ephesians)
It is in all likelihood an early Christian hymn. It testifies to a new sensibility that changes how one looks at the world of power and ambition and at suffering and death. There is a strong confidence in our being with Christ, the one who is “the Word made flesh.” Martyrdom is witness, first and foremost, to that conviction.
Life begins and ends with the qualities of faith and love. “Faith is the beginning, and love is the end; and the union of the two together is God,” he says, arguing for the unity of faith and action, of practicing what one preaches. The example is the reality of Christ: “He who spake the word, and it was done, [Psalm 33.9]; and what He achieved even by His silences was well worthy of the Father.” Word spoken and Word enacted. The Word uttered and the Word in silence. In a wonderful passage that anticipates The Collect for Purity in the beginning of our Liturgy (Cdn. BCP, p. 67), Ignatius says “nothing is hidden from the Lord; even our most secret thoughts are ever present to Him. Whatever we do, then, let it be done as though He Himself were dwelling within us, we being as it were His temples, and He within us as their God. For in fact, that is literally the case; and in proportion as we rightly love Him, so it will become clear to our eyes” (Epistle to the Ephesians).
It was in the sophisticated, beautiful, and, no doubt, decadent and dangerous city of Antioch that Christians were first called Christians. It was initially a term of opprobrium and insult, a point which we would do well to remember in our current world. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, was also the first to use the noun “Christianity,” suggesting the emergence of an ecclesial identity clearly distinct from Judaism (Epistle to the Magnesians), and providing an early form of what will be a fairly typical patristic argument about Judaism’s fulfillment in Christianity and part of the polemic between Judaism and Christianity.
Ignatius’ emphasis upon certain elements of the Christian narrative already point us to the Creeds, we have suggested. “I want you,” he writes to the Magnesians-on-the Maeander in Asia Minor, “to be unshakably convinced of the Birth, the Passion, and the Resurrection which were the true and indisputable experiences of Jesus Christ, our Hope, in the days of Pontius Pilate’s governorship” (Epistle to the Magnesians). Mary is an inescapable feature of that proto-creedal sensibility that emphasizes the idea of Revelation and Redemption. “Under the Divine dispensation, Jesus Christ our God was conceived by Mary of the seed of David and of the Spirit of God; He was born, and He submitted to baptism, so that by His Passion He might sanctify water” (Epistle to the Ephesians), he writes, already inaugurating a pattern of understanding which sees in the narrative of Christ aspects of redemption in the revelation. In other words, something new about our humanity is discovered in the revelation of God in Christ.
In a beautiful passage, Ignatius invokes a theme which will become a kind of devotional commonplace, the theme of the silences of God, the mysteries of human redemption wrought in the silences of God, what he calls the “three trumpet-tongued secrets.”
“Mary’s virginity was hidden from the prince of this world; so was her child-bearing, and so was the death of the Lord. All these three trumpet-tongued secrets were brought to pass in the deep silence of God. How then were they made known to the world? Up in the heavens a star gleamed out, more brilliant than all the rest; no words could describe its lustre, and the strangeness of it left men bewildered. The other stars and the sun and moon gathered round it in chorus, but this star outshone them all. Great was the ensuing perplexity; where could this newcomer have come from, so unlike its fellows? Everywhere magic crumbled away before it; the spells of sorcery were all broken, and superstition received its deathblow. The age-old empire of evil was overthrown, for God was now appearing in human form to bring in a new order, even life without end. Now that which had been perfected in the Divine counsels began its work; and all creation was thrown into a ferment over this plan for the utter destruction of death.” (Epistle to the Ephesians)
The new order is not a new world order. It is a new way of looking at life and death through our looking to God. A new light has come in to the world, the light of Christ, and that changes everything. As he writes to Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, to encourage him about his impending martyrdom, “the prize, as well you know, is immortality and eternal life” (Epistle to Polycarp). In a phrase that elaborates upon the Marian idea of pondering the words of Christ, Ignatius writes to the Romans that his martyrdom will “turn [him] into an intelligible utterance of God.” Through the Word made flesh, we become inworded, the Word of Christ lives in us and we in the Word. “So far as I am concerned, to die in Jesus Christ is better than to be monarch of earth’s widest bounds. He who died for us is all that I seek; He who rose again for us is my whole desire” (Epistle to the Romans). Our good is not found in the world but in God. Because of the Incarnation, our end in God is not an empty hope, an illusion or a tragic wish.
“For the good does not reside in what our eyes can see; the fact that Jesus Christ is now within the Father is why we perceive Him so much the more clearly. For the work we have to do is no affair of persuasive speaking; Christianity [there is that word again] lies in achieving greatness in the face of a world’s hatred” (Epistle to the Romans). Martyrdom is witness to the truth of Christ as God’s Word and Son incarnate. “My eros is crucified,” Ignatius says, in what is, perhaps, one of his most famous sayings, meaning that his desire for the things of the world has been killed in him, but only because of what is heard and seen in Jesus Christ and because of his devotion to the doctrine of Christ (Epistle to the Romans).
This sensibility makes comprehensible another famous remark of Ignatius, his prayer “to be a meal for the beasts, for it is they who can provide my way to God. I am His wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ” (Epistle to the Romans). As he reminds Polycarp, “a Christian, after all, is not his own master; he puts his time at God’s disposal” (Epistle to Polycarp). We do not live for ourselves. It is the highest ideal and one that challenges completely all our worldly affections and attachments. We live for Christ for somehow by God’s grace Christ lives in us.
It requires what we have seen in the witness of Mary. It requires our watching and waiting upon the coming of God’s Word proclaimed and celebrated. Advent is about the pageant of that Word which, in the Christian understanding, has its fullness of meaning in the Word made flesh through the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our attention to the Word of God written and proclaimed is the Advent task and challenge. “My records,” Ignatius says, in response to the question of proof about Christ from the Scriptures, “are Jesus Christ; for me, the sacrosanct records are His cross and death, and resurrection, and the faith that comes through him” (Epistle to the Philadelphians). Once again, we sense the emphasis upon what will become the creedal essentials. But for Ignatius, and I pray for us, that sense of the uniqueness and the primacy of Christ is borne out of the witness of the Scriptures, Old and New.
Christ, he says, “is the doorway to the Father, and it is by Him that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the prophets go in, no less than the Apostles and the whole Church; for all these have their part in God’s unity. Nevertheless, the Gospel has a distinction all of its own, in the advent of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and His Passion and Resurrection. We are fond of the prophets, and they did indeed point forward to Him in their preaching; yet it is the Gospel that sets the coping-stone on man’s immortality” (Epistle to the Philadelphians).
We wait and watch upon the coming of God’s Word in prayer that we may be, like Mary, defined by that Word and that we may be, like Ignatius, “intelligible utterance[s] of God” in the witness of our lives to Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Mary in Holy Waiting II
Comm. of Ignatius of Antioch
December 17, 2013
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