17/10/2025

St Ignatius of Antioch

When I have completed thoughts inspired by this morning's Ferial Mass readings, I will have to look up what I remember about today's saint. That he complained about his guards on his journey to death in Rome as "panthers" and actively was welcoming this journey to martyrdom sticks in my mind but I cannot remember the details.

In the first reading, St Paul continues to emphasise that it is faith, pure belief in God, that will bring us to the righteousness that is the target we have to aim for in our lives lived out in this world. Our faith can be witnessed by our deeds that conform to the Will of God but the institutional worldly deed that is following the "Law" as it had become by the time of the Incarnation had lost the sincerity that empowered it to achieve personal righteousness for its followers.

There was a reason that the Incarnation happened when it did.

Our God respects our freedom and completed his revelations by becoming man and experiencing for himself the limitations of the human mind, body and soul in dutifully accepting a life completed by death with the self-willed refusal of sin that is both our worldly example and source of supernatural grace.

Even three hundred years after the Resurrection Christian Martyrs were still willing to make the same absolute commitment to Faith in IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT that was Jesus' faith in his Father and ours. St Paul makes his first appearance in Scriptures as a participant in the "Joint Venture" that was the murder of the first martyr. 

I am pretty sure that St Ignatius welcomed his own death and I guess that I too will die sooner than later. I am sure, however, that Jesus tells all of us who read this morning's Gospel that there is nothing to be feared about death if we appeal for the free gift that he created 2000 years ago in worldly time on the hill outside the city walls in yet still painfilled Palestine.

The ultimate horror of that death becomes the Glory of Grace that is the Resurrection and available to all who allow themselves to experience Faith that is the Church of Love, the New Holy Family established at that moment in the real-time of this world when Jesus, dying God and man, declared

"Woman behold your Son. Son behold your mother"