If You Want to Love, Sacrifice (Yourself)

St. Ignatius of Antioch and G.K. Chesterton

Happy Friday!

This Sunday we celebrate the 5th Sunday of Easter.

In the Gospel this Sunday, we are presented with the commandment to love as Christ has loved us as it is presented in the Gospel of John.

St. John writes:

When Judas had left them, Jesus said,
“Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.
If God is glorified in him,
God will also glorify him in himself,
and God will glorify him at once.
My children, I will be with you only a little while longer.
I give you a new commandment: love one another.
As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.
This is how all will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.”

Without mentioning pages that could and have been written on the image of the “glory” of the Son of Man (cf. von Balthasar’s Glory of the Lord for more details), I would like us to focus today on the image of love. Particularly, I would like us to reflect on the imitating love with which Our Lord calls us to. Namely, Jesus tells His disciples that they are to love—not merely a human love—but they are to love as He Himself has loved them. He says “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”

This begs the question: “How has Jesus loved them?” With the merely historical perspective in mind, Jesus has just finished washing their feet (cf. Jn 13:1-13). In one sense, He is clearly calling them to imitate Him. His disciples must love as He has loved; they must serve, with humility, those they are entrusted to. This is why, on Holy Thursday—the Mass of the Lord’s Supper—the Church imitates the Lord by washing the feet and why it is the celebration of the institution of the Priesthood.

However, in the deeper sense, when Jesus tells His disciples that they must love as He has loved them, what greater meaning could this have then His most extreme act of love: His death.

Jesus is telling His disciples that in order to love as He has loved, and will love, they are to lay down their lives (cf. Jn 15:13). In this light, the moving passage from the last chapter of John which we heard just two Sundays ago takes on new light; Peter is told that “when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go'“ (Jn 21:18). True love means to imitate the One who is love Himself.

Loving, rather than the way the world characterizes it—fickle and sterile—means, in the Christian sense, to go out of oneself so as to seek the good of the other; to lay down ones life; to submit to the will of the Beloved. This is the glory of Jesus. He reveals the Father; not only because He knows Him (cf. Jn 1:1 and 10:15), but because in His person, He reveals the Father. God is love, as the letter of John and Pope Benedict XVI remind us. Jesus shows us this love by the supreme act of laying down His life for the salvation of the world.

In this commandment, which is a fulfillment of the Old Testament law (“you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Lev 19:18), Jesus is showing us the way to love as God loves: complete self-gift.

This act of love, and the call to absorb that into oneself, can take many forms. Not every person will be called to make the supreme act of love. Some, in the circumstances of their lives, will witness that love by suffering, persecution, or the alienation of loved ones for the sake of Christ.

However, in the early Church, martyrdom was almost a given for a Christian, particularly during the waves of violent state-sponsored persecution, such as under the Emperors Trajan and Diocletian. Martyrdom, the physical transformation of oneself into another Christ, was a supreme sign of loyalty to Christ. To some, martyrdom was seen as the true test of one’s commitment to Christ and the sign that one was truly a disciple.

In what follows, I will discuss one of the most famous early Church Fathers: St. Ignatius of Antioch. In his letter to the Romans, he reveals this desire to be truly conformed to Christ in his plea for the Roman Christians to not hinder his martyrdom. Analyzing this letter will shed light on what it means that Christ has called us to love “as He loved us.”

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St. Ignatius of Antioch and What it means to be a Christian

St. Ignatius of Antioch, a late first century/early second century Church Father, is most remembered for his letters and for his martyrdom under the persecution of Emperor Trajan.