The saints

Saint Polycarp of Smyrna

Bishop and Martyr · Feast day February 23 · About 69 to 155 · Smyrna, Asia Minor · Also known as Polycarp of Smyrna

Saint Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostle John himself, a living bridge between the age of the apostles and the young church. Arrested as an old man of eighty-six and ordered to curse Christ to save his life, he answered that his Lord had never once wronged him in all those years, and he was burned alive, in one of the most moving of all the accounts of the early martyrs.

Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.Revelation 2:10 (KJV)

A living link to the apostles

Polycarp was born around the year 69, in the generation that came of age just as the last of the apostles were passing from the earth, and by the clear and repeated testimony of the early church he knew and was taught by the apostle John and by others who had seen the Lord with their own eyes. His younger friend Irenaeus, who as a boy had sat and listened to the old bishop preach, remembered vividly in later years how Polycarp would tell of his conversations with John and with the others who had walked with Jesus, repeating their very words and their accounts of the Lord's miracles and teaching exactly as he had received them from those who saw.

In Polycarp, then, the living memory of the apostles passed directly to the next age of the church. He was not a man who had merely read about Jesus; he had been taught the faith by men who had touched him, and he guarded that trust as the most precious thing he owned. This gives his life a particular weight. When Polycarp speaks, the church hears an echo of the apostolic age itself, and when he dies rather than deny Christ, he dies as one who had received the faith from the hands of the eyewitnesses and would not let a single word of it fall.

The shepherd of Smyrna

Polycarp became bishop of Smyrna, a great and wealthy port city on the coast of Asia Minor, and for many decades, through dangerous and unsettled times, he shepherded that church with faithfulness and love. He taught, he corrected error, and he held the young churches of the region to the faith as the apostles had handed it down, standing as a bulwark against the false teachers who were already troubling the church with new and strange doctrines. A letter that Polycarp wrote to the Christians at Philippi has survived, and it is warm, humble, and saturated in the words of Scripture, urging the believers there to steadfastness, to constant prayer, to endurance in suffering, and above all to love.

In his old age Polycarp made the long journey to Rome to confer with its bishop over a difference in the date on which Easter should be kept, a dispute that divided the churches of the East from those of the West. The two bishops could not persuade each other and did not resolve the question, yet, in a lesson in Christian charity that outlasted the disagreement, they parted in peace and shared the Lord's table together, each recognizing the other as a faithful servant of the same Christ. Polycarp knew the difference between the faith that must never be surrendered and the customs over which brothers may honestly differ, and he held each in its right place.

Betrayed and found

Late in Polycarp's long life a wave of persecution broke over Smyrna, and Christians were being hunted down and put to death in the arena for refusing to swear by the emperor and offer incense to his image. The crowds, inflamed by the spectacle and having already seen several believers die, began to call out for Polycarp by name, for he was the teacher of the whole province and the most famous Christian in the city. At the urging of his people the old bishop withdrew to a small farm outside the city to pray and wait, but the search closed in, and when he learned that his hiding place had been discovered he refused to flee further, saying, The will of God be done.

He came down calmly to meet the soldiers who had come to arrest him, and, far from resisting, he ordered food and drink set before them and asked only for an hour to pray. His captors, moved despite themselves, granted it, and the hour stretched into two as the old man stood and prayed aloud, remembering by name everyone he had ever known, small and great, and interceding for the whole church of God spread across the world, so that some of those who had come to seize him began to regret their errand. Then, his prayer finished, he was set on a donkey and brought back into the city to face the governor and the roaring crowd.

Eighty-six years I have served him

Brought into the packed and howling arena, Polycarp was pressed by the Roman governor to save his life with a few simple words: swear by the fortune of the emperor, revile Christ, and he would be set free. The old bishop gave the answer that has echoed down the centuries as one of the purest confessions of faith ever spoken. Eighty and six years have I served him, he said of Christ, and he never once did me any wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King who saved me? The governor pressed him again, threatening him first with wild beasts and then with fire if he would not recant.

Polycarp did not flinch at either threat. When the governor warned him of the fire that would burn him, Polycarp answered that the fire the governor threatened burns only for an hour and is soon quenched, but that the governor knew nothing of the fire of the judgment to come, which is kept for the ungodly and burns forever, and that he did not fear the flames before him. The crowd, seeing that he could not be moved, howled the louder for his death, and a pyre was hastily built there in the arena from wood and faggots gathered by the mob, both pagan and, to their shame, some of the city, in their fury against the old man.

Faithful unto death

When the executioners moved to nail Polycarp to the stake so that he could not shrink from the flames, he stopped them, saying that the God who gave him the strength to endure the fire would also give him the strength to stand still within it without being fastened down. So they bound him only, his hands behind his back, and he stood there like a ram chosen out of a great flock for sacrifice. Lifting his eyes to heaven, he prayed aloud one last time, thanking God for counting him worthy of this day and this hour, worthy to be numbered among the martyrs and to share the cup of Christ and the resurrection of soul and body into eternal life, and he blessed and glorified God to the very end.

The fire was lit, and Polycarp died in the flames, or, by the account of his own church, when the fire seemed not to consume him quickly, by the stroke of a sword. The record of his death, written down by the church at Smyrna very soon afterward in a letter sent to other churches, is the oldest detailed account of a Christian martyrdom outside the pages of the New Testament, and it reports his end with sober reverence and awe. His people gathered up his remains, which they valued, they wrote, as more precious than costly jewels and purer than gold, and laid them in a fitting place, resolving to gather there each year on the day of his death to celebrate his birthday into heaven, and so they gave the whole church its ancient love of honoring the martyrs on the day they died.

Why Polycarp still matters

Polycarp answers the fear that faithfulness to Christ may one day cost too much. Eighty-six years of loyalty to a Lord who had never wronged him made the choice, when it finally came, into no real choice at all, and he walked to the fire as calmly as a man goes home. He is the model of the long, quiet, ordinary faithfulness that only reveals its steel at the very end, and a living witness that the earliest church knew Jesus not as a distant memory or a fine idea but as a King worth dying for. Be thou faithful unto death, the risen Christ said to the church at Smyrna in the Book of Revelation, and I will give thee a crown of life, and the bishop of Smyrna took his Lord at his word and received the crown.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint John the Apostle · Who is Jesus? · Saints for February 23 · Saint of the day