Deleted Scenes: St. Patrick’s Day and Romans 8:3

As I write this today, it is St. Patrick’s Day, and I have completely failed. I don’t have even a bit of green on any of my clothing today. My car has some green growths on it, but that’s as close as I’m getting. I think some penance is required for this failure, and this is how I’ll do it: I’ll educate you a little bit about this Patrick guy. 

Some of you know the story. Patrick grew up around 400 AD in northwestern England. When he was 16 years old, he was kidnapped by a gang of Celtic pirates who then absconded with him back to Ireland and sold him into slavery there. During six years of enslavement, Patrick grew tremendously in his faith in Christ as well as in his understanding and even love of the Celts. After an apparently God-given dream, Patrick escaped slavery, returned to England, and was trained as a priest. Years later, Patrick received another dream, where his former captors asked for him to return and proclaim the Gospel (very similar to Paul’s dream in Acts 16:9). So Patrick returned to Ireland with a team of other Christian teachers, his time as a captive having taught him the language and culture shared by the few hundred thousand inhabitants of the island. Patrick and his team began planting Christian communities throughout Ireland, baptizing perhaps tens of thousands of new believers. There had been almost no Christian presence in Ireland before Patrick’s mission, but by the time he died around 460AD, about a quarter of Ireland’s 150 tribes had seen widespread acceptance of Christian faith. That number would continue to grow in the years after as others carried on Patrick’s work.

There’s a lot that we can take from that story, including yet another illustration of Romans 8:28 or Genesis 50:20: God’s propensity to take what was meant for evil and turn it for good. However, the piece I want to pick up on here is that God used Patrick in such a powerful way at least partly because Patrick was so incarnational. 

I read a book recently called “The Celtic Way of Evangelism” by George Hunter that recounts this history. A big question in the book is why this mission to the Celts was so successful, especially with so little exposure to the Gospel there beforehand. What set Patrick apart? Here’s what Hunter argues: “the fact that Patrick understood the people and their language, their issues, and their ways serves as the most strategically insight that was to drive the wider expansion of Celtic Christianity…when the people know that the Christians understand them, they infer that maybe Christianity’s High God understands them too.” God used Patrick as a bridge-builder. Patrick knew this culture, he loved the people, he understood how they thought, and he received a Spirit-driven desire to introduce them to Jesus. He did not plant Roman or British communities in Ireland- he planted Christian communities that adapted to their Irish context. 

In this, Patrick was just imitating his Lord and Savior. Romans 8:3 says that God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. This is a statement about what we call the incarnation, God becoming a human. It’s another way of saying what John says in the opening to his Gospel: the word (who was God) became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). As I said on Sunday, “in the likeness of sinful flesh” means that Jesus authentically became human, even though he was not, in fact, sinful. Hebrews 4:15 says that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are- yet he did not sin”. Jesus knows us. He understands us. And he loves us. That’s why he can be our saviour, it’s why he can be our advocate (1 John 2:1), it’s why he can be our interceder (Hebrews 7:25). He truly is our representative.

As for you, who has God given you a unique calling to serve and make Him known to? What would it look like for you to follow Jesus, and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus’ followers like Patrick, in “incarnational mission”?