Saint Patrick’s Day: from leprechauns, wearing green, banishing snakes from Ireland, necklaces that say “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” to the part where everybody talks about how much Irish ancestry they have in their past.
St. Paddy's Day started as a religious celebration in the 17th century to commemorate the life of Saint Patrick and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. This “Feast Day” always took place on the anniversary of Patrick's death, which was believed to be March 17, 461 AD.
While the day has become a much commercialized celebration of all things Irish, let’s take a moment to review the inspiring Christian origin about this time of gospel advance. Saint Patrick’s direct mission from the Lord was about pioneering the church among an unreached group of individuals and bringing God’s amazing grace to an ungodly country.
The Gospel to the Irish
Patrick was born in a town on the River Clyde in Roman Britain, now a part of Scotland. His father, Calpurnius, was a deacon in the early Christian church. Patrick was not much of a believer himself. When Patrick was sixteen years old, he was captured by a band of Irish pirates who sold him to a chieftain in Northern Ireland. While in captivity for 6 years he worked as a shepherd and strengthened his relationship with God through prayer, eventually leading him to convert to Christianity. Before attempting to escape back to Britain, Patrick had learned the Irish language and culture. During his escape he was captured once again, but this time by the French. While held in France he learned all about monasticism before being released and sent home to Britain where he continued to study Christianity well into his twenties.
Patrick received a clear and personal call from the Lord to preach the Gospel in the land of his former captivity. Although the Irish were considered uncivilized barbarians, and illiterate, many felt this put them outside the reach of the gospel, butPatrick knew better.
In a strange and beautiful turn of events, those six years spent among them as a captive, he developed a special place in his heart for the Irish. Like Joseph sold into slavery to one day save Egypt and his brothers (Genesis 50:20), “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” So God sent Patrick into slavery to ready Ireland for a coming salvation.
The Discipleship Approach to Ministry
When Patrick arrived back in Ireland, he and his preaching ways were not welcomed, so he had to leave and arrived on some small islands off the coast. There he gained followers, and he eventually moved to the mainland to spread Christian beliefs across Ireland for many years to come. During this time, Patrick baptized thousands of people, ordained new priests, guided women to nun hood, converted the sons of kings in the region, and aided in the formation of over 300 churches.
A notable part of his strategy was that Patrick didn’t go solo to Ireland. He went with a team just as Jesus sent out his disciples together as in (Luke 10:1 NIV): “After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was to go. He told them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.’”
Patrick assembled group of followers that would tackle the work together, in the same location, laboring for the founding of a church, before moving on together to the next tribe.
Truth versus myths
Folklore often tells of Patrick’s famous banishing of all the snakes from Ireland, but there were never actually any snakes on the island to begin with. But Patrick may be the one responsible for popularizing the shamrock, or the three-leafed plant you see displayed all over the place today. According to legend, Patrick used it to teach the Irish the concept of the Christian Holy Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). They already had triple deities and regarded the number three highly, so Patrick’s use of the shamrock may have helped him win a great deal of favor with the Irish.
And if you are wondering where wearing green came from…it has nothing to do with being pinched. It goes back to the Irish Rebellion, when Irish soldiers wore green as they fought off the British Red coats. Until then, the color associated with St. Patrick and Feast Day was actually blue. The song soldiers sang during the war in 1798, “The Wearing of the Green,” changed all of that and made green, the color of shamrocks, Ireland’s mainstay color. From then on, people wore green on St. Patrick’s Day in unity.
Heartbeat & Soul of Patrick
The heartbeat and the soul of Patrick was the Gospel of Christ. The fact that Patrick understood these 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, and stands as perhaps our greatest single learning from this movement. When you understand the people, you will often know what to do, how to speak and cultivate a relationship them. When people know that followers of Jesus understand them, they surmise that maybe God understands them too.
Patrick knew the Irish well enough to engage them where they lived, and build authentic gospel bridges into their society and culture. He wanted to see the gospel grow rich in this Irish soil.
Friend of Sinners
Everyone who knows anything about the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Bible—and even those who don’t—knows that Jesus was a friend of sinners. Patrick’s pioneering approach is celebrated much in the same way today… and perhaps a model in some respects of the kind of mission well-suited for an increasingly post-Christian society 1500 years later. Most of Patrick’s colleagues weren’t impressed and the British leaders were offended and angered that Patrick was spending priority time with pagans, sinners, and barbarians. (Sound familiar?)
But Patrick knew such an approach had good precedent. For the One who saved him while he was a nominal Christian and an Irish captive was once called a “friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Mark 2:17 (NIV): “Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’”
The True Meaning for Us
Instead of complying with the religious establishment of the time, Patrick took the gospel to the uncivilized, and once thought unreachable, Irish. He gave much of his life evangelizing Ireland.
While today’s celebration has nothing to do with the true meaning of Saint Patrick’s Day, for those who love Jesus and the advance of his gospel, there are some good things to remember about Patrick and how God used him to help transform people into everything God created us to be.