Resurrecting St. Patrick – His Personality and Passion

Resurrecting St. Patrick – His Personality and Passion. (this post is in process and will be completed soon)

“In the Gospel story, the passionate, the outsized, the out-of-control have a better shot at seizing heaven than the contained, the calculating, and those of whom this world approves. Patrick seems to have been attracted to the same kind of oddball, off-center personalities that attracted Jesus, and this attraction alone makes Patrick unusual in the history of churchmen.”  (Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization).

Embracing the Characters. Most parents and educators know about the importance of character development. Integrity, virtue, goodness, self-control. Christ-centered homes, churches and schools wouldn’t be worthy of the Name if we weren’t fully immersed in that process with our children. But wait a minute here. While nurturing character, let’s not forget about developing characters. Unfortunately, we adult believers have some work to do in the characters business. Christians in recent history have tended to sand off the rough edges of God-given personality and giftedness. Committing the sin of conformity, the Church as a whole is in danger of becoming a cultural stereotype, a bland soup of sameness to a world in desperate need of righteous variety. Why are we prone to do this? Do we fear rejection from each other, from the world? Are we locked-in to playing it safe?

“Patrick devoted the last 30 years of his life to his warrior children, that they might ‘seize the everlasting kingdom’ with all the energy and intensity they had lately devoted to killing and enslaving one another and seizing one another’s kingdoms.” (Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization).

A Cast of Characters. This is not unique to St. Patrick, of course. Our scriptures are chock-full of faithful live wires. Try Jacob on for size, or David, or Isaiah, or Ezekiel, or… Actually, take your pick of Biblical rock stars, and are any two alike? Consider too that first and greatest NT prophet, a throwback voice in the wilderness, with his questionable wardrobe and diet. He may not have won any Mr. Congeniality awards, but that was a fascinating personality to say the least. And how about those hand-picked Apostles, some of whom were probably teenagers: “sons of thunder” fishermen, a political insurrectionist, a turncoat collaborator, a tight-fisted treasurer, and some quiet introverts thrown in as well. Or take a peek at the fascinating group of women in the mix. They were all as different as night and day. But somehow Jesus chose them as they were, or they chose Him, and it was okay. Only that greedy treasurer couldn’t fit in, but that’s another story.

Christ the Character. In our “spiritual” moments we are tempted to see Jesus blandly floating a foot or two off the ground while in the flesh. But of course He didn’t. His feet firmly planted on terra firma, He had authentic human personality. The Gospels seem to suggest that He was a far cry from a predictable Yahweh-in-a-box. Instead, Christ was somewhat of a divine eccentric, idiosyncratic, and probably something of a puzzle for those who were trying to typecast the Messiah. As very God, He was the King of Glory. As very man, He was the Pioneer of live wires, and as human as it gets. Yes, Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever, the same stable and eternal source of all that is true, good and beautiful. But was He or His followers the same in anything else? There is an endless variety of wildflowers, planets, colors and music. Likewise, when it comes to personalities, all bets are off. This brings us back to faith-based homes, churches and schools bearing the name of Christ the Character. We need to continue what we’ve started… Honoring the variety of personalities who grow up in our homes, worship in our churches, or walk through our hallowed halls of our schools. While nurturing the character of our children, let’s also remember to embrace the characters as well.

“When Patrick used the phrase ‘seize the everlasting kingdom’ in his open letter to the British Christians, he was echoing the mysterious saying of Jesus, which seems almost to have been uttered with the Irish in mind: ‘From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent bear it away.” (Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization).

A Better Translation. That gospel passage quoted above in Matthew 11:12 from the KJV has been put into other words to help us understand what Jesus seemed to have in mind. Here are other ways of saying the same thing:

… “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven is powerfully breaking its way forward, and people breaking out with its power are seizing hold of it.” 

… “From the moment John stepped onto the scene until now, the realm of heaven’s kingdom is bursting forth, and passionate people have taken hold of its power.”  

… “The kingdom of heaven is entered into by force, and the violent ones forcefully take hold of it.” 

… “The kingdom is pressing forward vigorously, and the vigorous seize it eagerly.”

… “God’s Kingdom is advancing forcefully from within the dynamic movement itself, as people embrace the teachings of Jesus and put them into practice.”  

Zeal and Passion. St. Patrick took Jesus’ teaching to heart as he encouraged the Irish people to pursue God’s reign eagerly, intensely, with all their might. Seeking the kingdom is not a passive exercise or a spectator sport. Early church leader John Chrysostom said that this verse is referring to those who have such earnest desire for Christ that they let nothing stand between themselves and faith in Him. So it appears that Jesus is at least partly speaking of a holy violence on the part of believers, drastic action that believers take against themselves in the form of repentance, self-denial, and other self-disciplines of the Faith. And it’s really fascinating that Jesus seemed to repeat His words to the disciples in Matthew with His teaching in Luke 16:16... “And now when the good news of God’s Kingdom is proclaimed, everyone is pushing to get in! People’s hearts burn with extreme passion to press in and receive it, forcing his way into it!” 

Fiery Passion. Zeal in the New Testament Greek is zelos (dzay-los), which means spiritually fervent to the point of being hot, seething; the root word refers to boiling water, a glowing solid, or something that is so hot it is bubbling to the surface. In the Hebrew Bible zeal is qinah (kin – naw), which means intense fervor and fiery passion. How does one describe the personality of Jesus, or someone like Patrick who seemed to be in synch with Him? There’s so much we don’t understand about how He operated from one moment to the next. The “Fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-23) does indeed give us a picture of His personality, but not the whole picture. For example, here we find Jesus clearing out the moneychangers with a scary flash of fire in His eyes. He is extremely frustrated and angry. He is consumed by zeal, a “fiery passion.” And yet, immediately following His display of righteous temper, we find Him welcoming the blind, the crippled, and many children! One moment He is fashioning a whip to use on merchants, and the next moment He is tenderly healing the blind and the crippled, and appreciating the praises of children. He was a person to avoid one minute, and then a safe place the next. How does one explain that? What would that look like? The personality of Jesus is never described fully in the Gospels, nor is Patrick’s in his letters. We do know that St. Patrick was full of His Holy Spirit, and so Patrick surely, in his own human way, reflected the personality and passion of Christ Himself.

God is Impassioned. The Tanakh, the official Jewish Bible, translates Exodus 34:14 this way… “You must not worship any other god, because Yahweh, whose Name is Impassioned, is an impassioned God.” God’s chosen people believe that He has demonstrated zeal down through biblical history, that He has a strong personality marked by conviction and holy passion. On the one hand, it seems almost silly to assign human emotion to the glorious God. On the other hand, God-made-flesh certainly revealed passion and zeal and what could be called emotion. We see the Father through the Son, so it seems emotion is not foreign to the character of the Lord God. Maybe all our imperfect, fallen emotions find their righteous origin in God the Creator. God certainly doesn’t have His emotional ups and downs like us. He of course isn’t moody in a human way, because He is the Rock, steady and stable through eternity. That’s what separated Yahweh from the gods of the ancient day, who were believed to be unpredictable and inconsistent. People lived their lives trying to figure out how to keep their gods happy. One never knew what to expect from those gods, whether the gods of Canaan, Egypt and Rome, or the more contemporary idols of technology, career and entertainment. To help us along the way, God let us read His mind somewhat by giving us Scripture and Jesus, the Word-made-flesh. God has a passion for truth and a zeal for love. That is His nature, and He will always be true to Himself. God’s essence as demonstrated by Yahweh in the OT and Jesus in the NT is eternally full of grace and truth, and passionately so.