DAY TWENTY-THREE -- Jesus the Word

His name was Patrick and he stepped ashore in Dane, Ireland in 433AD as a newly ordained priest, burning with passion to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. The young man could not have known that day that he was about to begin a ministry that would alter the course of Christian history.

This wasn't his first trip to Ireland. Years before he'd been abducted from his home in Britain and made a slave by Irish warlords who assigned him the job of sheep-herder. For hours on end he had roamed the rolling, verdant hills, and like the shepherd boy David thousands of years before, Patrick came to know God intimately, seeking His face in prayer day in and day out.

One night after six years in captivity, Patrick heard God speak, telling him he would be going home, and that a ship some two hundred miles away was ready to take him. Patrick writes that though he’d never been to the shore and knew no one there, he simply packed up and fled in the middle of the night. With God's guidance and strength he eventually found the ocean where through a series of miracles, he did indeed gain passage on a ship.

When he made it back to Britain at last, Patrick discovered that much of the great Roman Empire of which his homeland had been a part, had crumbled as a result of wave after wave of barbarian attack. Burning and looting with reckless abandon, they had destroyed entire cities, leaving little intact. Feeling lost and abandoned, Patrick finally found a family to take him in, but soon he began having a series of dreams in which a man stood before him, holding many letters. He writes:

And he gave me one of them, and I read the opening words of the letter, which were, The voice of the Irish; and as I read the beginning of the letter I thought that at the same moment I heard their voice...and thus did they cry out as with one mouth: We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more. And I was quite broken in heart, and could read no further, and so I woke up...

And another night---whether within me, or beside me, I know not, God knoweth---they called me most unmistakably with words which I heard but could not understand, except that at the end of the prayer He spoke thus: He that has laid down His life for thee, it is He that speaketh in thee; and so I awoke full of joy. (The Confession of St. Patrick, Translated from the Latin by Ludwig Bieler, Public Domain)

Patrick knew beyond any doubt that God was calling him back to Ireland to bring them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Immediately he pursued the training he needed to become a priest, and found himself at last on Ireland's shores once again. This would be the beginning of some 40 years of faithful ministry, seeing God continually work in miraculous ways.

Saint Patrick (as we know him today) worked tirelessly, witnessing the conversion of thousands of pagans. When he died, Ireland was almost completely evangelized. He left behind a heritage of multiple monasteries that housed hundreds of monks who learned to read and write by copying all the classical literature of Rome, including the Old and New Testaments.

Hundreds of years later, historians began to see the vast significance of Patrick's ministry. During his time in Ireland, massive raids on the Roman Empire destroyed all the great libraries of Western Europe. From a human standpoint, this might have been the end of the Bible, the finale to the written Word of God. But in the quietness of countryside monasteries, God preserved His precious Logos through the elementary education of monks who were once barbarians, but now lived for His cause.

The story of Saint Patrick is only one glorious thread in a tapestry woven throughout history, demonstrating God's esteem for the sacred Scriptures that now adorn bookshelves and pews and coffee tables throughout our land. Why such zeal? For what purpose such fervor? All God has ever done to preserve the value of His written Word has sprung from a passion to display and uphold His Son, the Living Word. Jesus is the One to whom all Scripture points and for whom every iota of God-breathed Scripture exists. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; He admonished the Pharisees, but it is these that testify about Me (John 5:39)."

Jesus, the Living Word was with God and was God. This God who once spoke worlds into being, spoke His very essence into the womb of a woman, that we might finally know Him as He is. Jesus is the glorious and ultimate manifestation of a God who delights to disclose Himself to us. This is why the Word incarnate causes the written Word to teem with precious life.

Let us come faithfully to the Scriptures, anticipating daily the miracle of encounter with the Word whose very Being pulses from each page. Let us cherish every letter, jot and tittle of the written Word, seeking always to find in them the face of Jesus, the Word who lives and breathes and transforms us by His every touch. O sacred Word, blessed Word, Living Word, Jesus.

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