Patrick’s Letter to Coroticus

I finished reading Patrick’s letter to the soldiers of Coroticus, which was actually a public rebuke of a raider who had taken a whole group of new Christians as slaves. Patrick writes with a kind of poetry that works like copyright protection. The letter was probably meant to be read and recited all over Ireland, and it would have been very difficult to copy incorrectly because the poetry would no longer “work”.

Here’s one section where Patrick defends his calling as a missionary, explaining that He is a slave of the Spirit and yet he does what he does for the wonderful eternal life that he looks forward to (reminds me of Hebrews 12:2). (Patrick was, of course, carried off as a slave to Ireland originally):

Could I have come to Ireland without thought of God, merely in my own interest?
Who was it made me come?
For here I am a ‘prisoner of the Spirit’ (Acts 20:22) so that I may not see any of my family.
Can it be out of the kindness of my heart that I carry out such a labour of mercy on a people
who once captured me
when they wrecked my father’s house and carried off his servants?
For by descent I was a freeman,
born of a decurion [a position of leadership] father;
yet I have sold this nobility of mine,
I am not ashamed, nor do I regret that it might have meant some advantage to others.
In short, I am a slave in Christ to this faraway people for the indescribable glory of ‘everlasting life which is in Jesus Christ our Lord’. (Rom 6:23)

For more on Patrick click here. Some of you may recognize this as chiastic poetry.

I used Patrick as an illustration when I spoke this morning in church – he’s kind of the opposite of Jonah, who did everything he could to avoid sharing God’s mercy with his enemies. Patrick, on the other hand, risked his life to share Christ with those who had taken him as a slave in his younger days. That shows what God’s mercy is really all about (see Rom 15:8-9, Luke 6:27-36)