Saints Simon and Jude (Thaddeus)

Homily for the Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude

All of us are familiar with the teaching of St. Paul that we are the temples of the Holy Spirit. That teaching comes to us from the passage that we hear today from the Letter to the Ephesians. Because it is difficult to tell whether or not the English pronoun “you” is singular or plural in written English except through context, many have grown up with the notion that each individual is considered a temple of the Holy Spirit. However, careful reading of the original Greek text of this letter reveals that St. Paul always used the plural form of the pronoun when speaking of us as the temple of the Holy Spirit or as the body of Christ. For his audience, this was quite natural because, as you have heard me say before, the people of the Middle East do not think of themselves as individuals but rather as members of a family or community. We Westerners, on the other hand, think about ourselves almost exclusively as individuals. When we speak of human rights, for instance, we often frame the question in terms of my human rights rather than the rights of the human community. This is precisely why so many of the teachings that came out of the Second Vatican Council, many of which emphasized the communal nature of our faith, were so hard for people to assimilate.

However, our community as a Church is pluralistic in nature. We are baptized into the body of Christ, and through that baptism are considered members and heirs of Jesus whom we refer to as our brother. When we receive Jesus in the Eucharist, we refer to it as receiving Holy Communion. The very word we use speaks of the fact that our reception of the Eucharist is a communal act. Somewhere along the line in our history we began to see the reception of the Eucharist as a moment for Jesus and me rather than as a moment when the community comes together to remember a sacred meal. Our relationship to God is not independent of our relationship with others. We are in this together.

We all know that Jesus gathered some seventy or seventy-two disciples around him. From those seventy-two, he chose twelve to be his apostles. The tradition of the church is that at least two of those twelve were probably blood relatives of Jesus, men that he had grown up with. In our culture, they would be considered cousins. Jude or Thaddeus and James are spoken of as his “brothers” in the Scriptures. We must remember that sons lived in the home of their father to which they brought home their wives and raised their children together. Joseph’s family would have provided the home in which Jesus spent his childhood.

The Gospels are about Jesus, not about his family. Consequently, there is very little biographical information in the Gospels regarding The Twelve. The little we know about them comes to us from our tradition. We do know, however, that because they were called “apostles,” these were the men who “were sent,” the literal meaning of the word apostle. Thaddeus or Jude and Simon the Zealot have always been celebrated together and remind us of the fact that oftentimes Jesus sent them out two by two. Like the other apostles they suffered martyrdom for the sake of the Gospels. This is what we celebrate today.