Two Unknown Apostles

Homily for the Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude

While St. Jude is known in some popular piety as the patron of hopeless cases, we know next to nothing about Sts. Jude and Simon beyond their names. Even their names are not completely known. While the four Gospels all mention Simon as a Zealot, Jude or Judas only appears in one of the Gospels. He has therefore been identified with Thaddeus, who appears in the other synoptic Gospels. Luke’s Gospel, the only one which specifically mentions Jude by name, identifies him as the son of James. However, some translations claim that he is the brother of James. After the resurrection, St. Jude slips into further anonymity. Although there is a brief letter bearing his name in the New Testament, Scripture scholars agree that this was not written by Jude the Apostle.

Simon is identified as a Zealot. This was a group of men who were actively seeking the overthrow of the Roman government and the reestablishment of the theocracy of Israel. The fact that Jesus chooses such a man as one of the Twelve indicates that Jesus’ choice was asking all of the apostles to set aside their past and move into a new fictive family.

Rather than focus on the identity of the apostles, the first reading from the Letter to the Ephesians may speak to us rather individualistic moderns about how our life in Christ is fundamentally a life with other believers. Just as Jesus grouped together a disparate collection of individuals and formed them into a unit, we are asked to rethink our way of following Jesus. In so many ways we modern Catholics still think about our relation to God, to Christ, in terms of God and me rather than God and us. A few centuries ago, our Western world bought the idea that we are primarily individuals rather than members of society. Catholic piety of recent centuries so often was the same way. However, our relation to God is not independent of our relation to others. Possibly the best lessons from today’s feast will come from reflecting on the first reading from Ephesians that tells us we are members of the “household of God,” and that all together we are being built into a temple, “a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator