Overview:

The Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude, Apostles

A Reflection for the Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude, Apostles

“Brothers and sisters:
You are no longer strangers and sojourners,
but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones
and members of the household of God,
built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets,
with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.
Through him the whole structure is held together
and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord;
in him you also are being built together
into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” (Eph 2: 19-22)

Find today’s readings here.

What does it mean to be a Christian? For Paul, it means that you dwell in a kind of spiritual house with Christ as the head and the prophets and Apostles as the foundation. Two of whom were Sts. Simon and Jude, whose feast day we celebrate today.

We know next to nothing about Simon and Jude. Scripture records nothing that they say and little that they do. All that we know of Simon, according to two of the Gospels, is that he was a Zealot, one of a group of Jewish nationalists prone to violence against their Roman occupiers and the Jews who collaborated with them. We mainly know Jude from his modern-day affiliation: the patron of desperate situations, of last chances, lost causes; Jude as powerful medicine when things seem hopeless. 

Simon and Jude’s actual personalities, characteristics and human features all drifted way to the back of their life stories. 

I was once going through a thing and I told a friend that, like that very cool t-shirt, I wanted God as my co-pilot. She replied, “I want to be in the backseat. Way in the back, not at the controls at all. Very small, very insignificant. Just: God, take over.”

She wanted to be, in other words, like Simon and Jude. In the book that records their lives, they cannot be seen at the controls. They cannot be seen at all. They were on the passenger manifest, listed among the Apostles, but beyond that they are invisible to history. 

But in a way their anonymity is even more powerful. Because they remind us that, in the end, the only thing really worth knowing is that they were followers of Christ. That was the “little that they did.” If all of us could do so little! Simon and Jude lived with him and for him and through him. And they did so with such brio, such unflinching intensity, that, (according to tradition) like all the Apostles except for John, they died for him. They followed Christ, they died for Christ. What more do we need to know?

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”