Meditation for the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude
“For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will,
but the will of him who sent me”
The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the parade of Apostolic Saints. With this feast, the holy band of twelve is gathered together in the unity of Jerusalem and in that gathering we glimpse something of the meaning of our eternal home. St. Simon and St. Jude complete the festal round of the Apostles and prepare us for the harvest festival of All Saints.
St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles of Christ. Very little can be said about them. What can be said has simply to do with their apostleship. They are of the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as a hymn puts it. What more needs to be said than that? And how appropriate, too, on the eve of Nick Hatt’s deaconing in our diocese tomorrow night and whom we keep in our prayers this evening. Simon and Jude speak directly to the nature of the ministry.
They have, to be sure, lent their names to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon is the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance! The zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness readily complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. For what we have here is really “the unreal city” (T.S. Eliot), a lost cause.
“Zeal for thine house hath even consumed me,” the psalmist says, in a passage recalled by the disciples in John’s Gospel in relation to the cleansing of the temple. Through the myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.
The readings for this feast concentrate our attention on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship; these are two things which we are badly in need of recovering and reclaiming. They belong to the truth of the ordained ministry. Without them, our parishes become little more than a club for seniors and a playground for children – we wish!. The church becomes a sect, championing one spiritual idea or quasi spiritual idea at the expense of all the rest, or trumpeting one of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day while ignoring the larger vision of the whole of redeemed humanity that is hers to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.