TRINITY · 28 OCTOBER
Saint Simon & Saint Jude, Apostles
The Zealot & The Obscure · Apostles & Martyrs · The Two Who Close October
Simon — SY-mon · Zelotes — zee-LOH-teez · Jude — JOOD · Thaddaeus — thad-AY-us · Lebbaeus — leh-BAY-us · Persia — PER-zhah · Suanir — soo-AH-neer · Armenia — ar-MEE-nee-a
O Almighty God, who hast built thy Church upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the head corner stone; Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy temple acceptable unto thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
They are the two most obscure figures in the college of the Twelve, the two about whom the New Testament tells us almost nothing: Simon (SY-mon) called Zelotes (zee-LOH-teez) — the Zealot — and Jude (JOOD), called also Thaddaeus (thad-AY-us) or Lebbaeus (leh-BAY-us), the man who asked at the Last Supper Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? — and received in reply one of the most luminous answers in the fourth Gospel: If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. Jude’s question is the occasion for Jesus’s teaching on the indwelling of the Trinity in the soul that loves him. Beyond that single question, the New Testament records nothing more of Jude. Simon the Zealot appears in every list of the Twelve and nowhere else in the scriptural narrative. They are named, they are numbered among the foundation stones of the new Jerusalem, and then they disappear into the great silence of apostolic mission from which history has preserved so little.
Simon the Zealot’s name tells us one thing: before he followed Jesus, he had been a member of the Zealot movement — the Jewish nationalist faction that advocated violent resistance to Roman occupation. That Jesus called to his side both a Zealot and a tax collector — the revolutionary and the collaborator, the man committed to the destruction of the Roman system and the man who profited from it — is one of the most striking facts in the Gospel. The Kingdom that Jesus announced dissolves the political categories that had previously defined and divided these two men. In the company of Jesus, the Zealot and the publican sit at the same table and call the same Lord their teacher. What Simon carried with him from the Zealot movement into the apostolic mission — the burning conviction that God’s Kingdom must come, the willingness to risk everything — became in the service of the Gospel something different from what it had been in the service of political insurrection. He took the same fire to different ends, and the ends are known to God.
The tradition sends Simon and Jude together — always together, as they share their feast — to Persia (PER-zhah), where they preached and where they were martyred together in the city of Suanir (soo-AH-neer). The Armenian church claims both of them, along with Bartholomew, as its founding apostles. Whether the tradition is historically reliable in its details cannot be established. What is established is this: two men who had been present throughout the ministry of Jesus, who had sat at the Last Supper and heard the promise of the Comforter, who had received the Great Commission on the mountain in Galilee, went somewhere after Pentecost, and preached, and built communities, and died. The world was changed by what they did, and the record of what they did is almost entirely lost. They are in the cloud of witnesses with the full weight of apostolic authority and the full obscurity of faithful servants whose names are written in heaven and not in any history book.
Their feast on 28 October closes the month of Trinity — the last Apostolic feast before Advent begins its approach — and there is something entirely right about the two most anonymous of the Twelve being given the final word of the Trinity season. Trinity-tide is the season of ordinary faithful service, the long green middle of the year in which most Christian life is lived without drama or recognition, in which the vast majority of the Church’s work is done by people whose names will not be remembered. Simon and Jude are the patrons of that work — the Apostles whose obedience to the Great Commission is entirely real and entirely unrecorded, who stand at the end of the long season as a sign that the foundation of the Church includes stones whose names only God reads, and that the building is no less solid for that. Even the most forgotten of the Twelve is a foundation stone, and the God who made his abode in the souls that love him knows every one of them by name.
O Almighty God, who didst number among the foundations of thy Church thy servants Simon and Jude, known fully to thee and partially to us; Grant that we may serve thee in the obscurity that most service requires, trusting that thou dost keep account of every hidden act of faithfulness, and that the building thou art raising needs every stone, however anonymous; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.