Back in September, we celebrated the feast of St Matthew. And just last week, we celebrated the St Luke, the Evangelist. As of a reflection of their importance in the Early Church, we celebrate all of the the apostles and the Evangelists in our Church’s liturgical calendar. This brings us to the feast of St Simon and St Jude, which we celebrate on October 28th each year. You might wonder: Why would we celebrate St Simon and St Jude together when many of the other apostles have their own individual feast day? As best we can tell, Simon and Jude are associated with each other and celebrated on the same feast day because, according to tradition, they were missionaries together in Persia and Mesopotamia, with both being martyred in Persia. From Sacred Scripture, we don’t know a lot about them, other than that they are included on the list of apostles. Tradition holds that Simon was a member of the Zealots, a nationalistic group in Ancient Israel that hoped that the Messiah would come to liberate them from the foreign powers that had occupied their country. St Peter’s in Rome and St Sernin’s in Toulouse, France both claim to have the remains of Simon and Jude, so we are not entirely sure where they are buried. We do not know many of details about the apostles, but we do know that they passed down the fact to us through great sacrifice and suffering. As we hear in the Gospel today of the 12 apostles whom Jesus called by name, we know that they were not the richest, not the most intelligent, not the most politically connected, but rather they were men who had great flaws and weaknesses. We can take away this message from our celebration of St Simon and St Jude today: In the midst of all our human weaknesses and failings, the Lord calls us to be his followers, to live out our faith as best we can in the reality of our lives. May we all hear that call.
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