10/28/2016 - Feast of St Simon and St Jude - Apostles - Luke 6:12-16

       Back in September, we celebrated the feast of St Matthew.  And just last week, we celebrated the St Luke, the Evangelist.  We celebrate all 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.  As I was writing this homily, I wondered: Why would we celebrate Simon and Jude together?  Shouldn’t each one get his own feast day like the other apostles?  As best we can tell, they are associated with each other and celebrated on the same feast day because tradition has passed down that they were both missionaries together in Persia and Mesopotamia, with both being martyred in Persia. In Scripture, we don’t know a lot about them, other than that they are included on the list of apostles.  In art, Jude is portrayed with an architect’s square, portraying him as an architect of the house of God.  Simon is portrayed with a saw, the instrument of his martyrdom. Tradition holds that Simon was a member of the Zealots, a group in Ancient Israel that was very nationalistic.  The Zealots hoped that the Messiah would come to liberate them from the foreign powers that had occupied Ancient Israel, to bring their nation back to military and political glory.   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 may not know a lot of details about a lot of the apostles, but we do know that the Catholic faith we have today was passed down by them 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 men who had great flaws and weaknesses.  They were tax collectors or zealots or men who had combative and argumentative personalities.   We can take away this message from our celebration of St Simon and St Jude today: In the midst of all our flaws and weaknesses, 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.