Saints Simon and Jude, apostles - Feast

There is something quietly staggering in the way Paul speaks to the Ephesians: you are no longer strangers. On this feast of Simon and Jude — two apostles about whom the Gospels tell us almost nothing beyond their names — we are reminded that the household of God is built on real people, most of them unremarkable to history. Jude is the patron of hopeless cases precisely because he was so easily forgotten. And yet Paul insists that these forgotten ones are the very foundation, fitted together stone by stone, with Christ as the cornerstone that holds the whole structure from collapsing.

Notice how the choosing happened. Jesus spent the whole night in prayer before he named the Twelve at daybreak. He did not assemble a committee of the impressive. He drew a list that included a zealot and a fisherman, a man who would betray him and men who would run. This is how God builds his temple — not with polished marble but with people who are still becoming holy, still being fitted together, often against their own rough edges. The heavens pour out speech day after day, and so does this slow, unglamorous work of God assembling a home out of ordinary lives.

You may feel today more like a stranger than a citizen, more like rubble than a cornerstone's neighbor. But the same patience that spent a night in prayer before choosing Judas is at work in you.