The Epistle of St. Jude is dear to my heart. St. Jude is one of my patron saints. As an Apostle of Christ, Jude Thaddeus served Jesus with a fire of perfect charity and a resilient heart to all the message of the Gospel to pump through is soul - preaching in the most desperate of circumstances the hope of Christ even int he midst of persecution and times of what appear to be utter abandonment by God. St. Jude in Christian tradition is an advocate before the throne of God as a help for the hopeless. He was a disciple who always saw the beauty even in suffering and believed that no crisis is too broken, in Christ all can be healed. St. Jude is an example of discernment in action, and the call to persevere with Christ even in our weakness, suffering and pain - Christ heals and Christ is with us.
St. Jude is one of the 12 Apostles of Christ, we will continue to focus on his life and ministry in future posts. St. Jude is often seen carrying Christ in his hands because Jude actively sought to carry out the teachings of Christ and spread them to the message to the world - which hungers for the bread of Christ, the bread of heaven. I have a special affinity for St. Jude because time and again as I suffer doubt, the desperation of being forsaken by the world, questions of God's presence, St. Jude is a testimony of Christ's healing presence even in the most unexpected of circumstances. St. Jude shows me that while Christ created heaven and earth with God, the Father and the Holy Spirit - he raised Lazarus from the dead, and fed the 5,000....often times our relief from God isn't a parting of the sea sort of moment...often times we find St. Jude, like Christ in a simple embrace of a friend, a funny greeting card, a morning cup of coffee and a sliver of blue sky in a storm.
I am going to run a series of blogs on St. Jude and hope in desperate times. St. Jude has led me to Christ's mercy time and again, even when I felt unworthy and inconsolable. Simple mercy is tremendous grace. St. Jude was a sinner yet he trusted in the healing of Jesus, his friend, his God, and his Rabbi - St. Jude is like us, a person who had to face danger, pain, suffering and all the temptations of the flesh - yet he persevered in faith - not always perfectly - but he learned from battles and never gave up hope.
There are many battles and desperate situations in the world today - from famine to war, toxic environments, abuse, vice and sin running rampant, but I like St. Jude - see the light even in this darkness - it shines bright in the darkness - because when we have Christ we have mercy, when God is for us the world make beat us, even kill our body, but our soul survives. I see the beauty of God's creation and the immense glory of God's healing hands even in the most desperate situations.
It can be easy to fall away in faith when times are so much of a struggle and we feel we have no control over situations - how can we fix things that are so broken?
I know I try to fix everything myself - St. Jude's example showed me that I need to be strong in hope - but my hope comes from Christ. When we give God our hands and offer up small but important acts of mercy in active ways then God magnifies that - God is our help - God is in charge - Christ is our helper - we are His servants, But it is a relief to know that Christ, who cares for us, is our Master Builder.
It can be impossible at times to see the mercy and grace of God in desperate situations. We feel like a boat tossed in a storm, a warrior without a shield, a sojourner lost with no solid ground beneath our feet. At the moment of our birth in Christ's grace, the baptism of our souls into the union of His Divine Majesty, Protection and Life-giving Hope - we are imbued with the wonder and mystery and awe of God and a call to surrender the will of the flesh to the will of the spirit.
As a child it is easier to trust God's grace and fully submit to God's will and listen in the intrepid, yearning exploration of our hearts to God's call - it is a way a call to adventure, charting our imagination to bridge the gap of intuition and analytical depth. By imagination I don't mean taking fairy tales as fact, but rather the childlike abandonment of trying to control everything in the world and trying solve every problem without relying on Our Father. A child knows how to trust while also being eager to learn, eager to explore, and ready to eat when they hunger.
I think it is also critical to note the limitations of our inner child, because as children sometimes we trust too me, or we become selfish-unwilling to share, sometimes we think the world centers completely on our current state of consciousness.
As we grow in faith and also in communion with the world we realize not only our limitations but we begin to mistrust because the world is a corrupt place where betrayal of trust occurs on a daily basis. We find ourselves in a constant state of fighting against the world and conforming to it. How many times do we try to exert our own sense of authority against the world, working to separate our own soul from the chaos of our surroundings - however in this break, we often fail because we turn our gaze so far inward to the desires of the temporal flesh or the current state of affairs we become islands without any life-giving force.
An island can be a rock, a sturdy place but a rock without water or vegetation leaves us like stone. I know I am guilty of trying to fix my surroundings and when I cannot fix the environment I distance myself and I forget to help my neighbor. It is a defense mechanism, but it is not the appropriate way to forsake the world, because in isolating ourselves and having the ego to believe we can be independent in life - we fail to see the necessity for God and the grace of Christ in all of our affairs. We become cold, bitter and angry - or at the best detached, detached from the world, but also detached from God.
Conformity is another road we often travel, we know our Spirit is restless in this world, hungry for the bread of Life, which is Christ and the eternal manna, but we feel so overwhelmed by the current mood of the times that when God does not seem to answer our prayers the way we want Him too - we decide to play the games of the world and in doing so, forsake God.
The most dangerous void is when we try to conform to the world and also serve God. As I broached earlier - Christ is the master builder, we are workers - and as workers God makes us aware of His plan, but we are not called to rule the world, this is our temporary home, and this planet though routed by sin and darkness - is God's creation - he is owner of the fields and harvests. In this modern age of technology and science, we fail to remember the blessings that God gives us - the simple blessings are often the most powerful - like a drink of clean water and a mountain stream in summer...God also is the blessing behind our technology - yet instead of wanting to use these gifts for good, men get greedy - chasing after their own ambitions - and abandoning God.
You cannot abandon God because God is the ruler and creator of the universe. God is gracious and just - but in that mercy he will not tolerate humanity building modern day 'Babel' not for the good of humanity and the earth (i.e. electricity is a blessing but not when we scourge the natural resources for short-term profit instead of using the brains God blessed us with for alternative cleaner energy) - we have taken God out of the equation.
The scary thing is too often God is used to justify this evil acts and the way of the flesh - something St. Jude's Epistle warns of with such clarity and rebuke - it calls us to look inward at our faith - and question 'are we doing this because of God?' I see so many churches where congregants discuss business more than faith and use church doctrine to spread lies about why we should not pass certain laws or protect national parks...this is a product of sin but when we start to see religion and faith as a facade to prop up our ideology instead of being transformed by Christ...we are conforming Christ to our worldly pleasures and opinions instead of being transformed by the spirit.
Christ is king and is perfection - Christ is God - the Father in Him and Jesus is in the Father...it is a blasphemy to discount God in hateful words as it is to be a person who claims to be faithful then twists Christ for their own agenda. No one wants to hear this - it is a problem we have faced since the early church and a problem St. Jude so eloquently illuminates:
The Epistle of St. Jude warns of this with a passionate plea:
10 But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. 11 Woe to them! For they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's error and perished in Korah's rebellion. 12 These are hidden reefs[e] at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; 13 wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.
"Hidden in love feast" How often do we prop our own desires of the flesh - arguing for their justification under the banner of Christ and the communion of the church.
Justification by faith - we are sinners and only in Christ's grace can we be truly redeemed, but we are not given a license to distort Christ's mission and build his kingdom on the fractured selfish ideology of the world. An example of this is a minister who also worked in real estate and finagled a land grab over a Christian college in hopes of eventually turning the school into a for-profit institution and then using the land for high-development potential - all of this was not done under as a way to help support the mission of the church - but was a way to use the church to support human ambition.
Sometimes we get lost as we cross the bridge of abandoning the flesh to the Spirit - we need food - yet Jesus is the bread of life, we have bills to pay, yet we are told not to worry about what we will eat or wear...It is a conundrum at times.
So how do we not get ensnared by these 'hidden reefs' - prayer and the Spirit of the Word. Christ will never leave us empty if we come to him with open ears and hearts. Often times to hear we have to leave our ambition at the door and also turn our anxiety and fear of the world over to God.
St. Jude through his Epistle and life account (through tradition) is a call for us to Hope in God's Grace through Christ even in desperate circumstances. St. Jude calls us to both active faith and active service in God's kingdom.
In faith we must realize that God in charge of this ship, so when it seems like we are being tossed at sea and left unaided, we must persevere in prayer and thanksgiving that God is in charge and our soul is secure, even if the flesh succumbs to the waves. Faith that is tossed by the sea to the point we lose sight of God's healing care and ability to carry us through storms - turns into a vicious desperate doubt. Even in the most desperate cases St. Jude calls on us to remember that Christ died for us, suffered yet death did not overtake Him, Christ rose again. St. Jude witnessed these miracles and understood sometimes it takes desperate situations to transform a faith into a fire of persevering inextinguishable light. St. Jude, leads us closer to Christ to see beauty and the blessing of life even in the midst of the brokenness of the world - to cling close to the promise guaranteed of everlasting life - so that we might not lose sight of 'soul work' in this life.
It has taken me many years questioning God and demanding answers to realize God's ways are higher than my ways. God's primary focus - and the purpose of Christ is abundant everlasting life in the spirit. So often we demand where is God now instead of remember all the amazing gifts He has given us - we lose sight of the fact this world is a battleground between light and dark and even in the depths of darkness the light of God reigns strong - our lives here matter tremendously but we cannot feel so empowered by the material temporal world that we would about God for the bread that decays - even the manna int he desert turned to waste at night - we need to set our hearts on the everliving Christ and trust that his path is better - even in storms and tempests and testing - than our road - because the narrow road of Christ leads us home to St. Jude and all the Saints and Angels in heaven.
Hope always even in desperate circumstances - even when God seems silent - he is there - He is guarding your soul and you just need to draw closer to His light and allow the flame to light a fire of hope and trust - in your soul.
Prayer:
O God by the power of the Holy Spirit you overpowered Mary, the Blessed Virgin who chose to say 'Yes' to YOUR plan for salvation even when the road was to be met with suffering, scorn, ridicule and constant fear - she turned away from the world and put her Trust in YOU and Her Son Christ. We Thank You for Christ as an example of how to live in this temporal world - where your creation shouts praises in rainstorms and endless skies of blue - where storms renew and the bow of your hand is always set on renewal and paths to salvation. Thank You Jesus for calling forth Your disciples. Each disciple had a special gift and tool to help spread the WORD and Your Holy Spirit throughout the earth. We thank you for St. Jude who even in the dark nights of the soul, amid political upheaval, persecution, toil and doubt - he sought your healing presence and Holy Spirit and burned for the oil of infinite hope your Soul, Christ provides. Teach me to follow the example of St. Jude and ask St. Jude to incercede with me in all my desperate needs. St. Jude through Christ give me an undying flame of love for Christ and petition to the Holy Spirit to fill me with wisdom and hope to not only persevere in persecutions but also to be an active merciful hand to all those in need - help us to build up ourselves in the most holy faith of Christ, praying int he Holy Spirit. Teach us St. Jude by your example to always keep ourselves as willing conduits for the mercy of Christ and in that mercy leading others to the life-giving source abundant of the Spirit of Christ's love. My we snatch unbelievers out of the eternal destroying fire, instead building them up in grace and love - showing them the mercy of Christ and praying that they may be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.
Praise be to Christ our King who reigns, show us St. Jude that our king suffered death was crowned in thorns - yet in this suffering He was not broken. Christ reigns.
I will continue to post on St. Jude and miracles attached to his intercession. Saints continue to act in heaven as wonder workers for Christ - leading us closer to HIS call and His kingdom. We are all kingdom builders, but remember we are not the architect - Christ is and what a hope that is that we don't have to carry our cross alone!
The Shrine of St. Jude does a great deal of outreach and is a source of abundant information on St. Jude's call to help heal through mercy with our hands in building the kingdom and turning our trust in prayer completely over to God:
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