To Know Christ Jesus by Sheed Frank

Author:Sheed, Frank [Sheed, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898704198
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Five Newcomers

To complete the Twelve (Mk 3), Jesus chose five men whose names we are hearing for the first time—some of them almost for the last.

James and Jude are thought to have been his cousins—we know that he had four cousins named James, Joseph, Jude,’and Simon (Mk 6:3).

James, called the Less, because he was younger than the other James, was to become head of the Church in Jerusalem, and it fell to him to announce that Church’s acceptance of Peter’s decision not to bind Gentile converts by Jewish ritual and ceremonial law (Acts 15:13-21). He wrote the Epistle which Luther called “an epistle of straw”.

Jude is usually held to be that same Jude who wrote an Epistle. At the Last Supper he asked Jesus the question which brought the answer: “If any one love me . . . my Father will love him and we will make our abode with him” (Jn 14:23). There has been a recent surge of devotion to him as Help of the Hopeless.

Thomas is, apart from Peter and John, the most colorful personality among the apostles: his name is still used for people hard to convince, as Judas for traitors. The Jewish word Thomas means Twin, so does the Greek word Didymus. One wonders whose twin he was, that the fact of twinship should have given him his name—another of the Twelve, perhaps. But which? It was Thomas’ glory that at the Last Supper he asked the question which was answered with “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life” (Jn 14:5-6). His glory, too, that he alone is recorded as having addressed our Lord as God—“My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28). As glorious was his reception of Jesus’ announcement that he would go to Bethany for the raising of Lazarus. They all knew that he was going to his death, for Bethany was only two miles from Jerusalem. Thomas said: “Let us go too and be killed along with him” (Jn 11:16). It is curious that he, alone of the apostles, is eclipsed by a namesake: when today we say Saint Thomas, everyone assumes that we mean Aquinas.

Simon, subtitled the Zealot, is not thought to be the Simon named in the short list of the Lord’s cousins. Why the subtitle? To distinguish him, doubtless, from Simon Peter. The Zealots were the political, violently anti-Roman, wing of the Pharisees. Simon had probably been one of them. Of course the word may merely have meant that he was especially zealous: but one feels that that is hardly the adjective anybody would have chosen to distinguish him from Simon Peter, who could carry zeal to the point of embarrassment. Curious too, if Simon was of such exuberant zeal, that no single word or deed of his is recorded.

So we come to Judas, the last of the Twelve, the man from Kerioth—that is what Iscariot means. We shall be seeing more of him, alas. Here we may simply wonder why Jesus chose him: he did not have to wait for the betrayal to know that Judas was a devil (Jn 6:71).

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