Today is the feast of Ss. Simon and Jude. They are two of the lesser known apostles, although in the American Church in the 20^th century, there was a popular devotion to St. Jude Thaddeus. Many parishes conducted novenas to him as patron of impossible causes and things despaired of.

In the novena prayer to St. Jude, his anonymity is noted: “the name of the traitor has caused you to be forgotten by many.” It’s likely more people will remember Judas than Jude among the twelve Apostles. This is unjust, considering that Jude remained faithful unto martyrdom, killed by a club or axe.

If Jude has been unfairly “forgotten by many,” so too has his epistle. Jude is one of those seven New Testament epistles named not for the community to which it was addressed (like Paul’s) but rather the apostle to whom authorship was attributed (in the broad sense of what authorial attribution meant in the Bible). The Epistle of Jude is brief: one chapter of just 25 verses! But it is exceedingly rich and remarkably contemporary.

Jude writes to a community to warn them about false teachers “worming” (the USCCB’s verb in the introduction to the Letter) their way into it. He urges the community to reject false teaching and to cling to the faith they have received. He is clear about the distinctiveness of what it means to be Christian: this is a community that is “called” (v. 1). To what is it “called”? Nothing less than “our common salvation” (v. 3). But that community’s faith appears to be under pressure, and so the sacred author urges them to “contend for the faith” (v. 3b). What faith? The “faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones” (ibid.).

Jude is not explicit about what aspects of the faith are under pressure, but they seem to be the understanding of Christ and morality, specifically, sexual morality. Why do I say that? Jude denounces the false teachers as “pervert[ing] the grace of God into licentiousness” (v. 4). He speaks of “angels who did not keep to their own domain but deserted their proper dwelling” (v. 6). That can obviously refer to demonic rebellion or — because this letter may have been written to a Jewish Christian community — allude to a Jewish tradition that some of the angels fell because they sought carnal relations with human beings. That passage is immediately followed by reference to “Sodom and Gomorrah,” about which the sacred author — apparently uninitiated by teachers of modern Biblical exegesis — speaks of their inhabitants as deserving “eternal fire” because they “indulged in sexual promiscuity and practiced unnatural vice” (v. 7). That catalog concludes by coming back around to the false teachers who “defile the flesh, scorn lordship, and revile glorious beings” (v. 8). They are “disgruntled” and “live by their own desires” (v. 16). They “live on the natural plane [i.e., the flesh], devoid of the Spirit” (v. 19; see also 1 Cor 2:14), the real source of “divisions” (v. 19a) in ecclesial unity.

Alluding to the practice in the ancient Church that the Eucharist was connected with a communal meal, Jude suggests that partiality against the poor (cf. 1 Cor 11:18-22, 33-34) was not the only “blemish” (v. 12) on those feasts. These false teachers join the communal meals, “revil[ing] what they do not understand and are destroyed by what they know by nature like irrational animals” (v. 10), men who “carouse fearlessly” (v. 12). Jude follows with a poetic list of just how dead and fruitless they are, despite their appearances: waterless clouds that give no rain; fruit trees of the late autumn (appropriate to the day of the feast) that bear no fruit and should be uprooted (cf. Lk 13:6-9); wild waves, foaming on the shore but bringing only destruction; errant stars for whom “the gloom of darkness has been reserved forever” (vv. 12-13).

The tone, vocabulary, and references to these false teachers strongly suggest matters of the flesh. How should Christians avoid their snares? Four ways:

“build yourself up in the most holy faith” (v. 20a, emphasis added);
“pray in the Holy Spirit” (v. 20b);
“keep yourselves in the love of God” (v. 21a); and
“wait for the mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 21b).

Note that constancy in the faith received is inseparable from remaining in the love of God (just as knowledge of God and keeping His Commandments are indivisible; see 1 Jn 2:4). Note, too, that mercy here is directed not to the false teachers to give them false assurances about continuing to “sin boldly” (as Luther put it), but to the faithful who remain in the truth they in faith are convinced they possess.

The problems of Jude’s community hardly seem limited to his place or his time. On this feast of St. Jude, I suggest you read the Epistle, here. Note also that Ralph Martin, former faculty member at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, has a helpful video on the Letter of Jude, which includes a full reading of the text, here.