St Simon and St Jude
Having done some perfunctory research into St Simon and St Jude, I couldn’t resist making comparisons with other “spare” pairs of men, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Vladimir and Estragon, apparently ordinary, mundane pairs somehow immortalised for being on the edge of a more important show and uncertain of their place in it. This is not, of course, Simon’s or Jude’s fault, as to some extent it is in Shakespeare’s, Stoppard’s and Becket’s plays. It’s history, or Christian mythology, that have created Simon and Jude. It’s quite hard, however, to discover anything, or anything of note that they actually did- even in legend. A few appearances as B team apostles in the Gospels, even their names being a little ambiguous; Jude writes strange and largely, and justifiably, ignored epistle, and they disappear off to myth and Persia to evangelise and be martyred but without any gripping or gruelling stories of miracles performed of tortures undergone. Not you might think very promising material for a sermon.
There, is perhaps, however, something inspiring in their unspectacular ordinariness- compared to more dramatic saints. They are not examples of heroic or even “saintly” lives, but they did their stuff, travelling far, whether to Persia or not doesn’t really matter, and being killed for their faith, as so many of that generation and its successors would be and still are.
The usefulness of this ordinariness developed in my mind from two recent experiences. First was Ayla’s inspirational use, last week, of the church building as a metaphor for us as a community. The second was the discovery of WhatsApp which, combined with my wife being in Greece with a party of sixth formers, meant I received nostalgic and similarly inspirational pictures of the church of Hosios Loukas, one of my very favourite churches. Hosios Loukas is a typical, but spectacular, example, of a Byzantine church, a cross in square with a dome and apses covered in fresco and mosaic, which seeks to recreate heaven and earth. Specifically, it encapsulates, the moment in the Eucharist when, as in the Byzantine liturgy, we shall join with the saints and all creation in saying- or here, listening to the choir singing for us- “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of Sabaoth..” These two inspirations put me in mind of the way the saints may be almost literally the foundations, which Isaiah and St Paul in Ephesians conceive in our readings today. Perhaps not foundations but pillars holding up the vault on the church and we may imagine, the dome of heaven.
That is one purpose for saints, and one which doesn’t really require them to be very distinctive individuals; they are praying pillars supporting the church, and the church itself is image of how heaven and earth may meet.
If saints are closely linked to prayer, it is right to ask what prayer is, or what we are doing when we pray. For me, the ideas of a God and of prayer are inextricably combined; praying- saying Thank you, saying Sorry, and saying Please all presuppose there someone or something- and inevitably something very like a loving parent- to which those sentiments are addressed. While, we may intellectually work out that we need a creator God, emotionally the major point of a God is as the person (because we can’t help thinking in personal terms) to whom, like a parent, such prayers of gratitude, pleading and remorse are, and must be, addressed. We do so as his or her creatures, and can hardly do so effectively without a consciousness of rest of creation, and of our part in.
So where do the saints come in? I suggest because they help in all our most stressful, guilty, happy and sad times, to know that we are not in it alone. You may not all be entirely comforted by thought of being in the same boat as the rows of very dead and nearly always very white men with mostly bald heads and very long beards, but they give us at least two things; first they have experienced extremes of happiness, remorse and desperation; they have been there before us and more so. Second, they are saints, because they did something, some lived lives of heroic self-sacrifice, or incomprehensible kindness, and even those may have been quiet and retiring, were such that their peers thought them very special. But not so special that we cannot, in prayer, identify with them and be encouraged by them. They are examples of salvation achieved, they tell us that human endeavour can bring about divine rewards, even if only as little but crucial, pieces of the great jigsaw puzzle that is the Kingdom of Heaven.
The saints also tell us that we are not alone in time or space; we can’t help being obsessed, overwhelmed even, by our present predicament, but the saints link us to heaven and to eternity. Those Byzantine churches attempt, quite literally, or graphically, to represent and to realise, Heaven on earth. They attempt to remove the divide between spiritual and physical existence, and those rows of bearded saints play a crucial role in that. They are all dead, often martyred, but they lived and frequently died engaged with the world (even saintly hermits, especially saintly hermits had queues of ordinary men and women seeking the out for their advice). This surely adds another dimension to our prayer; we can feel that however small, we matter as we express our joy and thanks, or bring our failings and our troubles to God in the company of so many others who have and who will do it so much better than we can. We are privileged and inspired to be in their company.
So I have been a little too hard on Simon and Jude; even second eleven, perhaps especially second eleven saints have much to offer us. And the stooges like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or the waiters in the wings, like Vladimir and Estragon, make us aware of the main action and see it in a different light. I certainly think I might find their company for eternity, rather less trying than conversation with St Paul, or St John, if today’s Gospel is anything to go by. Amen