Tuesday in the 30th Week of Ordinary Time, October 28, 2025

The Feast of Saints Simon and Jude

Ephesians 2, 19-22

Brothers and sisters: You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is held together and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord; in him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

As in the case of the other men whom Jesus named as his Apostles, Saints Jude and Simon were Galileans.  Jude is called Thaddeus in the Apostle lists in both Matthew and Mark’s Gospels.  St. Luke calls him “Jude, the brother of James”, that is, James the Less who served as the first bishop of Jerusalem. The Armenian Christians regard him (along with St. Bartholomew) as having first brought the Gospel to their country, in the years following Pentecost. St. Simon is surnamed “the Zealot” or “the Canaanean”, both of which words come from the same root, but the Greek text listing him should be read as “Simon the zealous”. He is said to have preached, after Pentecost, in the east, possibly in the Parthian Empire. St. Jude and St. Simon share the same feast day because, according to an ancient tradition, they suffered martyrdom together in the city now known as Beirut in Lebanon.

St. Paul’s words to the Ephesians, used here for the First Reading for this Feast, form one of the most beautiful summaries of the mystery of the Church: a people gathered from every nation and age, no longer strangers or wanderers, but citizens and family members within the household of God. What was once divided — Jew and Gentile, heaven and earth—is now made one in Christ. The Church, for Paul, is not simply an institution or an assembly; it is a living architecture whose stones are persons, bound together by faith and love.

“You are no longer strangers and sojourners.” The world often leaves people feeling displaced—moving through life without a true home. But in Christ, exile ends. The baptized are not outsiders searching for belonging; they are already known and claimed, adopted into a divine household. Each soul has a room within the Father’s house, and that house is being built even now, silently, in the midst of history.

Paul calls the Apostles and prophets the foundation, and Christ the capstone. Foundations are hidden, buried beneath what they support. The witness of the prophets and Apostles sustains the Church’s faith quietly, unseen by the world. Yet the capstone—the keystone at the summit—holds the entire structure in harmony. Christ unites both the low and the high, the hidden and the visible, the ancient and the new. He is the point where all weight converges and all tension finds rest.

“Through him the whole structure is held together and grows.” The Church, then, is not a finished edifice but a living organism, always under construction in the Spirit. The mortar that binds its stones is not mortar of earth but the bond of charity. Each soul sanctified by grace becomes another course in the wall; each act of faith another support in the rising temple. We are not merely within the Church; we are the Church as it takes form in us.

And Paul adds a final marvel: “In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” This is not poetry but theology of the highest order. The divine presence that once filled the Temple in Jerusalem now indwells the communion of believers. The Spirit who overshadowed the Ark now inhabits human hearts. The Church is thus both universal and intimate—vast as the Body of Christ extended through time, yet personal as the indwelling of grace in the soul.

To belong to this household is to live already in the threshold of heaven. The pilgrim becomes a citizen; the wanderer a son or daughter at home. Every act of faith, hope, and love sets another stone in the eternal sanctuary until, when all is complete, God will be “all in all” and His dwelling will be with his people.