Who is St. Jude? An apostle, a martyr, perhaps a relative of Jesus, St. Jude is a popular intercessor with an air of mystery and danger about him. His forename, which is indistinguishable in Latin from that of Judas the traitor, can still be found in the classified sections of local papers: “Thank you, St. Jude, for favors granted,” or some terse statement along those lines. Early 20th-century America saw a boom in St. Jude’s cult, and today his statue, often cast in plastic, can be found at the back of neighborhood churches.
Is this a Catholic superstition? A folk tradition? Something the Church tolerates out of mercy for the weakness of simple people? Scripture holds a clue.
St. Jude makes a cameo in the Gospel of John: “Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?,’ Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them'” (Jn 14:22-23).
Jude’s deceptively simple question gets to a central paradox of the Faith. How — and why — do Christians believe while others don’t? We are heralds of a message and a kingdom invisible and inaudible to all but those (a minority, in our time) who will become Christians themselves. And we ourselves are not much to look at.
Modern devotion to St. Jude makes some people wince. Third-class relics glued to cheap bondieuserie in China. Statues of a nauseating acid-green hue. Simplistic faith of the outmoded patron-client variety. And yet. Personal experience makes me entertain the notion that this simple devotion still contains something of the mystery expressed in the query, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?”
Motocross for Christ
Over summer vacation, my son watched a lot of random sports on Peacock. This culminated in an obsession with motocross. He did not merely want to watch one of the most dangerous sports; he wanted to participate.
My wife and I told him “no way.” We live in a town, in a twin home with a tiny yard, and do not have a garage, let alone a pickup truck. I am not mechanically inclined, and a used motocross bike is a finicky machine costing upwards of $5,000. A few places provide lessons complete with rental bikes, but these are also expensive and, we learned after repeated internet searches, far away from us.
My son fought back the tears during several rounds of no’s.
Now this is his confirmation year, and we asked him at dinner one night if he’d thought of a confirmation saint. “The guy with the animals,” he said flatly between bites. “Aw, c’mon,” we said. “Have you given this any thought?” So we started listing saints while stared at the wall. Until we got to St. Jude.
“Who’s that?”
“The patron saint of hopeless causes.”
His eyes got wide. He said nothing for the rest of dinner and rushed upstairs immediately afterward — to spend half the night praying, we later learned.
That night I did one last Google search. “Dirt bike camp,” I think it was. The first organic search result, which we’ve never been able to replicate, was for a Christian motocross camp: Motocross for Christ. The camp was finished for the summer, but a series of phone calls led us to the owner of a construction company less than 30 minutes from us. He told my wife over the phone that he had two passions in life: Jesus and dirt bikes, in that order. He had a handful of loaner bikes and a professional-grade Motocross course, and he ran a session every month.
It was all free. You just had to listen to a testimony and a Scripture reading and be a contributing part of the community (I bring Hawaiian doughnuts and wave a yellow flag when a rider falls). My son’s spiritual life has taken off, and St. Jude will get to stamp his name on another confirmand in the bargain.
My son wanted a dirtbike; he got Jesus. This is what St. Jude is all about.
A comic faith
Yes, there’s an element of comedy here. As the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri knew, Christianity is fundamentally comic, while paganism is tragic. Pagan tragedy starts with natural happiness (the hero’s greatness) and leads to a foul end (through his tragic flaw). Christianity starts with a fault (original sin, with my contributions piled on top) and leads to a state of happiness (given freely by God’s grace).
“Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” the Apostle Jude once asked. St. Jude now answers, “through our faults.” That is, through our capricious wants, our simplistic desires and our bitterly felt, idiosyncratic needs. These are what we bring to God through St. Jude’s intercession.
And how does God respond to this display of human weakness?
Once again, Jesus says of us and to us, “We will come to them and make our home with them.”