Welcome to today’s reflection.
Usually, free subscribers receive a reflection every Sunday, while paid subscribers receive one every day and have access to the full archive. Occasionally, though, I make an additional reflection freely available to everyone, and today is one of those occasions.
As we approach All Souls’ Day, I know this can be a particularly poignant time of year, especially for those remembering someone they love. Today I reflect on two apostles whose stories have almost disappeared, and what they might teach us about the lives we leave behind, the people we remember and what it really means for a life to have mattered.
There are twelve apostles named in the Gospels, but I suspect most of us would struggle to name them all without a little help. Peter is easy enough. We know about his enthusiasm, his mistakes, his denial of Jesus and his eventual leadership of the early Church. John is familiar too, as are James, Thomas and Matthew. Even Judas Iscariot has a story everybody remembers, although probably not the sort of legacy anyone would want to leave behind.
But what about Simon the Zealot and Jude?
They were among the twelve men Jesus deliberately chose to accompany him. Luke tells us that Jesus spent the night in prayer before selecting them from a wider group of disciples. They travelled with him, listened to his teaching and belonged to the small group that would become foundational to the early Church.
You might then be expecting a reflection on their stories as an essential part of Jesus’s ministry, but the truth is that we have almost nothing.
Simon appears in the lists of apostles, identified by his nickname, the Zealot. We know virtually nothing about his background or what he did afterwards. Jude, also known as Judas son of James and probably Thaddaeus, fares only slightly better. John’s Gospel appears to preserve a single question he asked Jesus, but beyond that his story largely disappears too.
Later Christian traditions tried to fill some of those gaps with stories of missionary journeys and martyrdoms, but they are difficult to verify and sometimes contradict one another. All we know is that Simon and Jude were there and that Jesus chose them.
Almost everything else about their lives has disappeared. As I reflected on that this week during a time of remembrance, I found it moving.
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I wonder how often we think about the story we will leave behind.
Perhaps it becomes more important as we grow older. When we are young, life seems to stretch endlessly ahead of us, and we spend much of our time wondering what we might become. Later, we begin looking backwards as well, remembering the people we have known, the things we have done and the decisions that shaped us.
Somewhere along the way, another question begins to appear.
How will I be remembered?
Perhaps our children will tell stories about us, our grandchildren will know something of our lives, or something we created will survive for future generations to discover. There is something deeply reassuring about imagining that the world will retain a little evidence that we were here.
Of course, some people do leave an extraordinary public legacy. Their names appear in history books, and their achievements are discussed centuries after their deaths.
But honestly? Most of us won’t.
I don’t mean that pessimistically. It is simply what happens as generations pass. Even within our own families, we often know surprisingly little about the people who came before us. As I trace my family history, I can remember my grandparents clearly and know a few stories about my great-grandparents, but if I go back another generation or two, they frustratingly become little more than names on the family tree.
Yet those people were once as alive as we are. They had hopes and worries, friends and disappointments, ordinary routines and people they loved. Their lives were every bit as real to them as ours are to us.
The fact that we no longer know their stories doesn’t make those lives any less important.
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I think this is why Simon and Jude have moved me today.
In Ephesians, Paul describes God’s people as a building constructed upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus himself as the cornerstone. Simon and Jude belonged to that first apostolic company, yet we have no way of measuring their individual contributions. We cannot confidently point to a church they established, a sermon they preached or a particular community they helped to build.
Their significance has outlived the evidence of their significance.
I find that challenging because we live in a world that constantly encourages us to measure impact. We want to know whether what we did worked, whether somebody noticed and whether anything changed because we were there.
I get that instinct; I can spend hours working on something I hope will help somebody, only to find myself checking how many people actually read it. There is nothing wrong with wanting our work to matter, but I sometimes wonder whether I have confused making a difference with being able to see the difference.
Some of the most important things we do may never produce anything measurable.
A parent spends years caring for a child. A friend stays close through an unbearable period of somebody’s life. A neighbour offers encouragement at exactly the moment it is needed.
None of those things is particularly likely to appear in a history book, but imagine how different those lives might have been without them.
I think perhaps we sometimes confuse being remembered with having mattered.
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There is another reason this has been on my mind.
At this time of year, many churches create space to remember those who have died. All Souls’ Day gives people an opportunity to gather, light candles, hear familiar names spoken aloud and remember those whose absence they continue to feel.
Being involved in these services is often among the most moving services I lead. Some people came carrying very recent grief. Others were remembering somebody who had died many years before, but still longed for their company once again. When I spoke to them afterwards, people rarely told me about their loved ones’ greatest achievements.
They remembered the ordinary things.
The way they laughed. That phrase they always used when something went wrong. The meals they cooked (sometimes badly), the advice they gave and the little habits that once drove everyone slightly mad but were now missed more than anyone could have imagined.
Sometimes those memories would arrive without warning. A particular song plays, or a familiar smell catches us unexpectedly. We might find ourselves saying something exactly as our mother or father used to, and for a moment, the distance between then and now feels a little smaller.
Grief has a habit of mixing comfort and sadness together. Remembering someone does not remove the ache of their absence, and I would never want to suggest that it should.
But I do wonder how much of the people we have loved remains woven into us. We carry their encouragement into situations they never lived to see. We might treat somebody kindly because somebody once treated us kindly. We could face a problem by relying on wisdom passed down in a conversation we can barely remember.
I wonder how many good things we do today began with somebody who is no longer here.
Their story continues, even when nobody else can see where it began.
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Of course, human memory has its limits. Stories change, details disappear, and eventually generations pass who never knew the people we loved. There can be a particular sadness in knowing that the stories we hold so dearly may one day be lost.
But Christian hope reaches so much further than memory.
When Jesus was challenged about resurrection, he spoke of God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, before saying something I find particularly comforting:
“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” (Luke 20:38)
Jesus was speaking about resurrection, not simply about people living on in the memories of those who loved them. Our hope rests in a God whose relationship with his people is not brought to an end by death. That doesn’t remove grief or answer every question about what lies beyond this life, but it offers a comfort that human memory, however precious, cannot provide on its own.
I think that is why I have found myself returning to Simon and Jude.
Their names have survived, but almost everything else about them has disappeared. Yet their lives were not made insignificant by the absence of a story for us to read, any more than the lives of those we remember this week are measured by what we manage to preserve of them.
We don’t have to be remembered forever for our lives to have mattered.
So if you are remembering someone at this time of year, perhaps you don’t need to find the right words or hold on to every detail. There is room for gratitude, for sadness, and for those unexpected memories that make you smile and ache at the same time.
Be gentle with yourself.
If you know someone who might find a little comfort in this reflection today, please feel free to share it with them.
Paul