Jesus on St. Jude: "He will show Himself The Most Willing to help"
St. Jude was a blood relative of both Mary and Joseph. St. Jude’s mother was Mary, cousin to the Virgin Mary, and his father was Alphaeus who is believed to have been the brother of Joseph. If St. Jude’s father was Joseph’s brother; then Joseph was St. Jude’s uncle and St. Jude was Joseph’s nephew. Most certainly, St. Jude was of the House of David. He had royal blood.
St. Jude was Jesus’s first cousin, and at that time, cousins were also called siblings. People looked upon St. Jude as Jesus’s sibling, and yet when he lived, he referred to himself as a servant to the Savior.
He described himself as a mere helper, and this prefigured his role among ordinary Christians who call on him for urgent help as they would a butler. St. Jude is often called upon to clean up the nastiest situations.
His humility has allowed for his intercession to be invited without hesitation. Once, I knew the wife of a gambling addict who called on St. Jude when they were broke and in debt, and she was not intimidated by the fact that St. Jude was from Joseph’s immediate family or that St. Jude was Jewish nobility, rather in her desperation she turned to him because he helps hopeless cases. Her husband recovered from his devastating addiction.
St. Jude came to be known as “Thaddeus”, which means the courageous one. He needed a lot of bravery to fulfill the mission that Jesus gave him; to heal a king miraculously. King Abgar of Edessa was ravaged by leprosy.
His Royal Highness sent an envoy to Jesus with an invitation that He come to his palace and heal him. Jesus, however, could not go in Person. The king also sent an artist to do an accurate drawing of Jesus, which was brought back to Edessa.
Jude pressed a cloth to Jesus’s Face and His Image was imprinted on it. Then St. Jude traveled over 700 miles to the palace of King Abgar, and when the royal saw the cloth, he knew it had Jesus’s face marked on it, it matched the portrait he had commissioned.
When the cloth touched the king, he was instantly cured of his leprosy and he committed himself totally to Christianity and so, too, did his subjects. Thus St. Jude is depicted as wearing a picture of Jesus on his breast.
As an apostle his fate was to die a martyr. St. Jude was beheaded, and his symbols are of the instruments of decapitation. In the painting I selected for this post, St. Jude has a sickle slung over his shoulder, quite grim-reaper like, but he also has a spear, a shared symbol with Christ; Whose side was pierced by a spear. His death was like his character; he gave himself up so generously, so willingly.
As St. Jude was on earth, so he is in Heaven. Our Lord extolled St. Jude’s benevolence and efficiency to some of our greatest saints; He inspired St Bridget of Sweden with a profound devotion to St. Jude when He told her, “he will show himself the most willing to help”. Our Lord instructed St Bernard of Clairvaux to promote St. Jude as, “patron saint of the impossible”.
But the impossible is only made possible if we do as St. Jude and rely solely on the Trinity. St. Jude wrote in his Epistle: “But you my dear friends, must build yourselves up by means of your most holy faith; you must pray in the Holy Spirit and keep yourselves in the love of God while you await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ which effects life everlasting…To Him who is able to preserve you without sin and to present you spotless before His glorious presence with exceeding joy – to the only God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory and magnificence, empire and power, before all ages, now and forever.