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You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.
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Welcome to form Now, I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute. And Joining me is Dr. Jim Prothero, who is a professor of scripture here at the August Institute. And today we want to talk about the letter of St. Jude, which is about one page in your Bible. And, and it's a page that gets heavily neglected. I mean, most of us Catholics, most people don't even know Protestant or Catholic, that there is a letter to St. Jude from Jude. And so the letter of Jude is what we want to talk about and kind of dive into that a little bit here. And Jim, let me first begin with help us understand who is St. Jude for our audience. Who is this figure who's writing this letter? And of course, this letter comes in what we call the Catholic Epistles, which is seven letters after all of the Gospels, you get Acts of the Apostles, then you get the Pauline letters, and then right before the book of Revelation, which is the end, I think most people know that you get these seven Catholic epistles and you get several from St. Peter and you get several of St. John, and then you get James and then Jude, who's probably out of all of them, the one that people know the least.
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No, I think that's right. So Jude, there's actually a lot of Judes in the Bible. His name actually is Judas. It's the same name as Judas Iscariot. But normally we just change the good guys names to Jude, so it isn't as confusing. But when you get into the lists of the apostles in the Gospels, sometimes they'll say the Judas who wasn't Iscariot, but that's also a Jude or a Judas. It's from the Old Testament name Judah, of course.
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Right. That's why it's such a popular name, because Judah was one of the great sons of Jacob and very important, the whole tribe of Judah.
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That's right.
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So it's a very popular name.
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And relatedly today, Simon is just the other version of Simeon, which is one of the 12 tribes. So that's another popular name. So you meet lots of Simons in the New Testament, lots of Judes, lots of.
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And both those names, by the way, I can't help but say this, but they're very, very popular because they go back to Jacob sons. But they're also really popular because of the Maccabees, which is recent. And so the Maccabean Family had a Simon and they had a Judah, and so Judas Maccabeus, Judah Maccabeus. And so the idea of under Roman occupation, Jewish mothers and fathers naming their kids after the Maccabean sons who rose up and led a revolt and liberation against the Greeks, that was the hope in the time of the first century against Rome. So that's why these names are so popular.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this Jude, it's so interesting how little we have from the early centuries about some of the apostles. And it's a great, I think it's a great comfort and a testament to the way that God works, that he built his church through them. Anyway, the Jude here who wrote the letter of Jude, in the first line, he identifies himself as Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. And most of the early fathers have identified this Jude with the Jude who is brother to James and one of Jesus cousins. So in say Mark chapter six, you'll see Jesus goes back to Nazareth and they say, hey, who's this guy? Don't we know his. And they call them brothers. But you read along a little bit in the Gospel and you find out that James and Joses and Simon and Jude are actually the children of his aunt who's also named Mary, Joseph's sister in law. So it gets complicated.
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And by the way, this is great evidence for Protestants to say, well, you Catholics are wrong. Mary had other children because Jesus had brothers. But he identifies himself not as a brother of Jesus, but as a servant to Jesus and a brother to James.
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That's right. That's right. A lot of the stuff that we have from the second century and into the third century that talks about the apostles and some of the people who lived in the Holy Land and wrote about the history of the earliest church. One of the things they give us two interesting bits of information. One of them is that in Jerusalem the family of Jesus became very important and took on a kind of leadership role. And so James, of course, Jesus cousin, becomes the first bishop of Jerusalem. You see him in Acts chapter 15, Acts 21. And when he dies, they pick another cousin to be the next bishop in Jerusalem. And the family gets kind of a say in who's going to run it. So they take on this important, which means, number one, that we should be able to trust all of those early traditions about Mary, about Joseph, about Jude and James that we have. And it also kind of illuminates for us the life of the church and the way in which Jesus family, by the grace of God, came around because so many of them. The Gospel of John tells us that his brothers kind of still didn't really get what he was doing or believed in him.
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Yeah, in early Mark, Mark chapter three, they were.
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They think he's nuts.
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Yeah, they think he's gone crazy.
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That's right. In Mark chapter three. But they came around. St. Paul tells us in First Corinthians 15 that Jesus appeared to James after he was raised. And so James very quickly has a sort of a wake up moment. Surely he's coming around a little bit before then, but he's not there at the cross. You know, that's just John and Mary and some of the other women from Galilee. But these others, these others in his family who had kind of followed and watched and were skeptical finally come around. And so you can see kind of a wonderful sort of opposite to like Joseph and his brothers back in Genesis, right? Joseph's brothers. Look at Joseph, they hear about his dreams that he's going to be great and they go, let's kill that dreamer. Dad likes him. He has dreams that God likes him. Let's get rid of him. And it takes a long time for them to have any kind of reconciling moment to the very end of the book of Genesis. And here it's Jesus death and then his resurrection that brings Jesus brothers or his relatives, brothers around to believe in him and then not only to believe in him and kind of begrudgingly accept, like I suppose he's the chosen one, he is the Son of God, but actually to become martyrs and apostles of the message of the gospel. So I think it's just really wonderful.
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Now let me ask you, as we look at the letters of Jude, and he's writing to those who are called beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ. So he's writing not to a particular place, it seems, it seems to be a little bit more circular letter, a little bit more wider audience. But, but this letter I think gives us a window into not, you know, to the early church, of course, but the early church after a while.
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Right.
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And so one of the things he says is, you know, beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith. So there's false teachers and false shepherds that Jude mentions who've slipped in and are causing controversy, confusion, deception about the Christian way of life. And so he's writing to the church to contend for the faith. That seems to be the purpose of this letter.
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That's right, yeah. So it doesn't seem to have a single audience. Like you said, it's kind of more general. Right. He's kind of writing to everybody, but he does have something very specific in mind that he wants to talk about and it's these false teachers. He calls them waterless clouds.
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Wow.
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Yeah. I love the imagery in Jude.
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For a lot of people, like, what does that mean of waterless cloud? But having lived in Israel for a summer and seen it rain once for five minutes during that summer, you see a cloud and it gives you hope that there will be moisture in a very dry and arid place.
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But.
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But when a cloud comes by and you're like, well, that was vain hope. And so that's. So I get the metaphor for living in that territory. I mean, if you live in Seattle, waterless clouds are probably beneficial clouds. You're like, finally, it didn't rain on us, but it means something particular to that environment, I think.
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Yeah, no, that's right. That's a great insight. Yeah. They don't help the church grow. He says that they are false teachers. One of the things I think is really beneficial about Jude, there's actually a lot of points that I think are really important for us today. But one of the things that he brings up so these false teachers, he doesn't tell us exactly what they teach. He says that they blaspheme the holy ones. He says that they encourage immorality and licentiousness by their own example and specifically by the fact that they are present at the Christians agape feasts. So they're not outsider heretics, they're insiders. And some of them might even have positions of leadership. So if you want a letter to look at to think about how to handle scandal in the church, I think Jude is really helpful. There's a lot of specifics that you don't have, but that's kind of helpful too, because the specifics change every time. On the other hand, the reality and the sort of the way in which hypocrisy within the church or within church leaders leadership happens, that kind of remains the same. And so you see Jude, we'll get to it at the end. But you see Jude on the one hand telling people, well, yeah, you should have been prepared for this, you should have expected this because Jesus said it would happen and the apostles said it would happen. And so, ta da. And yet at the end, yeah, that's.
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Such an important point, Jim, because you know, he's going to call them to contend for the Faith. They all have to all of them, not just the leadership. They all have to contend and defend what the faith that's been handed on by Jesus Christ and the apostles and not let false teachers, even false shepherds, take them astray from that, make compromises with worldly paganism and worldly living and licentiousness. So they can't compromise the faith. He's going to call them that. But at the end you get to this point where he says one of the problems of these false shepherds is causing scandal. And so he tells them, look, this doesn't mean the plan of God has been thwarted. The fact that there's shepherds, those who should be good bishops or good priests, who are worldly, and false teachers, that's a scandal that shouldn't be happening. But he's saying the apostles and Jesus warned you from the beginning that this was going to happen, that the church would have to suffer bad leadership. So bad leaders doesn't mean wrong church.
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That's right. That's right.
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That's an important thing for us to get our minds around. Because today people get so, you know, there's different scandals in the church today, like at this time. And people are like, well, am I in the wrong church? Should I go be come, you know, should I leave Catholicism and be Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, or should I be evangelical? The problem is you're going to find bad shepherds in the Orthodox Church. You're going to find bad shepherds in the evangelical Church. This is just part of the reality of the church.
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That's right. And at the same time, I'm getting ahead of myself a bit because I want to look at the end. Maybe we should go back into the middle. But just to follow up with that, one of the things I think is striking about Jude in the middle. I mean, he's railing, right? He's not happy. He's got all these little sets of threes, right? And it almost seems like he's name calling at points, right? But he doesn't encourage them to sort of withdraw and leave, right? Because these sort of scandals are out there. He doesn't want them to withdraw and run away. He also doesn't tell them attack in the way that a lot of times we think about. He wants them to oppose falsehood. But if you look toward the end in verse 20, he begins, he says, but you building yourself up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit. So it starts with you, right? When you're in these times of scandal, where should you start? Well, building Yourself up in the faith. Right. Praying in the Holy Spirit. Not to, sort of. It's easy sometimes to get caught up in the politics of the church and what you want to oppose, and then you, like, forget to pray.
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That's such good advice, though, because when people hear that there's a false shepherd or a false teacher, and they get scandalized and they get angry and they get frustrated or they get confused, well, what can they do? Well, the first thing they do is build themselves up in the faith. Right. By knowing it well. And we have such great resources now. We have the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You don't have to. You don't have to. You know, the average Catholic doesn't have to rely on, you know. You know, do I have a bad pastor or does my. My deacon or my priest or my friend? Are they telling me something wrong? Well, you can go to the catechism and you can say, well, here's what the Catholic Church teaches. This is official. What they're suggesting is not official, and it's wrong. And so I love that. It tells them to build themselves up in their faith and to pray.
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That's right. And in verse 21 and 22 and 23, he says, so keep yourselves in the love of God, verse 21, waiting for the mercy of the Lord Jesus. Verse 22. Have mercy on those who doubt. So he's not talking about obstinate false teachers here, but people who, because of this bad witness, kind of have questions. Right. So that friend of yours who sees the scandal and starts to, like, ask questions and become really uncomfortable with their faith. Right. Jude is not encouraging you to go whack them across the head with the catechism or get angry at them or frustrated.
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Yeah. Because rightly, to be angry at the false shepherds and the false witnesses and the false prophets, but we don't want to be angry at those who have been made confused by them.
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Exactly. That's a great advice. So have mercy on those who doubt. And then in verse 23, save others by snatching them out of the fire. And for others, show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. So you have those who doubt. Right. Those who've been put into confusion by this, have mercy on them and reach out. Other people, as a result of the scandals are sort of like going off the rails. Totally. And he says, reach out and save them from the fire. Right. Pull them back. There's real danger here. Get them. Pull them back. And then the other, he says to others, you should show Mercy, but with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. And that is to say. Right.
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Probably approaching those who are walking darkness and the wrong things.
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Right. And don't fall into the darkness yourself. Yeah.
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That makes what. Great advice. This is timely. Yeah.
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And it's all packed in there, so you can miss it if you do, like a little kind of cursory reading, like, oh, yeah, I'll just read Jude. It'll take me two minutes. Take an hour, Read it slowly.
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Read it and reread it and reread it. But this gets to the point, Jim, that how important is it for Catholics today and Christians to know these Catholic epistles and these letters like Jude, to be able to navigate the challenges we face in the church today? It's really important.
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Well, how. Verse 20 here. This is the word of God. Right. Build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. Well, how do you build yourself up in faith? You can go to Mass and receive the grace of the sacraments. What's another thing you ought to do?
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Read the Word of God.
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Read it. And if you don't know it, then it's not a tool that God can use to build you up. If you're never reading it, then you're not listening. And it can be a struggle with either time. Sometimes with understanding this. Sometimes understanding what's written can be difficult. So you need resources, like the catechism, like some of the stuff we're doing right now, like any good resource. But they're all there.
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It's so important. I think of our lord in Matthew 13:19. He's interpreting the parable of the sower and the sow that gets eaten by the birds. He says, that's when somebody hears the word of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. In Matthew, when they hear the word of the kingdom of heaven and they do not understand it, the devil comes and snatches that word from their hearts. And so that's why Jude is saying, you've got to be built up in the faith. In other words, you've got to understand the faith. Otherwise, when there's these scandals and confusion that comes, you could lose your faith. Let's go back towards the beginning, he begins. After he tells him to contend for the faith, he then says, I think it's verse five. Now, I want you to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe and the angels. So he's going to go on. So it's interesting. He talks about. It's really Jesus who led the first Exodus. That's very powerful. Jesus did the first Exodus. But then he's reminded that those who experienced the first in the old covenant, the great redemption of the old covenant of coming out of Egypt, those people ended up doubting God and murmuring and disobeying and falling into. At the golden calf, probably. Well, at several points in the desert, they fell into licentiousness. And so he's using that as an example that, look, you've. In the church today, we've been redeemed, we've in a new covenant, but if we fall away in how we live, we can end up being judged and not enter the promised land.
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That's right. The book of Hebrews and First Corinthians, chapter 10, they all make these same points and they all look back to the time of the wilderness. And this is frankly, this little bit in Jude, if you've been encouraged to read Jude, is a great encouragement to go back and read the Book of Numbers, last half of Exodus, because that's what these apostles are turning to, to say, look, you want to think about your faith and your walk with God. They were brought, redeemed by God's grace and his powerful mighty hand and outstretched arm. And they were brought through water. You were brought through water. Baptism, Baptism. They got manna from heaven, supernatural food and drink, even better. Manna, right in the body and blood of Jesus. Given for you, shed for you. And guess what happened to the people that God redeemed for himself when they stopped trusting, stopped listening, stopped loving, stopped waiting, and they fell into idolatry, licentiousness, everything else like that. They didn't make it. And this is, don't let it happen to you.
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Out of love and charity. Jude's going to move into what would seem, probably we experience as readers, it gets a little darker. Right, because he's going to warn them about judgment, and yet he's doing this not to literally, not to scare. Not to scare the hell out of them, but to scare them out of hell. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It's a sober sense of warning. He's going to bring up Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, who likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued, you know, their desires, unnatural desires. Right. As he's going to say. And they serve as an example by punishment, with eternal fire. And so this idea of judgment. How are we to see this idea of judgment in Jude?
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Well, so I think there's a pair of things to think about. Number one is to think about the effect. Right. So you said it's not trying to just scare the hell out of them, but to scare them out of hell. And judgment also always kind of has two sides, Right. To say that God will judge iniquity and will reward justice by his grace and mercy.
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And that's consoling, actually, what you're saying, because if these people are scandalized by people who are living licentious double lives as Christians, you know, you may not be able to judge them. And people get. Christians get so frustrated when they say, oh, there's this prelate in the church. And I know they're bad and they're not being punished, and they get so discouraged by that. But here Jude is trying to keep away that discouragement, isn't he?
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Yeah, I think so. So, I mean, on the one hand, it certainly reminds them, I mean, he's going to talk later about, you know, snatching people out of the fire in mercy, that there is real potential for this for themselves.
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There is really hell.
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Yeah, there is real hell. But on the other hand, it's also comforting. It's a reminder to them that God's justice, even if it's delayed, comes swiftly when it's time. And that God won't. Every little act of love that you feel is neglected or forgotten, just like also every sin that you think you got away with. Right. Those are not. God is not blinded to those. And so if you have sin, confess it and thank God for his wonderful forgiveness. And if you have acts of justice or love, if you're doing the right thing in your parish, and for some reason, somebody who has everybody else's ear, whoever it is, likes to put you down and keep kind of shutting you up and throwing what you're saying out to the side. God sees that and God will use that and work through that, even in hidden ways. So the judgment isn't just to be scary.
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Right.
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It's also to promise to remind people that God's not forgetting this stuff.
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God's faithful to his justice.
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That's right.
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And that we shouldn't be discouraged if we don't see justice being administered to those in the church who are failing and are fraudulent. But ultimately you can't escape the long arm of God's law.
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That's right.
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So that's reassuring, even if it's not sobering and making us want to make sure that we're repentant. Now, in the next scene, we get Saint Michael, the archangel gets mentioned here so here's a great shout out to St. Michael the Archangel. And of course, in the church I know in our diocese and the Archdiocese of Denver, we're praying that the Prayer of St Michael the Archangel after every mass as part of the response to some of the scandals and troubles of the church. And here you get, you know, in that prayer to St. Michael, it says, may he rebuke the devil, right? And that's actually here we say, it says, you know, the Archangel Michael is there and he says, the Lord rebuke you. So we get Michael quoted here. What do you want to say about the archangel?
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Well, a lot, but so, so what happens here is Jude talks a little bit about the false teachers and he gives some kind of characteristics of them. And one of the things he says is that they reject authority and they blaspheme the glorious ones. So that's the angels, right? We're not exactly sure what kind of blasphemy they're committing against the angels. But he makes this move and he tells a story that was common tradition at the time about the devil arguing with Michael about the body of Moses. And either the devil is unhappy because he can't find it, or maybe that the devil is doing his accuser thing and that Michael is going to take Moses body up to heaven after he died, which was a common tradition. And that the devil is coming to Michael and saying things like, hey, stop that. Don't you know he was unfaithful here? Don't you know he did this? Don't you know he did this? Right? Because the devil loves to accuse God's people unjustly. And Jude says when Michael is talking to Satan, even Michael doesn't just trash talk the devil. He says, the Lord rebuke you. And number one, it's a good reminder that as human beings, even those who are marked by the blood of Christ and the redeeming water of the Holy Spirit, trash talking angels isn't a good idea. But also, I think it's a really important reminder about God's uniqueness as God. It's easy sometimes to think that like God and the devil are like duking it out, right? And that sometimes God is kind of back on the ropes and then other times he's really coming after it, right? Something like that, where he's just sort of like struggle between good and evil like that. And there's aspects of that that are true, right? The side heaven is always at war against evil and sin is always at war against heaven. But God is on a whole different plane. The opposite of the devil isn't God, it's Michael. Because they're both angels, right? Good angel, bad angel. God's just over the whole thing. So when Michael wants to oppose Satan, right, with the greatest power, he doesn't say, hold on a minute, let me get my special sword. He says, may the Lord rebuke you. And that's all he needs to say. It's just like in the book of Revelation, right? You see, like, angels fighting with each other. There's wars and things like that and all sorts of things. Stars are falling out of heaven, and you're like, oh, my goodness, this is terrifying. And then he just kind of says, like. And then God said, it's time, and poof, it was time. Jesus comes out faithful and true on his white horse. And Revelation doesn't even describe a battle because you don't need one because it's God. So he wins. So I think when we pray that St. Michael prayer, it's really important to focus on those lines. By the power of God cast into hell Satan, the Lord rebuke him. We humbly pray because we're actually joining Michael in his prayer and his acknowledgment of God's authority that's been given to him.
- [27:25]
B
That's such a beautiful thing that people who haven't read the letter of Jude don't know how that prayer is taken from the letter of Jude. And we're invited to join St. Michael in his prayer to God. It's really beautiful. Well, in the last minute here, Jim, what would you say to someone who's going to pick up Jude today and read it? Anything else you want to throw in?
- [27:53]
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I would say look up the cross references. Jude is going to reference a lot of Old Testament stuff, and if you're not familiar with it, it'll just kind of sound like he's ranting. But in verse 11, he mentions three different Old Testament bad guys. Cain, Balaam, and Korah. And all three of them from the book of Genesis and the Book of Numbers are really important kind of bad guys. But if you don't know the story, you won't be able to do what Jude wants you to do, which is to see yourself in it, right? And resisting these types of temptations and trying to not be like these three people. Korah is famous for rebelling because he said, you know what, Moses? Aren't all God's people holy? Why do you get to be all big? And why does Aaron get to be the priest? Shouldn't we all get to be priests and make the sacrifices. I feel like that has a lot to say to some of the conversations that we have today. But nobody reads numbers anymore and nobody reads Jude. So we're missing something that we could use to up build ourselves.
- [29:07]
B
Jude is telling the early Christians in the early church to go back to the stories of Israel and the Exodus and numbers for lessons on how to live as the church today. And I hope that's what you get enriched by is returning to the Word of God as Jude invites us to to be built up in your faith. And when you know the story of the church, then you're not surprised by the twists and turns of the story of the church in your life, in your day, in our present time and the present side cycle of news that can be so confusing. And I love how Jude ends. He says now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy. Well, that's the prayer we want for all of you to him who can keep you from stumbling with all the bad scandals and all the bad false witnesses out there who want us to compromise with the world rather than our Christian faith. I hope that this strengthens your faith. And go back and read Jude today and remember he is the patron of helpless causes. So you can pray to St. Jude and I will today. God bless you.
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