Psalm response: Their message goes out through all the earth.

This is a feast of the apostles Simon and Jude, but apparently there is no trace whatever of them outside of the New Testament and no word of them anywhere after Pentecost, no mention even of their efforts or whether they were actually martyred or not. 

Now Christ and Paul variously describe us as servants, disciples, workers, apostles, children, and heirs, among other things.  That is quite a spectrum, reaching not only across the span of our spiritual development but also the range of the particular role and identity that the Father offers us and calls us to – and what we choose to accept and try to become.

Today’s passage from Paul's Letter to the Ephesians refers to the "household of God" before going into the less felicitous metaphor for the Church, a building, and yet that building becomes the “holy temple of the Lord” here and Revelation speaks of it in a more profound and imposing manner reminiscent of it being the Mystical Body of Christ (21:9-14, 22-27).

While all of those roles or identities fit us, the one I like the best because it is the closest to our human experience is that of being a child of God.  Just off the top of my head I think of the prodigal son, the son sent to the ignoble men who lease the vineyard and kill that envoy of the father, and the son who says "yes" and doesn't go into the field, the son who says "no" and does go.  The place where we relate best to God made man is in the humanity which we share with Him. 

But there is also the Firstborn Himself, the son of Mary, in whom all of us are called to be children of the Father.  He is the image of what it means to be a child of God but is above all the living God Himself who helps us not to mirror that image but to live and become alive in the same way, with the same life, filled with the same Spirit.

And like all children, each of us will become different in how we live out the lives we are given, how we ourselves choose to respond to the love that gave us life.  A few us will be well known, but most of us will be Simons and Judes, true apostles but often enough hidden ones even from ourselves....