St Judes Close SP1

Saint Jude was an apostle and the writer of the New Testament ‘Epistle of Saint Jude’. He was also known as Thaddeus and Lebbaeus.

He undertook missionary work in Persia with Simon.

Saint Jude and King Agbar

There is a story that King Agbar of Edessa, who had leprosy, wrote to Jesus begging to be cured. Jesus did not go himself, but send Jude with an image of himself that he had imprinted on a cloth by pressing it to his face. The king was cured. Saint Jude is often depicted with either a cloth, a picture or a medal to represent this story.

On the West Front of Salisbury Cathedral however he is shown with a ‘halberd’ – the axe-like weapon with which he was killed.

Lost causes

He is famous as the patron saint of lost causes, or impossible situations – a tradition that seems to have originated in Depression-era Chicago¹. Richard Taylor writes that his name is only invoked in extremis because of its similarity with that of Judas²

Hey Jude

The Beatles’ song ‘Hey Jude’ ostensibly has no connection to the Saint. According to Chris Hunt in ‘The Mojo Beatles Special’

Written the previous month while driving to Surrey to visit freshly estranged Cynthia Lennon, the song was inspired by Paul’s sudden feelings of sympathy for the children of divorce, more specifically by the plight of his songwriting partner’s five-year-old son, Julian. McCartney later switched ‘Jules’ for ‘Jude’, because it ‘sounded a bit better’, but other than that the song arrived with all its basic elements in situ.

³

However, although Sir Paul says that he changed Jules to Jude because ‘it sounded a bit better’, the identification of Saint Jude with ‘lost causes’ or ‘impossible situations’ does chime reasonably well, I think, with the subject of the song and some of the lyrics (‘take a sad song and make it better’ etc)

Footnotes

1. Thomas J. Craughwell. This Saint’s for You!: 300 Heavenly Allies Who Will Change Your Life p219, Quirk Books,US (1 Nov 2007). ISBN 978-1594741845 [↩]
2. Taylor, Richard (2003). How to Read a Church: A Guide to Images, Symbols and Meanings in Churches and Cathedrals. Rider & Co. ISBN-10 1844130533 [↩]
3. Chris Hunt | Hey Jude [↩]