Saint Jude: Patron of Hope, Not Hopeless Causes 

There is a peculiar comedy in the way we Christians handle our saints, much like the way a child might categorize their toys putting all the soldiers in one box, all the dolls in another, and occasionally discovering that they've accidentally filed the fire truck under "things that swim." We have patron saints for nearly everything: lost causes, lost keys, lost tempers. Saint Anthony finds our misplaced spectacles, Saint Christopher guards our travels, and Saint Jude poor Jude has been saddled with the rather gloomy responsibility of being the patron of hopeless causes. It is as if we took one of Christ's own apostles and assigned him to work the graveyard shift of divine intercession, handling only those cases that even God Himself might find a bit tricky.

But I submit that we have gotten Jude entirely backward, which is rather our specialty as human beings. We have performed the remarkable feat of taking a saint whose very existence testifies to the reality of hope and turning him into a symbol of hopelessness. It is rather like naming a lighthouse "The Beacon of Absolute Darkness" or calling a hospital "The House of Incurable Diseases." The logic is so spectacularly inverted that one suspects the Devil himself might have had a hand in the marketing.

Let us begin with the facts, which are always a sensible starting point, though they are terribly unfashionable in our current age. Saint Jude Thaddeus was one of the Twelve Apostles, which means he was personally chosen by Christ to be part of that ragtag band of fishermen, tax collectors, and general ne'er-do-wells who would eventually turn the Roman Empire on its head. He is sometimes called Jude of James to distinguish him from that other, more famous Judas who had the unfortunate tendency to betray people for spare change. But this Jude our Jude was faithful unto death, preaching the Gospel in Mesopotamia and Persia until he received a martyr's crown. This is hardly the resume of a man who specialized in lost causes. This is the resume of a man who knew something rather important about hope.

The confusion seems to have arisen from the fact that Jude was, for many centuries, a rather neglected saint. People were reluctant to invoke him for fear of confusing him with Judas Iscariot, which is rather like refusing to hire someone named "Smith" because you once knew a Smith who stole your lunch. The result was that by the time people did remember Jude, they turned to him only in desperate circumstances, when all other intercession had failed. And so he became, by a sort of spiritual accident, the saint of last resort.

But here is where our thinking has gone catastrophically wrong. We call him the patron of hopeless causes, as if he presides over a filing cabinet marked "Cases Too Difficult for Other Saints." But what we really mean or what we ought to mean is that Jude is the saint of causes that appear hopeless to us. The difference is not merely semantic; it is the difference between acknowledging our own limited vision and declaring that God Himself has thrown up His hands in despair.

Consider what we actually mean when we say something is a "hopeless cause." We mean that by our calculations, using our finite minds and our very finite understanding of how the universe operates, we cannot see any possible way forward. We have exhausted our resources, tried all the sensible solutions, and come to the end of our own cleverness. But Christianity has always insisted that this is precisely the moment when things get interesting. This is when God, having politely waited for us to finish demonstrating our incompetence, rolls up His sleeves and gets to work.

The entire history of Christianity is, when you think about it, the history of hopeless causes that turned out to be rather hopeful after all. A young Jewish carpenter announces that He is the Son of God and promptly gets Himself executed by the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Hopeless cause, surely. A handful of terrified disciples hiding in an upper room, convinced that their movement died with their Master. Hopeless cause. A persecuted minority religion spreading through the Roman Empire against all odds, logic, and military might. Hopeless cause. The conversion of Saint Paul, who was busily persecuting Christians one day and preaching Christ the next. Hopeless cause. Augustine and his pears, Monica and her tears, Francis and his poverty all of it looked absolutely hopeless until it wasn't.

So when we turn to God in our moments of desperation, what are we really acknowledging? We are acknowledging that we have reached the end of ourselves, which is the very best place to be. We are admitting that we cannot fix this, cannot solve this, cannot even imagine how this might possibly work out. And in that admission, we are finally in a position to see what God can do.

This is why I propose that we stop calling Jude the patron of hopeless causes and start calling him what he really is: the patron saint of hope. Not the cheap, flimsy hope that is really just optimism in disguise the kind that believes things will work out because they usually do, or because we deserve a happy ending. No, Jude is the patron of that deep, defiant, bloody-minded Christian hope that looks at the impossible and says, "Well, that's certainly beyond human power, but we're not dealing with merely human power, are we?"

This is the hope that Abraham had when he prepared to sacrifice Isaac, believing that God could raise the dead if necessary. This is the hope that Daniel had in the lion's den, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had in the fiery furnace. This is the hope that Mary had when an angel told her she would bear God's Son, and Joseph had when he decided to marry her anyway. This is the hope that sustained the martyrs in the arena, the missionaries in hostile lands, the saints in their darkest nights of the soul.

It is a hope that does not depend on probability or likelihood, because it is not based on what we can calculate but on who we can trust. It is not a hope that insists everything will turn out exactly as we wish, but a hope that insists that God is good, God is powerful, and God is faithful, regardless of how things appear to our limited understanding. It is a hope that can look at a cross and see resurrection, at a tomb and see an empty grave, at death and see life eternal.

When we look to the example of Saint Jude in our moments of desperation, we are not seeking out a specialist in lost causes; we are looking to a witness of hope who stood with Christ, who saw Him die, who believed when all seemed lost, and who lived to see the victory of the Resurrection. We are learning from his perspective, his faith, his stubborn refusal to believe that anything is truly hopeless when God is involved.

The modern world has developed a curious sort of atheism about hope. Oh, people still hope for things they hope to win the lottery, hope the weather will be nice for their picnic, hope their favorite team will win. But this is not the theological virtue of hope; this is mere wishing. Real hope Christian hope is something altogether different and infinitely more dangerous to the powers of this world. It is the insistence that despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the violence and chaos and suffering we see around us, the universe is fundamentally tilted toward goodness because it was created by a good God.

This is why despair is actually a sin, though we rarely treat it as such anymore. It is not merely a bad mood or a temporary darkness; it is the refusal to believe in God's goodness and power. It is the claim that we know better than God what is possible, that we can see more clearly than the Creator what can and cannot be redeemed. It is, when you think about it, a peculiar form of pride masquerading as humility.

Saint Jude stands as a rebuke to this despair. He reminds us that what looks hopeless from our limited human perspective may be exactly where God is preparing to do His most spectacular work. The situations we label as "hopeless causes" are often simply situations where God is waiting for us to get out of the way so He can show us what real hope looks like.

This does not mean, of course, that every prayer in impossible situations results in a Hollywood ending. The Christian understanding of hope is not so shallow. Sometimes the hope we find is not the hope that our circumstances will change, but the hope to endure them with grace. Sometimes the miracle is not that the cancer disappears, but that we find peace in its presence. Sometimes the hopeless cause is saved not by dramatic intervention but by the slow, patient work of grace over years or even lifetimes.

But even in these cases especially in these cases calling Jude the patron of hopeless causes misses the point. He is not the patron of situations that cannot be redeemed; he is the patron of our own hopelessness, which is always the real problem. He is the saint who helps us see that no situation is beyond God's reach, no heart so hard that grace cannot soften it, no darkness so deep that light cannot penetrate it.

When we remember Saint Jude, we are not asking him to convince God to take on a case that even God finds challenging. We are looking to his example to help us see what God is already doing, to learn from the eyes of faith that can perceive hope where our natural eyes see only despair. We are asking for the grace to believe, not in favorable outcomes, but in a faithful God.

This is the paradox at the heart of hope: it grows strongest not when things look best, but when they look worst. Anyone can hope when the odds are favorable, when success seems likely, when human effort appears sufficient. But real hope Jude's kind of hope only reveals itself when we reach the end of human resources and are forced to depend entirely on divine grace. It is the hope that blooms in the desert, the light that shines in darkness, the life that springs from death.

So let us stop relegating poor Jude to the margins of hagiography, as if he were merely a last resort for desperate souls. Let us instead recognize him for what he truly is: a champion of hope, a witness to the truth that nothing is impossible with God, a reminder that the causes we call hopeless are simply the ones where God is preparing to reveal His power most dramatically.

The next time you find yourself in what appears to be a hopeless situation when the diagnosis is grim, when the relationship seems beyond repair, when the addiction feels unbreakable, when despair whispers that God has forgotten you remember Saint Jude. But remember him not as the patron of lost causes, but as the patron of found hope. Remember him as the apostle who stood with Christ through crucifixion and resurrection, who learned that the darkest Friday can become Resurrection Sunday, who discovered that what men call the end is often just the beginning.

Look to his example not because your cause is hopeless, but because you need his witness to see the hope that is already there, hidden in the darkness like stars that only appear when night falls. Draw inspiration from his eyes, his faith, his stubborn apostolic insistence that the God who raised Christ from the dead can surely handle whatever impossibility you're facing.

For in the end, there are no hopeless causes only hopeless people who have temporarily forgotten that they serve a God who specializes in doing the impossible. Saint Jude is not the patron of situations beyond redemption; he is the patron of people who need to be reminded that redemption is always possible, that grace is always available, that hope is always warranted because God is always faithful.

Let us rename him, then, not officially perhaps the Church moves slowly in such matters, and rightly so but in our hearts and in our understanding. Let us call him Saint Jude, Patron of Hope, Witness to the Impossible, Apostle of the God Who Makes All Things New. Let us remember him not as a last resort but as a first reminder that with God, all things are possible, and that the word "hopeless" is not in the Christian vocabulary.

For as long as we have Christ, we have hope. And as long as we have hope, we have everything. This is what Jude knew, what he lived, what he died for. This is what he wants us to know. Not that we have a special saint for our impossible situations, but that there are no truly impossible situations when we serve the God of resurrection. That is not hopelessness. That is hope itself, pure and undiluted and utterly undefeated by anything the world can throw at it.

So the next time someone tells you about Saint Jude, the patron of hopeless causes, smile and gently correct them: "No," you might say, "you mean Saint Jude, the patron of hope. And that's not the same thing at all. In fact, it's exactly the opposite."

The Seeker’s Quill