So Close

Acts 5:12-16

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• At least his shadow might fall on one or another of them
• They were all together in Solomon's portico
• The people esteemed them
• Bringing the sick and those disturbed by unclean spirits

Applying the Word to My Life:
In 2023, the arm of St. Jude was being displayed at a church in Des Moines. I was coming home from a business trip and realized I had just enough time that, if everything went right, I might make it before they closed.

When I arrived, the doors were already locked. I found another entrance just as someone was coming out, slipped inside, and got into the line. Eventually I reached the relic and knelt down. Almost immediately, someone stepped in and moved me along - visibly uneasy about what looked, to them, like relic worship. It was not the moment for that conversation, so I did not try to have it. But for those few seconds, I was there, only a few feet from the remains of one of the men who had actually walked with Jesus.

I had read about Jude. I knew something of his life and the way God had worked through him. Standing there made all of that feel less like distant history.

I was not worshiping an arm, and I was not worshiping Jude. I was showing reverence for the life of someone who had said yes to Christ, walked beside Him, carried the Gospel into the world, and eventually gave his life for it.

The relic mattered because the person mattered, and the person mattered because of what God had done through him.

Acts gives us a scene that would probably look strange to us too if we actually saw it happening. This is only a short time after Pentecost, and people are already carrying the sick into the streets on cots and mats so that, as Peter passes, "at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them." Crowds begin coming from the towns around Jerusalem, and Luke tells us the sick were healed.

Peter does not stop them. God works through the moment and heals. Luke does not interrupt the story to warn that they are giving Peter too much honor.

Nobody in the story stops to explain that Peter is not God. Apparently they already knew that.

They wanted to be close to someone through whom God was visibly at work. Peter's shadow was not a god, and neither was Peter. Their reverence for what God was doing through him did not compete with worship of God. It depended on it.

That is the distinction Catholics are making when we talk about veneration. Worship belongs to God alone. Veneration is the honor we give someone because we recognize what God has done in and through that life. In fact, the whole thing stops making sense if we separate the saint from God, because the saint is only worth venerating because of what God's grace accomplished there.

That afternoon in Des Moines, I did not kneel because I thought St. Jude was God. I knelt because the remains before me belonged to a man who had once stood beside Jesus. He had listened to Him, followed Him, and carried His name into the world. Being close to that relic gave me a physical connection to the great things God has been doing through His children since the beginning of the Church.

And Acts tells me that instinct is not something Catholics invented centuries later. Almost from the beginning, Christians wanted to draw close to people through whom God had done something holy.

Veneration recognizes what God has done in a person. Worship belongs to the God who did it. Those are not the same thing.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll let the lives of the saints point me past themselves and toward the God who made them holy.