July 23, 2000
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James, Simon and Judas
Common Men, Uncommon Calling: James, Simon and Judas
Number nine in the full list is an obscure man named James the son of Alphaeus. He had a name that was shared by some others. James the son of Zebedee who was the brother of John. This James is known to us and there are several incidents in the gospels where James appears. There was another James, the James the brother of our Lord. Our Lord had a half-brother born to Joseph and Mary by the name of James. He later became the leader of the Jerusalem Council and authored the epistle James. But this James, the son of Alphaeus, is just obscure. We don't even know anything about Alphaeus.
Interestingly enough were you to look at Mark 15:40 you would see him there called, "James the mikros, micro James, Little James." I think the NAS translates it "James the Less." In what way was he little? Well it could refer to his physical features, he could have been very small, just a little guy. It may also be that he was young in age. It would be hard to imagine that were he an older man he would still be bearing the moniker "Little James." They may have wanted to show a little more deference to his age.
It is also true that he was something of a background person, and that's why he's called "Little James," or "James the Less," small James. Perhaps it's some kind of a combination of that, we certainly can't be dogmatic, but let's for our mind's sake assume that he was a kind of a small sort of quiet person. Our Lord has never depended upon superstars. The New Testament tells us absolutely nothing about him. However, I have some things to say about him, sort of from the white spaces. His distinguishing mark then is his obscurity, right? If we don't know anything about him, that in itself is an interesting fact. Apparently he sought no recognition, displayed no great leadership, asked no critical questions and demonstrated no unusual insight. Only his name remains and all his life and labors are sunk in obscurity.
Historical tradition tells us, however, that he was sent after Pentecost to Persia to preach the gospel, modern Iran. The gospel was rejected by the power that was there and he was crucified for his faithfulness to Christ, just as his Lord had been crucified. The legacy for Iran was pagan Islam. The Lord uses people who seem not extraordinary at all. Here is such a quiet, unknown soldier. He became a great preacher, he was able to do miracles, cast out demons, heal people to validate the message that he preached. And he preached the message with faithfulness and God's Word never returns void, Isaiah says, so he bore fruit for his preaching. He was powerful enough to bring about his own martyrdom.
In Mark 2:14, Jesus passes by the tax office of Levi/Matthew, whom we saw last time. And notice this, he saw Levi, the son of..who?...Alphaeus. Could it be that this James was the brother of Matthew? That could be. There is no effort on the part of the Scripture writer to distinguish between the two Alphaeuses, could be. That wouldn't be uncommon since Peter and Andrew were brothers and James and John were brothers. Why not these two? Why not James and Matthew/Levi?
In the nineteenth chapter of John at the crucifixion of Jesus, there in verse 25, was standing by the cross of Jesus, His mother, Mary, His mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Cleophas," see that name Cleophas? Some scholars tell us that Cleophas is just another form of Alphaeus so that if this James was the son of the sister of Mary, he would have been Jesus' cousin. Was James the cousin of our Lord? Was he the brother of Matthew? We don't know.
A pedigree is no substitute for the power of God. The Apostles never really were the true workers in the Kingdom, anyway. Christ was and they were just the tools. Had they been really important and had their pedigree been important, had their methods been important, had their means been important, had their styles been important, had their careers been important, we would have some information. We sweep into the book of Acts, as I said, and we don't hear anything about them except for Peter, James and John. And Peter and John dominate the first part, and the Apostle Paul, the Apostle who came later, dominates the back half of the book of Acts.
There isn't anything that we know about them because the men aren't the issue. We don't need, apparently the Lord knew, a biography of these men. It was enough to know that they were chosen by the Lord, empowered by the Spirit, and carried the gospel to the world of their day. And they disappear. The Scripture always keeps the focus on the power of Christ and the power of the Word. They preach the Word filled with the Spirit and that's what you need to know. The vessel is not the issue, the Master is. So in a sense, James the son of Alphaeus was like the rest of the Apostles, he was harnessed to the Master's chariot, a slave of love. He lived only for His glory and died without leaving any earthly record. But believe me, there is a heavenly record. He right now shines in heaven. His name right now is on the foundation of one of the gates that lead into the New Jerusalem.
Number ten is Simon who was called the Zealot. If you read Matthew and Mark you're going to find him identified in a different way. In Matthew and Mark he is called Cananaen, which comes from the Hebrew word that's carried over into the Greek word. The Hebrew word is qanah and it means "to be jealous," or "to be passionate, zealous." It was used in the Hebrew language for those who were passionate and jealous and zealous for the law of God. Zelotes is the word for zeal in the Greek, and that's the word that appears here, zelotes from which we get Zealot. It's exactly the same word in Greek. So you have one Greek word coming from a Hebrew word, meaning the one who is jealous, or the one who is zealous.
Both words then refer to this man. He was a man who had zeal and passion, in particular for the Law of God. Both words then indicate to us that he was a man clearly defined by one characteristic in his life, and that was this passion for the Law of God. Long after he was converted, long after he was an Apostle, and he is still called the Zealot, or the Cananaen. He bore the label all his life. How in the world did this guy ever got into the 12?
There were four parties among the Jews. There were the Pharisees, fastidious about the law, religious fundamentalists. There were the Sadducees, those are the ones who were the religious liberals. There were the Essenes and they were the monastics, they were the separated people who lived out in the desert and lived an austere life style and disdained the comforts of the city. They would be like Monks living in a monastery. The last, the fourth and last of the primary groups that developed was the Zealot group. And their particular bent was political. They hated the Romans. If you wanted to define a Zealot, you could say they hated anybody that imposed upon Judaism any pagan intrusion. The Romans, of course, were guilty of that. They hated the Romans. They hated the Greeks before them. They were, in fact, born out of rebellion, born really to be terrorists. They were the political terrorists. They were the assassins. Their existence appears to come from the Maccabean period when the Greeks were still leading and ruling over Israel. And the Jews were sick of it and tired of it, the temple had been desecrated, a pig had been slain on the altar to mock Judaism and its ceremonial laws.
There was a Maccabean revolution, as you know. First Maccabees 2:50 says, "Be zealous for the Law and give your lives for the covenant." There was this calling together of Jews who would go and die to dispossess the pagans who had occupied their land. They were the strictest of the strict. They were really extreme Pharisees of the Pharisees who went to the point where they not only interpreted the Law literally, but they believed that somebody who didn't interpret the Law the way it should be interpreted and didn't live by that Law could be killed, assassinated. They insisted on a literal obligation of traditional renderings of the Law. They wanted a Messiah who would kick out the Romans and every other pagan nation and who would restore the Kingdom to Israel with all its former Solomonic or Davidic glory. They were red-hot patriots and they banded together under a man named Judas of Zamala(?) to deliver the Jews from the Romans. They literally started a rebellion and some of their crimes were quite amazing.
They were headquartered in the Galilee where the rest of the Apostles with the exception of Judas was from. They stirred up sedition. They did terrorist acts everywhere. Josephus, the historian, gives us a brief look at them. The land of Israel was under Roman rule. The Jews couldn't accept that fact, the country was a sleeping volcano about to erupt. They wanted the Romans out. They offended them in every sense. For many years Herod the Great who was not a Jew but an Idumaean had succeeded in holding the nation together in peace. He did it by the sheer force of his personality and his skill and diplomacy as well as being backed, of course, by Roman force. It was 4 B.C. when Herod the Great died. Divided up his kingdom to his sons, Philip took the north-east regions, Antipas took Galilee, Archelaus was left Judea and Samaria. Before this new arrangement ever could be ratified by Rome, Israel erupted. They wanted all the Gentile rulers out and the Romans out. The blaze was the fiercest in Galilee where this Judas of Samala led the insurrection.
The Roman power broke that insurrection, but the Zealots were all the more fortified. In the south, in Judea the Romans found Archelaus was unfit to rule so they replaced him with a man named Coronius (probably Coponius). Now Coponius is well noted because he introduced a census. That's when Jesus was born at that time, when they went down, Joseph and Mary, to the census to record their identity beyond the tax rolls. He introduced a census for taxation. That was another terrible act as far as the Zealots were concerned and so a holy war blew up again led by Judas of Samala. The revolt again was crushed by the Romans and this time Judas was killed, but the Zealots were even fortified more and they stopped with the open-rebellion and they moved to terrorism. They became known as Zacharei(???), secha(?) a little curved sword and they would hide it in the folds of their robe and they would come up upon the Romans and stab them in the back of the ribs through the heart.
They involved themselves in guerilla warfare, burning, plundering and going up into Galilee to hide. Sometimes even killed their own countrymen whom they believed compromised with Rome. But Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews writes concerning this Judas of Samala who was the leader of these rebellions and sort of out of which the Zealots were fortified. He said, "Judas the Galilean was the author of the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy." He gives him some credit for really defining this group. "They, the Zealots, have an inviolable attachment to liberty and say that God is the only ruler and Lord. They do not mind dying any kind of death, nor do they heed the torture of their kindred and their friends, nor can any such fear make them call any man lord. And since this immovable resolution of theirs is known to a great many, I shall speak no further about that matter, for I'm not afraid that anything that I have said about them will be disbelieved, but rather fear that what I said comes short of the resolution they show when they undergo pain," end quote.
Josephus says all they need to say is very little because everybody knows these people are so zealous they will literally die and if the people around them that are in their group fall at their side, that does not at all mitigate their resolution. They don't mind dying, he says, any kind of death, nor do they heed the torture of their kindred and their friends. You can torture them. You can kill them. But you can't change their passion.
Simon was one of them. In fact, there are historians who believe in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, Titus Vespasian, the Roman general, when they destroyed Jerusalem and massacred a million to a hundred thousand Jews in Jerusalem in that one terrible holocaust, that it was largely participated by the Zealots. Let me read you what one historian says, "When Jerusalem was besieged and when the inhabitants were slowly starving to death, and when the outlook was completely hopeless, within the besieged city a civil war was raging and the Zealots and the assassins, who were a part of the Zealots, were murdering anyone who suggested a more moderate policy, or who was prepared to come to terms before ultimate ruin engulfed the city. The Zealots and the Assassins were crazed with hatred for the Romans and for anyone who had anything to do with the Romans. It was their insane hatred of Rome which in the end destroyed their city."
When a Roman army moved in and besieged the city, what they did was cut off all the supplies so they began to starve the people out. As they began to starve to death, they would come to a negotiating position. When you got them into a position of weakness, this would be like we would call "cold war power," when they knew they were on the edge of total defeat, they would then negotiate some kind of truce. There were people in Jerusalem who wanted to do that to save their lives, the Zealots wouldn't allow it. They actually killed the Jews who wanted to negotiate and as a result, wound up getting their entire city destroyed and the population massacred. Josephus writes, "Zealots, for that was the name those reckless persons went by, as if they were zealous in good practices and were not rather extravagant and reckless in the worst actions." Here is Josephus even saying their zeal was ill-conceived.
He goes on, "Nothing shows that fanaticism of the Zealots better than the incident in which the last of them finally perished. When Jerusalem fell, some strongholds in the city still held out. The last of them was outside the city in a place called Massada., Herod's summer palace down in the south, part of the desert. There a group of Jews commanded by Eleazar held out. When it was clear that all hope of escape was gone, Eleazar summoned the Jews together, made a flaming speech in which he urged them first to slaughter their own wives and children, then to commit suicide. They took him at his word. They tenderly embraced their wives...writes Josephus...kissed their children and then began the bloody work. Nine-hundred and sixty perished, only two women and five children escaped by hiding in a cave," end quote.
They were so zealous they literally killed their families, rather than be taken by the Romans. This is Simon. Now think about Simon having to hang around Matthew who had sold himself to Rome to extort taxes out of Israel, who was the most hated and despised of all people in that society because he was a Roman tax collector who betrayed his people and aided and abetted the pagan invader. He would just as soon stuck his little knife in the heart of Matthew outside this shadow of Christ in which he had wonderfully come.
It's amazing, isn't it, that Jesus would pick a man like this, a terrorist, a man of fierce loyalties, a man of amazing passion, courage and zeal, narrow for sure, enthusiastic to a fault, a man of action, loyal, savage. The Lord chose him. J.G. Greenhow(?) writes, "Were men divided from each other by a wide, deep gulf of thought and feeling and even of impassion and hatred, yet the Publican and the Zealot clasped hands," referring to Matthew and Simon, "and they joined hearts at Jesus' feet. In the furnace of His love these opposites were welded together. It was a picture and prediction on a small scale of what would come to pass in the greater church, where walls of partition were to be broken down, where national antipathies were to be crucified and buried with Christ and rise again transfigured into the glory of the uniting faith and charity and where there were to be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free but Christ all and in all."
Think of him in relationship to Judas Iscariot. Judas wanted money. Judas wanted power. Judas wanted the Jewish kingdom, he wanted the Romans out. Simon must have been comfortable hanging around Judas because Judas was a materialist, Judas was looking at the political implications of Jesus' messiahship. He betrayed Jesus in the end because it became clear to him that the thing wasn't going the way he thought it was supposed to go and his thoughts would have been that it would go in the same place that Simon would have thought originally that it should go, the dispossession of the Romans, the freedom of Israel. I suppose in some ways Simon could have been the betrayer. He was even more passionate about those things than Judas.
But Simon believed the truth. The fiery enthusiasm that he had for Israel was turned to Christ. I wonder if when he preached he ever gave testimonies about his background. Eusebius, the church historian, says he preached in the British Isles, in Egypt and in Africa. Finally because of his preaching, they sawed him in half. And I'm sure if he was willing to die for political aspirations and the love of Judaism, he was even more willing to die for spiritual aspirations and the love of Christ.
There's another in this list, verse 16, "Judas, the son of James." It means "Jehovah leads." He had three names. Jerome called him "Trinominus(??)", the man with three names. If you look at Matthew 10:3 he's called Thaddaeus and also in Matthew 10:3 Lebbaeus, Thaddaeus Lebbaeus Judas son of James...a lot of names. The name "Judas" was his name from birth that his parents gave him. His parents were anticipating that in his life God would lead him and he would follow. But his other names are really kind of interesting and probably got added on and maybe became nicknames that he accumulated. Thaddaeus means breast child. The Hebrew root has to do with a female breast nursing. I basically would interpret that as "Mamma's boy." You'd think a long time before you named your kid "Mamma's Boy." Maybe he was the littlest guy, maybe he was the last in a long line of kids, and especially devoted and cherished by his mom. His other name Lebbaeus is a Hebrew word that means "heart child." This is a little tender, heart, mamma's boy, hanging around Simon the Zealot. Zealots make great preachers and so do tender-hearted, compassionate, gentle, sweet-spirited, mammas' boys.
We have one incident with this Judas Thaddaeus Lebbaeus in John 14:22. He is called "Judas, not Iscariot." How would you like to be known all your life by who you're not? I'm sure he was pretty commonly saying, "I'm Judas, not Iscariot." He's..."Judas, not Iscariot, said to Jesus, 'Lord, what then has happened that You are going to disclose Yourself to us and not to the world?'" This supports the idea this is a very tender-hearted man. He doesn't say anything brash or bold or confident. He doesn't confront the Lord and rebuke him like Peter. There's just a gentleness and a meekness and a kind of tenderness in the question. He just says, "What happened that we know You, but the rest of the world doesn't know You? What happened?"
There's a gentleness there. I mean, "We all kind of followed with great expectation, You are the Savior of the world, the holy One of God, You come down to set your Kingdom up and You're preaching the good news of forgiveness and salvation and this is good news for the world and we know that. And we know that and we know...but nobody knows that. So what's happened that You're going to disclose Yourself to us and not to the world?"
This is a pious, believing disciple. This is a man who loves his Lord and this is a man who feels the power of salvation in his life and he's full of the hope for the world and he in his typical tender-hearted, heart- child, mamma's-boy kind of way he just says..."What happened? You're the King of the world but the world doesn't know that. You're the Savior of the world, the world doesn't know that. Why can we understand and we can see but nobody else can see? How are You going to save the world if they don't know You? Surely this is the time. Don't You think maybe this is a good time to make Yourself known to everybody?" Sort of like, "Could you go for it now?"
I think there's still that hope that the Kingdom is going to come. Jesus' answer is so marvelous, and I will always be grateful to JTL, we'll call him, for asking this great question because of the answer. "Jesus answered and said to him," and the answer is as tender as the question. "If anyone loves Me, he'll keep My Word, My Father will love him, we will come to him, make our abode with him." JTL, He says, "Look, you don't have to worry about it, you don't have to worry about it. The Kingdom can't be known to anybody who doesn't love Me. But when somebody loves Me and keeps My Word, My Father will love him and we will come to him and the Kingdom will come to the heart of that person."
His question was still sort of in the political realm, sort of in the material realm. How come You haven't taken over the world yet? "I'm not going to take over the world externally, I'm going to take over hearts, one at a time. And if anybody loves Me, he'll keep My Word. And if he keeps My Word, My Father will come to him and together we'll set up the Kingdom in his heart." What an answer.
Verse 24 gives the other side. "He who doesn't love Me doesn't keep My Words and the Word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me." It's just the question of loving Me. Jesus' answer is marvelous. We can be everlastingly grateful to Thaddaeus Judas for eliciting the response. It's not an obscure answer, it's a profound direct answer. "I can only reveal Myself to a loving, obedient, believing heart."
It's the same today, isn't it? People say, "Well, I don't..I don't understand the gospel, I don't understand about Christ, I'm not interested in that." Well, it's not so much more information they need, there is certainly a minimum amount of information you need. It's a question of loving Him which is tantamount to believing in Him, trusting in Him as Lord and Savior. The only eyes it will ever see and the only ears it will ever hear are those composed of loving obedience. Paul said, "If our gospel is veiled, it's veiled to them that are perishing cause the god of this world has blinded their minds and they can't see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ." That's the problem. They must come to see the reality of Christ and to love Him. And if they're unwilling to do that, there will be no Kingdom of God in their heart. What a great answer JTL got.
By the way, there's some traditional history that says he became known for healing many people of many diseases in his apostolic ministry and preaching. And there's some history that records that he healed a man named Adgar, who was a king of Syria as he was preaching, healing. This man who was healed by Judas son of James became such a devout Christian that his apostate nephew captured Judas son of James, Thaddaeus, Lebbaeus, and killed him, murdered him for the gospel. So he may have been a mamma's boy but he had a heart of courage. Don't ever underestimate tender people. Throughout history there is a symbol identified with him as an apostle. Sometimes when you see an old historical records, Judas son of James, there's a symbol associated with his name and it is a huge club, like a baseball bat. That was what they used to kill him.
So what kind of people does the Lord use? Just about every kind you can imagine and called these men to the highest calling out of their obscurity. And, folks, what's encouraging about that is that this is us, isn't it? This is who we are. The Lord can use us in a mighty way and then He gets all the glory because we can't be the explanation for any spiritual success.
