Jude

Jude is a single chapter of twenty-five verses, and it is the letter its author did not plan to write. He says so in the third verse. He had intended something about the salvation we share, and then he changed course and urged his readers to contend for the faith instead. Whatever reached him was serious enough to cancel the pleasant letter, and everything after that explains what it was.

He introduces himself as a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, and he claims no title beyond those two. The people he writes to are not named, and neither is their town. What he tells them is that certain men have crept in among them unnoticed, and most of what follows is a description of those men.

The descriptions arrive in layers. There are three old examples in verses 5 to 7, three names in verse 11, five pictures in verses 12 and 13, and a prophecy quoted in verses 14 and 15. Jude expects his readers to know the stories already and gives them only the labels. Then he stops describing, says but you, beloved, and speaks to them directly from verse 17 until the closing lines turn and address God.

One word holds the whole letter together. The readers are kept in Jesus Christ in the first verse, the angels are kept in chains in the sixth, and in verse 21 the readers themselves are told to keep themselves in the love of God. The closing lines hand the work back where it started, to the God who is able to keep them from stumbling.

It finishes without travel plans, greetings or names. A letter that has been almost entirely about danger ends instead on glory, majesty, dominion and authority, and on a God who was there before all time and is there still.