Feast day: December 27
St. John the Apostle
The 'beloved disciple' who leaned on Christ's chest at the Last Supper, stood at the cross, received Mary as his mother, and wrote the most soaring of the Gospels.
John, the son of Zebedee and younger brother of James, was a Galilean fisherman called by Jesus at the lakeside, and he became the disciple closest to the Lord's heart — the one the Gospel calls 'the disciple whom Jesus loved.' With Peter and James he formed the inner three who alone witnessed the Transfiguration and the Agony in the Garden, and at the Last Supper he reclined next to Jesus and leaned upon his breast.
He was faithful to the end. When the other apostles fled, John alone stood at the foot of the Cross with the Mother of Jesus, and from the Cross the dying Christ gave Mary into his care: 'Behold your mother.' On Easter morning, hearing that the tomb was empty, he outran Peter to it, looked in, and believed.
After Pentecost he was, with Peter, a pillar of the Church in Jerusalem, and the tradition of the early Church places his later years at Ephesus, guiding the communities of Asia Minor into great old age. To him are attributed the fourth Gospel — soaring and contemplative, the 'spiritual Gospel' that begins 'In the beginning was the Word' — three epistles, and the Book of Revelation, written, it is said, in exile on the island of Patmos.
By tradition he was the only apostle not to die a martyr, surviving even an attempt to kill him, and living to such an age that, the story goes, when he could no longer preach at length he would simply repeat, 'Little children, love one another.' His symbol is the eagle, for the heights to which his Gospel soars, and he is a patron of theologians and writers.
The only apostle who didn't die a martyr — and the only one at the foot of the cross. In old age his whole sermon became one line: 'Little children, love one another.'
“Little children, love one another.”
— St. John the Apostle
Image: Peter Paul Rubens (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08492a.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.