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Wisdom 11:22 – 12: 2 + Psalm 145 + 2 Thess. 1: 11 – 2:2 + Luke 19: 1-10
The book of Wisdom reminds us that God creates everyone and everything out of love. The sacred author points out that God does not despise anything God creates but sustains all Creation by His Love.
If God were to ever stop loving us, we would immediately cease to exist. God’s undying love for us is the source of His mercy toward us, the reason God can overlook our sins in the hope we would turn back to Him.
Or rebuke us little by little that we might turn away from our sins and return to Him. This merciful approach to the sinner is yet another example of how God’s ways are not our ways, because we react very differently to sin and to the sinner. When we are hurt by the sinful actions of another, we tend to react with anger, and even at times with thoughts of vengeance, of how we can get even.
This is not God’s way.
Or we can be just as harsh when it comes to our own sins as well. We are often our own worst judge, jury, and executioner. But God is too busy loving us to be disappointed in us, too busy delighting in us to condemn us, always enticing us back by the allure of His love to His side.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus Christ is the embodiment of God’s merciful love toward sinful humanity. In Christ Jesus, we encounter this faithful, enduring love of God which always seeks us out, calling us by name back to God’s side.
Zacchaeus encounters this love which saves him, this love which finds him where is. Notice that Zacchaeus wants to see Jesus, but it is actually Jesus who sees Zacchaeus, who looks deeply into the heart of this chief tax collector and sees goodness there. Where others see someone who cheats them and takes advantage of them and who has become rich by working for the hated Roman Empire, Jesus sees someone different.
Jesus calls Zacchaeus by name—he knows Zacchaeus on a deeper level than others do. Jesus even changes his plans that day by choosing to invite himself to stay in the house of Zacchaeus. For Jesus sees before him dangling from a limb in a tree a son of Abraham, a man of faith, a member of the house of Israel, chosen by God to be his own.
Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not mention Zacchaeus’ sins. He does not command him to repent. He does not tell him to leave his job. Jesus simply looks at this “lost one” with love, seeing Zacchaeus as he is. Whereas those in the crowd are not at all able to look past Zacchaeus’ failings, which are all too evident to them, Jesus sees deeper.
Held in this glance of love, Zacchaeus changes--- Zacchaeus repents.
His response to the loving mercy of Jesus is to renounce the hold his wealth has had on him, by giving half of what he has to the poor. Repenting---turning away from the things that have led him away from God---this chief tax collector turns back to God by promising to repay generously anyone he has cheated.
Throughout Luke’s Gospel, Jesus the Good Shepherd has sought out and found the lost sinner. He has taught by means of the “Lost and Found” parables that this is what God does, this is God’s very nature, this is who God is!
Before Jesus finishes this last leg of his journey to Jerusalem, where His mission of mercy toward lost humanity will reach its pinnacle with the offering of his life on the cross, Jesus reaches out in loving mercy to find this prodigal son of the Father, Zacchaeus, and bring him home by going to his home.
The holy men and women who the Church celebrates this coming All Saints Day responded daily to the loving mercy of the Lord Jesus. The saints rested each day in the felt knowledge that though they were sinners they were still loved by God.
They recognized that the Savior of the World, Jesus the Christ, kept knocking at the door of their heart and the door of their daily life, inviting himself in. That He, the Lord of Mercy, wanted to stay in their house, to live with them, to nourish them with His saving love, that he might work through them to seek out and save the lost. The Saints show us that a faith-full life is first of all about responding to the everlasting, never-ending, always present love of the Lord.
That repentance is not a beating oneself up for one’s sins, but a constant turning back to the Lord and seeing that he has always been looking upon us with love, that he has even been with us when we are lost in our sins, calling us back to his side.
All saints are sinners, but they are recognized as saints by the Church because knew themselves to be a “beloved” sinner of God. For the saints, each moment was an invitation to respond to the Lord, to begin anew, to invite the Lord Jesus again into their “house.”
Repentance—a turning around to come face to face with the One who is always looking at us with love. Repentance—a constant turning away from those things we mistakenly think will satisfy our hunger for God’s love,
Repentance means recognizing we are looking for love in all the wrong places and then turning back to the One who is the true source of the love for which we thirst. True repentance shines forth in what we do, in how we act toward others who are sinners just like us. Repentance is the last quality of discipleship we learn on this Journey to Jerusalem with Jesus in Luke’s Gospel.
As beloved sinners, we come to the house of the Lord today, invited by Him to His house so he might live with us in our house. We discover that this great Sacrament of Mercy, which we call the Eucharist, is not for the perfect but for sinners coming home to the Lord.
The Eucharist is not for those who have their spiritual homes all tidy and in order, but for those who recognize their aching hunger for the Lord of Mercy and long to be saved by Him. Healed by this sacred Medicine of Mercy, we then see one another through the eyes of Christ and reach out to touch others with the merciful love of Christ.
Fr. Joseph A. Jacobi