Today’s readings: Wisdom 11,22 - 12,2; Thessalonians 1,11 - 2,2; Luke 19, 1-10.
St Luke constantly tells stories of people who are lost, whom Jesus restores to life, and who eventually accept the good news of liberation. These stories are normally about unidentified people. But here, finally, we have someone called by name: Zacchaeus, whom Jesus encounters in his house.
The good thing that transpires mostly from this story is that what actually redeems us is not our faith in God, but God’s faith in us. This shows mostly in the way Jesus reaches out to make everyone possibly rise and find salvation. Like Zacchaeus and with him, it is in our houses that we are called to experience salvation concretely.
The Second Vatican Council, in re-elaborating the Church’s relationship to the modern world, spoke of dialogical relations in which giving and receiving is possible in both directions. The Church was never meant to be sectarian, and though on one hand, a bland tolerance verging on weakness may not be the ideal, on the other hand, fundamentalisms that cut out dialogue are not acceptable.
As the gospel constantly suggests, dialogical practice should be in the nature of the Church, which is called to invent new ways how to bring the good news to the world. This is the caritas that should animate the Church’s being for people. When this understanding of caritas is forgotten and not practised, the Church ceases to be a Church and is set to lose sight of what it stands for.
Cultivating more charitable relationships with those outside the ‘Church’ was a problem at the time of Jesus as it still is in our times, though in different measures. The attitude of the older son in the parable of the prodigal son as narrated by St Luke stands for a general attitude that marks all those who, from time to time, may feel irritated by God’s mercy and by His ways, which are often not quite logical and acceptable to our minds.
It was a prevailing attitude in the gospels whenever Jesus reached out to outsiders. It still prevails today, as for example, happened recently when Pope Francis labelled proselytism as ‘solemn nonsense’. There were factions within Catholicism that were irritated, particularly among those who have been trying to reassert a strong sense of Catholic identity against forces they believe want to play it down.
In the first reading from the Book of Wisdom, we read today that God’s greatness is in His being so merciful. It is what in theology we call God’s universal will to save one and all, and to restore in us the lost image of our humaneness. God’s mercy is not simply about forgiving sins. He gives us wholeness and He fills our emptiness.
The lesson coming from the Zacchaeus narrative is not simply a moral one. It is not about a Zacchaeus being forgiven his sins. It is about redemption at its fullness, it is not about our love that reaches out to God, but about God’s own love that reaches out to us and touches the heart with its healing power.
This is what the Zacchaeus story narrates to us in times when, in our churches, we still keep walls of division and fuel prejudice against people we deem unredeemable. The encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus is of extraordinary richness for the culture we live in. Zacchaeus is typical of so many victims of deep misconceptions about religion and God’s infinite love.
Zacchaeus was held as a public sinner, yet Jesus could see through his heart and discern his deepest desires. It is in our deepest desires that Jesus connects with us and that we can connect with Him.
Plato held that what we desire is that which is true and beautiful. For him, education was the disciplining of desire. Augustine, from a Christian perspective, advocates a similar disciplining which, as he adds, orientates the soul towards a greater and greater attunement with God through love.
God’s encounter with us always occurs in the depths of our hearts where our deepest desires lie and where we can truly connect with ourselves and with the God of love.