31st Sunday Year C - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2016

I love today’s first reading. It sums up so well Israel’s insights into just what God was like. Those insights had been growing over the fifteen centuries that God had been working on and with the people of Israel, leading them from their original paganism to what we heard today. “You are merciful to all… and overlook people’s sins. You love all that exists… You spare all things because all things are yours, Lord, lover of life”. The Responsorial Psalm affirmed much the same thing. God “is kind and full of compassion, slow to anger, abounding in love… compassionate to all … creatures”. It is beautiful. But it was hard for the people to learn, just as it is hard for us. So many of them, so many of us, still expect God to be punish brutally those who sin.

We have less excuse than they had, because, in his life and his deeds, Jesus revealed more of the mystery of God. Jesus showed us a God who is essentially three persons relating to each other in love, giving themselves totally and trustfully to each other, and joyfully receiving each other’s love. God does not simply sometimes love and sometimes punish when necessary, but can only love because God is essentially and only Trinity, three persons consciously, continually, totally united and rejoicing in mutual love.

Creation is the overflowing of their loving. St Paul once quoted a contemporary poet, “In God we live, and move, and have our being”. They got it. The catch is we find it so hard to realize, so hard to go with the flow. We find it so hard to see and to respond to the incredible dignity and destiny of every person, of every creature. That is the mystery of sin, which no way interrupts, however, God still loving us. Rather sin is the sad experience of our refusing, for a whole variety of reasons, to love God, or ourselves or each other. We seem to be inherently critical, judgmental and hostile to each other – not just to our obvious enemies, but even within the one household.

Look at the people in today’s incident. There was Zacchaeus, apparently the area manager for taxation for the southern end of the West Bank of the Jordan. There was a group of Jericho citizens. Presumably there were the disciples. And then there was Jesus. Tax collectors were hostile to people generally, and extorted them mercilessly, as far as they could. Not surprisingly, the general population hated them, seeing them all as sinners and so to be excluded from the normal social and business interactions in town. And there were tensions within the group of disciples. Twenty centuries later, and thousands of kilometers distant from Israel, do we react to each other much differently? Just look at the TV News tonight – endless hostility, endless judgment.

And Jesus was there – no judgment, no hostility, but a sense of responsibility that simply expressed his love for all of them. There was no word of criticism for any of them; but his response to the situation did shock them all. He offered friendship publicly to Zacchaeus. It surprised Zacchaeus. It unsettled the citizens. And God knows what it did to the disciples. Jesus challenged all of them, without a breath of threat. Zacchaeus responded. Did the citizens think twice, allowing themselves to be surprised – and pleasantly surprised at that? Let’s hope that the disciples pondered. Would Jesus still have dined with Zacchaeus if Zacchaeus had not responded as he did?

What do you think Jesus meant when he observed, “Today salvation has come to this house”? Is salvation finding the freedom to change? Is it withholding judgment, being inclusive even of sinners, moving from hostility to friendship? Is it stepping into the free flow of God’s energetic, joy-filled love for all? What might salvation feel like – for us, in today’s world? And can we experience it now, even if most others choose not to change?