Although it may not seem like it on the surface, today's readings give us an invitation to put God's care for us into perspective and to let ourselves get lost in wonder at his graciousness to us. None of us is so small that God doesn't care for us! If we would only strive to see him, he will not fail to notice us!
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Homily:
31st Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle C
My brothers and sisters, today our readings invite us, I
think, to consider the eternal nature of God.
Now, because we are creatures who exist in time, it’s hard for us to
consider what a timeless existence might look like, but that is exactly what
God is and so for us to be able to know him, we must at least strive to
comprehend it. To try and put this into
perspective for us, I’ll share with you what I consider the best description of
eternity that I’ve heard so far.
Imagine that you are standing on a beach in front of an
ocean. Then imagine that you pick up one
grain of sand and start walking. Your
task is to carry that grain of sand from the beach to the top of Mount Everest
and when you get there, to leave that grain of sand at its peak. Then your task is to return to that beach,
pick up another grain of sand, and place it, along with the other, at the peak
of Mount Everest. You task, in fact is
to do that with every grain of sand on earth: from every beach, every ocean
bed, and every sand box in the world; one by one from wherever you find it to
the top of Mount Everest. Now imagine
that every step that you take takes ten thousand years to make. And so here you are, taking every grain of
sand on the earth and moving it, ten thousand years each step, to the top of
Mount Everest. And when you’re
finished—billions of years later—eternity will have just begun.
In our first reading today from the Book of Wisdom, we read
that “Before the LORD the whole universe is a grain from a balance or a drop of
morning dew come down upon the earth.”
In other words, just as billions of years are as but one moment in
eternity, so is the whole universe—vast and incomprehensible in size—but as an
insignificant amount of weight in a balance or an unnoticeable drop of moisture
on the earth. Yet, it goes on to say,
nothing that happens in this universe—no grain falling from a balance or drop
of dew falling to the earth—goes unnoticed by God. Still more, it says that God not only notices
every little thing, but that he also looks upon all of it with mercy, which
reveals to us something important about God and our relationship to him.
Sometimes, I think, we can separate God who created the
universe from God who rules it. When we
do this, God who created the universe looked upon everything and saw that it
was “very good”, but God who rules it does so like some beleaguered manager
trying to make something positive out of a mess and who would rather scrap it
all and start over than try to fix it. Fortunately
for us, this latter description of God is a distortion of the truth; because
God who created the universe (and all that is in it) out of love is also God
who rules the universe (and all that is in it) in love. And since God is Love, then mercy must be the
rule with which God rules.
Man (i.e. the human person), by God’s special design and
providence, was the only creature that God had made for himself. All of the rest of creation was made to serve
man, but man was made for no one else but God to be the one creature destined
for an intimate, personal relationship with him. So strong is God’s desire for this in
creating man that, even when man sinned, God did not abandon man to death, but
rather he set into motion the plan to redeem him so that man might once again
achieve his destiny. As the words from
the Book of Wisdom remind us: “But you have mercy on all, because you can do
all things; and you overlook people’s sins that they may repent. For you love all things that are and loathe
nothing that you have made…”
To show us this most perfectly, God sent his Only Son,
Jesus, to reveal to us that he indeed had not forgotten us among the vastness
of the universe; and in our Gospel reading today, we see a bit of a microcosm
of this reality being played out.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus has come to Jericho, a town deep
in a valley between the river Jordan and Jerusalem. It was kind of a seedy town where crime was
rampant and so most travelers just passed through, hoping to make it through
without getting robbed. Nonetheless, Jesus,
the Son of God, comes to this town, the lowest place within the Promised Land: which
is nothing less than an image of God’s lowering himself to come among us. Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector (which,
by the way, also made him the chief of those despised by the people) and he was
very short. He wanted to get a glimpse
of Jesus, but he couldn’t because he felt lost among the crowd. And so he climbed a tree just hoping to see
this Jesus that everyone was talking about.
How surprised he must have been, then, when Jesus noticed him, called
him by name, and then invited himself to his house for dinner!
Zacchaeus felt small and insignificant in the midst of the
mass of creation that surrounded him.
Yet, when he made an effort just to see Jesus—Emmanuel, God who is with us—Jesus not only noticed him, but he
called out to him and wanted to be known personally by him.
Then the people accuse Zacchaeus before the LORD, saying that
“[Jesus] has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.” What an image of judgment day this is, isn’t
it? Zacchaeus stands before the Son of
God and is accused of his sins.
Confident in God’s mercy, however, he stands before him and says, in
effect, “I stand ready to receive your just judgment. To demonstrate this, I promise before
anything else, to give half my possessions to the poor; and if you should find
that I have extorted anything from anyone, I promise I shall repay that one
four times over.” And for this act of
faith in the one who judges justly, Zacchaeus receives salvation from the one
who alone could give it.
My brothers and sisters, this is the core of the Christian
message! That we, who are seemingly
small and insignificant in respect to the vast universe, are nonetheless looked
upon with mercy and love by our creator who made us for himself; so much so
that he became one of us by sending us his Son to save us and to show us the
way back to himself. And if we are
rebuked a little—that is, if we suffer some in this world—it is not because the
God who rules the universe is some mean-spirited, vengeful God who wants to
punish us, but rather, as the author of the Book of Wisdom states, it is “to
remind us of our sins so that we may abandon our wickedness and believe in
him”, Jesus, our Lord, who alone can save us!
And so, my brothers and sisters, let us not be fooled into
believing the lie that the all-powerful God, the God who created us and all of
the universe, wants nothing to do with us, but lies in wait to punish us for
our sins. Rather, let us, like
Zacchaeus, rush to be seen by him, trusting that God’s justice is always
tempered by mercy for those who hide nothing from him: for the God of all the
universe—the God of eternity—will not fail to notice us; and salvation, the
salvation won for us through Jesus, will today be ours.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – November 2nd & 3rd, 2013
