Homily for October 31, 2004
 Year C - Cycle II
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time 

“He came down quickly and received him with joy.”  I think we are fortunate today that in the readings from the Book of Wisdom and in the Gospel of Luke, we encounter God the Almighty.  We get to see the interactions between God and this character Zacchaeus.  From this interaction we are led to ponder, “How does God who is infinitely above me come into my life?”  I think to answer this, we need to get to know Zacchaeus a little and then to contemplate God as God and then God's way of interacting with us.

Now Zacchaeus as we read was a tax collector.  He was a chief tax collector, based in the city of Jericho.  Being a tax collector in those days and in Israel was like being a drug dealer in our time.  It was a despicable enterprise.  Zacchaeus would have been the equivalent of a drug lord.  He was despised as a traitor since he worked for the Roman occupier and on top of that he got rich by overcharging taxes on his own people.  So in the eyes of his fellow citizens and no doubt in his own eyes too, he was a sinner--unworthy of the love of God.  Yet to read between the lines, he was not all bad.  His conscience must have been working on him since he was curious about Jesus who had the reputation of being a great prophet and a man of God.  Since he lived not far from the River Jordan, he probably encountered another prophet, John the Baptist, a couple years before.  He may have even come to be baptized by John because Luke tells us in the third chapter, that even tax collectors came to be baptized by John. They said to him, “Teacher what shall we do?” And he answered, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.”  Zacchaeus heard that and even took it to heart.  But now with Jesus' coming, he was about to take the next step. 

As you read, Zacchaeus was a short man.  When I read that I always say that if I were to do the casting, I would cast in the role of Zacchaeus, Danny De Vito.   He was a short man and in the crowd, he would not be able to see Jesus, not that that crowd would let him see him anyway.  So he humbled himself and in an undignified manner, he climbed a tree that happened to be a sycamore tree.  Now, sycamore trees I know because when I was growing up in California, there were a lot of them in my neighborhood.  I loved to climb those trees.  They are kid friendly trees. They have smooth bark, the branches start low to the ground so it was easy to climb up and they have big leaves – it was just a wonderful place to be.  Well, in order to see Jesus, Zacchaeus had to climb that tree.  He didn't have to but he humbled himself to do it.  So Zacchaeus, whom I call a despicable little man, found himself up in a sycamore tree in the humiliating company of all the kids of Jericho – I'm sure there were a bunch of kids up there.  But let's leave Zacchaeus in the tree for now and turn our attention to God.

In Wisdom, we just read, “Before the Lord, the whole universe is a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.”  As enormous, as awesome, as beautiful, as complicated as the universe is in our experience, God is infinitely more.  So how do we relate to this God?  The philosophers and theologians tell us that God is not just another being; God is being itself, the foundation of being.  God is not just the possessor of truth, but truth itself.  God is not just good. God is goodness itself.  So with all this, God is self-sufficient.  Self-sufficient means that God does not need anything else, anything extra – there is nothing that can complete God.

So here we are.  What is our relationship with God? Is it just sort of an afterthought?  Well being self-sufficient, we also say that God is inscrutable, he is incomprehensible, immutable.  That means we can't understand, we can't change him and we don't know what he is going to do. That is the picture we have of what the philosophers and theologians tell us about God.  Then we are sort of standing before God, wondering what we are.  We can even get to the point where we become fearful of God and want to do a bunch of things that people tell us to do to make ourselves ingratiated with God. Or, we have a temptation to just ignore God - to say, God is out there, I'm here, I'm going to do my thing, God does his thing.  That is why some people are agnostic and some people are atheist.  But that picture of God is intellectually attractive in the sense that we know God is truth, permanent, solid and does not change.  God is our rock. We stand on firm ground when we believe in God. 

But this picture of God can also leave us cold and fearful and we can fall into a resentful silence in front of this God.  If you ever have a conversation and that is all we had it might go something like this.  You would say, “For you Lord, how long is a million years?” And the Eternal One would say, “Oh, about a second.”  And then you would ask him, “How much is a million dollars to you?”  And the Creator shrugs it off and says, “Oh, about a penny.” And so, clever people that we are, we would ask, expectantly, “Lord, can you just give me a penny?”  To which the Most High, All Knowing replies, “Oh yeah, in about a second.”  This is a God, you cannot win with, and this is a God who is going to move Zacchaeus out of that tree. But there is more; thank God there is more.

We know that God is creator--we're here.  The universe is here.  We also know that because he created, God is faithful to his creation.  He told us so. He is faithful to his creation.  Now that we are here, God is here with us.  God is not just self-sufficient, but God is humble.  He is humble enough to be present in his creation, to be present to us.  So, we know that God, in having made the universe, is forever tied to us – it is God's decision to be faithful to us.  He is committed to it in love.  And that is the way that we can know what God wants of us.  We know how God is going to act towards us – it will always be in love.  And we know that because God enters into covenant with us – he has revealed that to us.  So, God is not inscrutable to us.  Because of his faithfulness we therefore, have nothing to fear from God. 

Let us go back to creation, because the creative act is the most important thing for us in our relationship with God.  It's not just an act which happened at the beginning of time and that was it and then creation stopped.  God is always creating and that is crucial.  He is always immersed in creation – continually bringing something new into being.  And most importantly, this applies to us in our relationship to God.  Thomas Martin, that great mystic, said, “There is within each of us a deep place where we, ourselves, are here and now being created by God.”  We are still being created by God - our souls.  This is noted in our Wisdom passage and so we can paraphrase that passage as: you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you are making.  You spare all things because they are yours, oh Lord and lover of souls.

Let us return to Zacchaeus and the sycamore tree.  For him, when Jesus looked up and said, I'm going to be at your house, that was a strike for Zacchaeus.  Jesus called him by name.  And that recreated in Zacchaeus a new heart.  He opened himself up to a Creator God in the deep recess of his soul and something new was made – Zacchaeus was forever changed.  He had accepted the judgment of himself and others that he was unworthy of love.  So he needed a new creation.  When he encountered God, he encountered a God who delights in created good from nothingness. And so God said to him, you are not unworthy of love because I have sought you in your very unworthiness.  And that's the humility of God – wherever we are, whatever state we are in, God is with us there--creating something new out of us.  The joy of Zacchaeus is the joy of new life.  It is the joy of salvation from our faithful Creator God.  And we too experience that joy as we surrender to God, who pursues and creates us. 

May God bless us all.