Thirty First Sunday in Ordinary Time

Link to Mass Readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/103110.shtml

There are all kinds of faith between people and God. Some people are all in their heads with God, worshipping Him out of a love for the theology and idea of Grace. Some people have a very personal relationship with God, because He saved them from their dark place. Others love God as a friend who walks with them always, hand in hand fingers entwined. All of these are ok, we all see God through different prisms. But I bring it up because while there is variety between believers, there is also variety in how God presents Himself to us. Sometimes we read about Him as the just judge, and other times the loving shepherd. Sometimes He is the God of smiting, and other times He is the God of forgiveness. So much of a minister or theologians’ time is taken up trying to reconcile these different aspects of God.

To an extent, they cannot be reconciled. God is both the just judge and the merciful forgiver. There is a Heaven and a Hell, whatever that means. The tension between salvation and damnation is the genesis of the phrase “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

Today we read about the love of God. Though He can do all things, He has mercy on us because of His total power. The passage from Wisdom is beautiful because it brings the love of God, which extends to infinity, to us small, sinful people. This is why people fall in love with God, because of the mystery behind why a God would love us like this.

Zacchaeus is the man who falls in love with God because he is curious. Is there really a god who loves us so extravagantly? Is there really a god who loves me like that? My favorite part about the story of Zacchaeus is how ridiculous it is. Here is a man, who is wealthy and important, who perhaps out of pride does not order the crowd to part so he can see Jesus, but instead climbs a tree too see him; in effect standing out more in the tree than he would ordering the crowd to part. I think this is where God finds us so often, in those moments where we cannot help but search for Jesus in spite of our pride, and so become fools for Christ.

We cannot find Christ without being fools. Only fools believe in proof of what is hoped for, and evidence of things unseen. Only fools could believe an all powerful God loves us despite everything. Only we would let ourselves be weak, and love someone who lets us know pain and sorrow so closely.

There is a joy to abandonment, to being foolish. How else could we explain a man who gives away half of everything he owns, and repays his injuries four times over? There is such a joy to letting go, to believing something this good really exists, that God has and will come into us.

“For you love all things that are and loath nothing that you have made; for what you hated you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?”

Rejoice and be glad, I will praise your name for ever, my king and my God.