Experiencing God 244 - Zacchaeus

“The whole world before you, O Lord, is like a speck that tips the scales, and like a drop of morning dew that falls on the ground.”  In this reading from Wisdom, if the whole world before the Lord is only a speck, imagine how small we are.  In the total scheme of things, we are very small, our lives very insignificant  but in God’s eyes, very precious. There’s an old Zen expression that is similar to this that I have used at funerals:  “How should we view life in this fleeting world: Like a star at dawn, like a bubble in a stream, like a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, or like a flickering lamp."  In other words, our lives are over in a flash. We need to hear these wisdom teachings and reflect upon them in order to jolt us from our conventional and often conditioned ways of thinking.  The secular culture in which we live has a way of shaping our thoughts and our behavior in ways that are neither true nor reflect reality.  We often end up placing an inordinate importance on things that are really not important at all, and forgetting the things that are the most important. In Thursday’s church prayer this week, a reading from Thessalonians jolted me in this way. It reads: “You know very well that the day of the Lord is coming like a thief in the night.  Just when people are saying, “peace and security”, ruin will fall on them with the suddenness of pains overtaking a woman in labor, and there will be no escape. You are not in the dark that this day should catch you off guard like a thief. We belong, not to darkness but to light, therefore let us not be asleep, but awake.” 

We belong, not to darkness, but to light.  Today’s Gospel from Luke we’ve just heard is a story of a man who was lost in darkness, but who found the light.  It is a story of man, not too much different from ourselves, who was lost.  Lost to what?  Lost from God; lost to community; maybe lost to family and even lost to himself: A man caught in the grips of power, inordinate need for success and financial security that extended far beyond his own physical needs.  Zacchaeus, we are told, was a chief tax collector, and was very rich.  His riches were attained by appropriating taxes from those who were poor or just getting by, and profiting a great deal from it himself.  Luke tells us that he was short in stature, but it is very obvious he is also short in moral attributes as well.  His own Jewish name, Zacchaeus, meant “Righteous One”, but there is little that is righteous about him at this point. And as you can well imagine, he was not well liked and respected by his town folks. But when he heard that Jesus was among the many travelling through Jericho, making that 18 mile journey to Jerusalem, he became very interested in seeing Him. Zacchaeus would probably have heard about Jesus from his town folks, and let’s face it, most of what he would have heard would be in direct conflict with his own behavior and lifestyle.  Yet his desire to see him, this mysterious itinerate preacher, out-weighed the jeers, laughter and cat calls he received from the crowds as he the climbed that sycamore trees in the public square.  So he humbled himself in order to see, to make eye contact with that one person who was so different from himself. Zacchaeus was looking for Jesus, but as it turned out, it appears that Jesus was also looking for Zacchaeus. 

And it was this eye contact they made, and the greeting and invitation that followed that jolted Zacchaeus from his conditioned ways of thinking, his self-centered way behaving to see the light of reality, the light of truth. 
He did not hear: “What are you doing Zacchaeus; You look and are acting like such a fool.”  Nor: “You scoundrel Zacchaeus, how dare your cheat people like you do.  But what he heard was Jesus calling him by name: “Zacchaeus, hurry down from there, for I must stay at your house today”.
There’s a powerful line in the first letter of John chapter 4 which says: “We love because God first loved us.”   “We love because God first loved us”. This particular line of scripture has particular significance for me because it wasn’t until I had personally encountered Christ, and experienced His love for me, even though unworthy, that I was able to begin let go of much of my own conditioned behavior that kept me a prisoner, mainly a prisoner to myself.  The quickest and most powerful way of breaking the grips of our own self-centeredness, our own distorted way of seeing things, is through an experiential knowing that we are loved by God.  This correspondingly creates an experiential knowing that we are loved by others and that, we are in fact, loving persons ourselves. 
I don’t think Zacchaeus had much experience of this being loved by God or, very likely, by anyone else.  He had probably grown accustomed to the belief that if you don’t look after yourself, then nobody else will: So first and foremost, look after yourself.  Except, as we all know, just looking after yourself is a very lonely and very empty place. 
The human heart is not designed for the purpose of looking solely after yourself.  If this is your foremost preoccupation, then most likely you will be left a deep sense of emptiness, a life without purpose.   So something or someone is needed to break that false self-centered illusion of life that sticks to us so easily. For Zacchaeus, that someone is Jesus.   I believe you will all agree that it is not possible to have a true encounter with Jesus without being changed by it.  This encounter has a way of restructuring our priorities, and putting them in line with Gospel values.  This is not only true for Zacchaeus, as he was to find out, but it is also true for us today.  Through his own encounter with Jesus, Zacchaeus discovered within himself something more precious than the way of life he had adopted and wealth he had accumulated. 
Many of you may have read in Tuesday’s Chronicle Herald the story about the Dunsworth couple from the South end of Halifax who had their own faith encounter some 22 years ago. I believe they are now living in Nicaragua.   The husband writes: “Back in ‘97 when I was a cultural Catholic who identified with my religion, but not actually going to church, I used to think the notion of a spiritual ah-ha moment a lot of hooey.  That is, until I had one.   We had a comfortable life, a house in the south end, members of the Waeg, good public schools for our 4 children.  I had a decent but unfulfilling legal practice.  Things begin to happen when I attended a Halifax dinner for the Canadian Cancer Society where I met a group who had just come back from Guatemala on a project of building homes for Habitat for Humanity, and were now going to Nicaragua on a similar mission. I joined them.   The poverty I saw there caused me to question my whole life course and values. 
More than that, I felt like I was being called by some higher entity to do something, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what.” 
After the Guatemala trip, the Dunsworths continued the same charitable work in Costa Rica and Belize, and then Argentina where they ended up staying for four and one-half years.
In 2005, they moved to Nicaragua where they started their own project relating to a student work development program. This program continues today and currently has 74 students ranging from ages 6 to 16 years funded mainly through US and Canadian sources.  
We are all inspired by these stories of conversion and change.  We are inspired by the fact that the courage to undertake such change does not come from ourselves, but from the faith we possess and share.  As Catholic Christians, like Zacchaeus, we discover that the instrument of change is found in the person of Christ.  Our Gospel ends with the teaching: “For the Son of Man came, (not to judge) but to seek out and to save those who are lost.”