Ordinary 31

The Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

Wisdom 11:22 – 12:2; Psalm 145; 2Thessolonians 1:11- – 2:2; Luke 19:1-10

Human beings have always looked up into the night sky. Its beauty, vast expanse and twinkling lights has always fascinated us. Comets, eclipses and unusual sightings have caused fear as we have wondered what omens are being foreshadowed.  But to the skies we look. What wonders the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes have offered us as they look deeper and deeper into space revealing the immensity of this grand act of God’s creativity.

Did you know that our universe has been continually expanding at ever greater rates since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago? Creation is not a past event but an on-going act that has not been completed by God. New stars and planets are being birthed while the light of dead planets and stars may as yet not reached our planet for us to see; so limitless is this act of creation.

The vast distances measured in light-years is incomprehensible to me. To go from one end of our galaxy to the other you would have to travel over 100,000 years at the speed of light. A light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. You would have to travel 6 trillion miles times 100,000 earth years!

“Before God the whole universe is as a grain from a balance or a drop of morning dew upon the earth.” As the Hubble and Webb telescopes open us to wonder and beauty they simultaneously shrink us as Alice in Wonderland and humble us before the magnitude of creation and our God. We keep getting smaller and smaller as we reflect upon ourselves in our own eco-system, revolving around our star, within our Milky Way Galaxy, in an ever expanding universe. I am reminded of the question posed by the Psalmist, “What is the human race that you are mindful of us, the human being that you care for us?” [Psalm 8:5] How more profound that question is if we truly are the only sentient and soul-filled beings in this ever expanding universe: a grain from a balance; a drop of morning dew.

Compared with God, everything created is infinitesimally small. What the unseen atom is to us; we are to the eternal God.

So why then does our God care about the likes of a Zacchaeus? Why does Jesus invite himself to his house for dinner? The answer: “…you [God] love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made…”

Loathe is such a dark word, is it not? How many of us dislike and loathe at least some aspect of ourselves? How many people who have or are suffering spousal, sexual and physical abuse feel they deserve the abuse? Isn’t that a loathing? How many of us feel we do not deserve God’s mercy? “God, you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made…”

By the way, what is mercy?

Wisdom describes mercy as God overlooking our sins that we might repent. We have thought that mercy is something we receive after we repent. Mercy is the path toward repentance. Mercy is sparing a person. God warning us, reminding us of our sins that…is it, that we might abandon our ways or that we allow God to lead us away from our sins and gradually bring us back home? Which to do you think it is?

Mercy is caring enough about a person to walk with them. God makes leather clothes for Eve and Adam to protect them in their nakedness. Jesus clearly knowing the past life of the woman of Samaria overlooks her past so she can become an evangelist. God marks Cain the murderer to shield him from being killed. God uses Joseph to feed his jealous and lying brothers and rescue them from famine. God chooses the murderer Moses to lead his people. As with our ancestors in faith, God walks with you and me and overlooks our sins into a new life. This is what Francis is inviting the Church in all of its members to do; walk with others. Walk with couples toward marriage whether they actively practice the faith or not; walk with gay people; with immigrants, the poor, and refugees; walk with women, with people seeking a spiritual life; with victims of abuse and their abusers – walk with people like you and people like me – no judgement, surely no punishment, just walking and listening as Jesus did with the disciples returning home to Emmaus.

Isn‘t that what Jesus does with Zacchaeus? And how much more enjoyable it is to listen to someone than over a glass of wine and a meal? “Zacchaeus…today I must stay at your house.”

Whether short in stature or smaller than an unseen atom, can we reflect on why God cares, walks in mercy with the likes of you and me?