31st Sunday of Ordinary Time (November 2-3, 2013)
James Bernauer, S.J.
Today’s readings remind us of the essential Christian message: God’s love for us,
God’s continuing call to us. Jesus’s mission to seek and to save the lost. Zaccheus,
but also you and me. As simple as today’s Gospel story is, however, I found it full of
wonders as I thought about what I might say today. First of all, why did Zaccheus
want to see Jesus? Because he had become a celebrity in the Land of Israel?
Perhaps that is all there is to it. But isn’t the chief tax collector a pretty hardened
figure? And he would have been taking a risk in showing up at such a public event
with so many people present from whom he had been collecting taxes and becoming
wealthy in the process. And then Zaccheus goes through this dramatic conversion,
with Jesus having said next to nothing to him. Why the conversion? It seems that
there is more than celebrity watching involved for Zaccheus. But what? Wasn’t it
that his life was waiting for something special to happen? Zaccheus is similar to the
museum visitor who goes in the hope that some painting will give him or her a new
vision. Like that visitor, Zaccheus was probably always going out to discover what
assorted commotions in the streets were all about. But seeing Jesus was not just one
spectacle among others—it was decisive for him. Why was that? Wasn’t it possibly
because he never expected that Jesus would notice him, that Jesus would not be
satisfied with being observed but that he would want an encounter with the one
who was gazing. Jesus says: “I must stay at your home. “ That Zaccheus never
expected. The incident reminded me of an image from Henry James, when an
insight comes so unexpectedly that it may be compared to the sudden encounter
with a beast as one walks through the jungle. It jumps out and grabs one by the
throat. Doesn’t his encounter with Jesus do exactly that to Zaccheus? And perhaps
at times to us as well.
But there was an obstacle: the Gospel says that he was short of stature. And so he
had to climb a tree to get a view of Jesus. Well no matter what our physical size we
are all short of stature when it comes to seeing Jesus; there are always obstacles
blocking our view. I think of how his Jewishness has so often been airbrushed out of
our pictures of him. And so we frequently miss that sense of Jesus in the debates
that were , that are, so much a part of Jewish culture: just recall the incident when
Jesus is asked about which is the greatest of the commandments among these
hundreds that we are told to observe and Jesus simply says love of God and love of
neighbor. What is really interesting for me in that episode, however, is that the
scribe responds and says “well said, Jesus.” It is similar to that beast in the jungle
image: a good person is waiting for something decisive to happen in his or her life,
to say what is essential, and Jesus makes it happen.
You and I are in a situation similar to Zaccheus and that scribe. We have heard all
sorts of stories about Jesus and we want to see him. But there are obstacles. Maybe
too many regulations blocking our view? Perhaps a smallness within us that makes
it difficult for us to gaze beyond ourselves, let alone to see above the crowd. Have
we too often been looking for an official portrait of Jesus, a frozen, dead Jesus. While
he can only be found among the living. But that consoling thought creates real
difficulties for us as well because there are so many places he appears: As Hopkins
writes, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not
his, To the Father through the features in men’s faces. “ But some of those features
in which Jesus may be encountered seem far from lovely: hunger, thirst,
strangeness, nakededness. But these are not opposites, the beautiful versus the
ugly. No they are the fullness of life, that fullness of life for which we have so
frequently prayed and which we have been promised. The miseries of the world,
even of our personal worlds can be overwhelming at times but our faith is always
disclosing the presence of Jesus, a decisive vision that strengthens us not to turn
from the sorrows in our world but to experience love and grace through them. Still
we need to see that face, to feel that presence for that to happen and, like Zaccheus,
we need to clear the obstacles blocking our view. But our Christian confidence is
that that can be done, that Jesus may be seen, in the brightest of days as well as in
the darkest of nights. Because Jesus does not want us to just look at him. He wants
us to live with him.
You know there is a short story that speculates about the very last person who
saw Jesus alive. What was it like for that person? How faithful is his recollection?
But wait! The last person who saw Jesus alive? There is no such person, there will
never be such a person. Some final view of Jesus alive?--That will never happen.
Never! Thanks be to God.