What is the hardest thing to understand about this faith we try to follow? You might say that maybe it’s the Trinity, after all, that is sometimes described as a mystery. Sometimes, the more it’s explained to you, the worse it gets, so I suspect that would be a typically Catholic answer to this question. But I think maybe the thing that most of us struggle with the most to believe, maybe without realizing it, is what we hear in that first reading from the book of Wisdom. It’s that God loves everything God has created. That means every single individual thing, including you as an individual, and not only you, but everyone around you, and yes, it also means including all the people you can’t imagine God loving and embracing. God doesn’t loathe anyone. Loathing is human behavior, not God’s. If a person exists, God wants that person. Also, if it exists, God is still trying to interact with that person and in a very real sense is still creating that person. All God can do, just because of the nature of who God is, all God can do is be constantly eager and ready for any one of us to be even momentarily available, ready to be embraced and maybe changed into what God now intends for us.
I think there is a reason that is hard to believe. We all have reasons to feel that we are not loved as we are, that we are therefore not particularly important to God, or that what God might be expecting of us isn’t possible for us, we’re not the kind of material God is looking for. And so we go on with life as it is, with low expectations for what God wants to do, and low expectations for God keeping any promises.
There’s a reason that today’s first reading about God valuing every created thing was chosen to fit with today’s gospel about Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector who turns his life upside down. We know that tax collectors in Israel were deeply compromised people. The Romans didn’t have an internal revenue service, they ran their global empire by hiring local people to collect the taxes as their agents, and they basically all did this work on commission, and if they could somehow get people to pay more, they got to keep it. It was a good living, and I think it was possible for people to work in it and think they were lucky, and many of them may not have even noticed that they were exploiting the powerless especially, and that they were part of a system that ultimately did not have much interest in protecting Jews. In fact just a few years later Zacchaeus’ employer the Romans would wreak complete destruction on all these Jewish taxpayers.
So Zacchaeus is a deeply flawed and widely disliked person. And yet, this man whose life is a moral mess takes a step — literally. Something in him makes him want to see Jesus in person, up close. And it turns out that all God was waiting for was that one step, and suddenly God shows up at Zacchaeus’s house, and at that point, Zacchaeus has been recreated. Amazingly, he’s still a tax collector, but he’s like no tax collector anyone has ever seen before.
And here’s the great news here, is that the change God brings actually brings with it a sense of happiness and release. This is a reading filled with joy. I think a lot of people fear that learning what God wants from us is always going to involve something painful for us to do, since obviously God will want something that sounds impossible. And yet, this deeply flawed man seems to have felt liberated by this sudden change. He has returned from the land of the lost. He has a new way of looking at the world, he has a new way of looking at the poor and how to interact with them, he knows what to do next without Jesus even having to tell him, he’s a little less rich than he was before, but probably still not badly off. He reached out to God for one moment, let down his guard. And Jesus, who came for the lost, found him.
There used to be that old saying that people put on posters, God isn’t finished with me yet. A little too cutesy, but it does get at a truth, that if we allow it, we are never done being changed into what God now wants of us. The question is that phrase: if we allow it, if we really want this. Because it’s perfectly possible to avoid the God who is pursuing us. This process requires something from us, it requires some kind of desire to move on, a curiosity to at least get up on the lower branch of a sycamore tree, a moment to ask in prayer and honesty for what we most need, or even a moment in prayer to tell God that we don’t know what we most need, but that something is missing, and God can tell us what it might be. Anyone can return from the land of the lost. It does takes a certain amount of courage. And yet being lost and then found apparently feels great once it’s done. Climb one branch even if it’s only out of curiosity, one moment where you desire to see Jesus closer to you, and let him find you.