PURSUED, FOUND, LOVED, AND WELCOMED
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
November 03, 2019
On a late
summer morning more the 30 years ago I set out in my car, alone, for a vacation
trip to the West. My first destination was to visit a newly-ordained friend of mine
in Bismarck, N.D.—about a 7 hour drive. This was back in ancient times when the
only form of technological entertainment on a road trip was the radio in the
car. But I wasn’t listening to it that day. If I had been I would have heard my
name.
Some of us
of a particular age may remember the days when, every once in a while, a
broadcaster on WCCO would interrupt a program to say something like, “Mr. John
Doe is asked to call home for an emergency message. Mr. John Doe is asked to
call home for an emergency message.” It was then the only way to put out a
public message if you didn’t know where John Doe was.
It’s
probably just as well that I didn’t hear the announcer paging me that day. I
may well have panicked with alarm or reddened with embarrassment that now the
whole world knew that a guy in his 20’s regularly listened to WCCO radio (as I
still do).
So I drove
all the way to Bismarck, where my friend had to break the news to me that my
elderly grandfather had died suddenly almost immediately after I set out on the
trip that morning. My family had been looking to contact me all day.
And speaking
of embarrassment, I remember getting on the phone from Bismarck that evening
and speaking with my father and actually asking him out loud if he thought I
should come back home for the funeral, because I was pretty far away and it was
the first day of a 10 day vacation and it would be really inconvenient for me.
His silence was all I needed to hear in order to feel terrible, and I was back
on the road to Minneapolis, the next morning.
First I
hadn’t heard that I was being looked for because I wasn’t listening. Then once
I’d been found I was hesitant to respond in the obvious, generous way.
Zacchaeus
has quite a bit to teach me in today’s gospel of Luke. He too was not first
aware that he was being sought out by Jesus that day in Jericho. Zacchaeus worked
awfully hard—embarrassingly hard in fact—just to get a glimpse of Jesus on the
road. In that culture truly important men did not run or climb trees. But after
he had done both of those things, it turns out that he need not have done
either one, because when Jesus passed by he already knew Zacchaeus by name,
without ever having encountered him before. And Jesus not only wanted to engage
him, he wanted to come and stay at his house. Zacchaeus was already known, and
being pursued.
We are not
the ones who have to work and work really hard in order to get God to notice
us. God is already working really hard to get us to notice him. Zacchaeus
teaches me that. What I do have to do is listen. Perhaps you do too.
And the
other thing I need to do is respond to what is asked of me because of that
encounter. Like my return trip from Bismarck, the requested response—the
response of love—is not always convenient, and it causes us to have to consider
the needs of people other than ourselves. And maybe a bit of embarrassment over
my own tendency to selfishness isn’t such a bad thing after all, though it’s
disturbing.
The response
of Zacchaeus in the gospel today is one of radical conversion, although there’s
not any indication that Jesus demanded that from him. It was a moment of
awakening. Zacchaeus announces that from now on he will give half of his
belongings to the poor, and will repay four times over all the money that he
has taken from taxpayers unjustly. That is certainly not convenient for him,
but it is the response of having been pursued and found and loved and welcomed
by Jesus Christ—in the very midst of his sinful life.
Here's the
other thing that Zacchaeus teaches us: every single person on earth is being
pursued and found and loved and welcomed by Jesus Christ in the very midst of
our sinful lives.
There are no
exceptions, as the Book of Wisdom says so beautifully in today’s 1st reading. Any created thing that is here among us is sustained in being because
God wishes that it be so. God does not create things that he hates or wishes to
be destroyed or maltreated or deprived of love. That includes sinners and tax
collectors. It includes refugees and migrants and democrats and republicans. It
includes the rich man named Zacchaeus and the poor man named Lazarus. It
includes Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi. It includes people of every race and
religion and moral character. The day that God doesn’t want them here, they
won’t be here.
We
Christians of apparent good character are not the only people who are being
pursued, found, loved, and welcomed by Jesus Christ every single day that we
live together, that demands from us a response that is certainly not always
convenient or self-serving. Let Zacchaeus continue to teach us about that.
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