Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
What are the reasons we invite people over to our house? Maybe it’s a birthday party, and we want to celebrate the anniversary of our birth with our friends; maybe it’s a school project that has to get done; maybe it’s to watch movies with our friends or a significant other; maybe it’s to watch the big game. No matter what the reason, we invite people over to share friendship and fellowship; we want to enjoy one another’s company; we want to celebrate a holiday or Holy Day with family. Inviting someone over to our house is a way of expression communion with them, even if it’s on a very basic level.
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| According to tradition, the tree that Zacchaeus climbed to see Jesus |
In our Gospel today, though, Zacchaeus does not invite Jesus into his home. Rather, Jesus invites Himself in. What is interesting is that Jesus did not originally intend to visit Zacchaeus. St. Luke relates that Jesus, “intended to pass through the town” where Zacchaeus was. But, passing through Jericho, Jesus must have felt the intense love, a love so strong that it caused him to climb the tallest tree on the roadway, so that Zacchaeus’ lack of height would not impede him from getting to see this great man. And so Jesus approaches Zacchaeus in that tree and says, “‘Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.’”
Jesus wishes to be in communion with Zacchaeus. He wishes to enjoy friendship and fellowship with his tax-collecting host. Jesus loves Zacchaeus with the love of God, the love of a caring Father, and wishes simply to spend time with one whom others certainly would have shunned from their homes, since he worked for the foreign, idolatrous, Roman government.
This recounting of what happened to Zacchaeus is not meant to make us simply say, “Wow! That was really nice of Jesus. Look how welcoming He was to the outcasts of His day.” Rather, it is meant to currently, this day, tell us something. It is meant to communicate to us how much Jesus wants to enter into our homes and share communion with us.
“But Father,” you might say, “Jesus doesn’t want to come to my house. The dishes aren’t done; the room is dirty; we don’t have the special towels out in the bathroom. And, most importantly, I’m a sinner. Jesus doesn’t want to come over. Doesn’t he know what I’ve done?” Or maybe it’s not that we’re afraid that Jesus will find out that we’re a sinner, but that we’re convinced that Jesus wants nothing to do with us because we’re a sinner.
In either case, we are wrong. Jesus does want to come into our homes. He does want to share His joy and His friendship with us. He wants to love us. In the Book of Wisdom, from where our first reading came today, we hear this truth almost in the form of a dialogue: “For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned…O LORD and lover of souls.” If we have life; if God has brought us from the nothingness of non-existence and created us, with the cooperation of our parents at the moment of our conception, the God loves us. In fact, it is precisely His love which brings us into existence and keeps us existing for all eternity. God’s love is stronger for us than a loving mother or father, a devoted grandparent, and even stronger and more intense than the love between a man and a woman united in the sacred bonds of marriage.
God wants to come to our house, to be a part of our family. And His love and His mercy, if we allow it into our lives, will change us, will lead us to repentance for the sins we have committed, so that our home is a fitting place for such a Guest. And God is not alone in wanting to dwell in our homes. All of our extended family wants to be at home in our home. And as a family of faith, our extended family doesn’t just mean grandpa and grandma, uncles and aunts, cousins, and the like. It means the saints, the holy ones, those parts of our Catholic family that have gone before us and have witnessed to Christ in heroic ways as martyrs, virgins, priests, religious, mothers, fathers, children, and in every way of life of which we can think. They want us to have fellowship with them, because, as St. John says in his first epistle, their fellowship is with God.
This Sunday evening and Monday we as a Catholic family celebrate our Catholic saints. So many of our parents and grandparents used to, and hopefully still do, have images of the Jesus, Mary, and the saints in the home. And while pictures don’t necessarily mean that we welcome the saints, they do a lot to remind us that the way we live, and the way we have communion as an earthly family, should be a place where Jesus and the saints feel welcome, should feel like family. We can think of particular patron saints that we have, especially the ones associated with our state of life or work. We can think of American saints. We can think of the saint name we have or chose at confirmation.
Soon Jesus will dwell within us who approach the Eucharist and receive it worthily. He will make His home in our hearts. Let us use that grace that we receive from the Most Holy Sacrament, so that in all parts of our life, Jesus and the saints are welcomed. Let us remind ourselves how much Jesus and the saints are a part of our life by reclaiming the Catholic practice of pictures and statues of the Jesus, Mary and the saints in our homes. Jesus wants to come and have communion with us. Will we, like Zacchaeus, welcome him in?