Readings of the day: Wisdom 11:2-12:2; Psalm 45:1-2, 8-9, 10-11, 13, 14; 2 Thessalonians 1:11-2:2; Luke 19:1-10
It is humbling, really, and even more so than ever with our science and technology for observing our universe, to look out into the heavens and realize how small we are. Here we are, on a nondescript planet that orbits an average star, the sun, in a galaxy (the Milky Way) that is dwarfed by many more spectacular galaxies, in a universe with an estimated diameter of 93 billion light years.
Yet, when Pope Benedict XVI was installed as Bishop of Rome in April 2005, in his homily at the Mass as he received the archbishop’s pallium, the garment of lamb’s wool around an archbishop’s neck with three crosses in front and three in the back that symbolizes his unity with Jesus, the Lamb of God, and the fisherman’s ring that marks the pope out as a successor of Peter, he said this: “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ.”
The week before Pope Benedict gave this homily, he addressed the cardinals who were about to choose him, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the successor to Pope John Paul II. Cardinal Ratzinger warned of “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”
Let me say that I think we are invited to hold both these statements as true, as jarring as they are when we hear them together, from the same person, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger-Pope Benedict XVI. We cannot deny the pervasiveness of sin, individual and in the structures of our societies, politics, economies of the world.
A few days ago I tuned into a panel discussion on CBC’s The National about the possible causes of the current global economic crisis. The panelists acknowledged Russia’s war against Ukraine as a factor in the world’s economic problems. But then one of the panelists used a word I do not recall hearing before then, “Greedflation”: Price inflation driven at least in part by the greed of elites and large corporations for profits, which ends up (as economic problems tend to do) disproportionately affecting the (already) poorest and most socially disadvantaged.
Our world has struggled to respond to Russia’s unjust attack on Ukraine, its slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians and damage to Ukraine’s cities and essential infrastructure, and government and even religious officials’ attempts to justify the war. Much of public discourse, aided by the worst of social media, has been reduced to ideological polarization, peddling of conspiracy theories, and a kind of anti-intellectualism or general anti-authoritarianism.
Sin in our world is easy to find with very little effort. The “dictatorship of relativism” is a constant danger; the ethics of moral decisions becoming judged ultimately relative to “what is most beneficial for me,” with less to no regard for a common or universal good, any definitive direction or meaning of human life, which we Christians might call heaven. As St. Augustine of Hippo once prayed, “O God, our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
But sin, or this “dictatorship of relativism,” is not the original state of the human person, from the moment of creation or the moment each of us came to exist. Our original state, and indeed the original state of our entire 93-billion-light-year-wide universe, is one of having been blessed, loved, intended, willed by our God. Many theologians, including yours truly, have in recent years shied away from terms like “original sin,” because sin is not original or essential to our human nature. Our having been thought, willed, loved, deemed necessary, and blessed by God are original to our human nature as God has created us. Sin is a corruption of this original blessed, willed, loved state of the human person and creation.
There is no truth, to my knowledge, that is proclaimed more consistently in our Scriptures than this: “God blessed them… God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good,” the Book of Genesis proclaims at the end of its first creation account. And we hear this same proclamation, this same truth across our readings today. The Book of Wisdom was among the last Old Testament books to be written. It was written in a time when, if one wanted to find sin, corruption, relativism, decadence in Israel, one would find it easily. One foreign nation after another (the Greeks and then the Romans, during the time in which Wisdom was written) had ruled Israel, sometimes with brutality. And Israel’s home-grown elites were often no better: The regime of King Herod and his successors hoarded the wealth of the nation and became corrupt and brutal. There were the Pharisees and their scribes, and the temple priests. There were zealots who sought to respond to violence and corruption with more violence and more corruption.
Yet, amid all this social corruption and decadence, the Book of Wisdom says this of God: “Lord, you love all things that exist… How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? … You spare all things, O Lord, you who love the living.” Wisdom does not deny sin in the world by proclaiming this foundational truth of God’s love of all creation; on the contrary. The author of Wisdom knows all too well the corruption of sin in our world, but proclaims that God corrects “little by little those who trespass… so that they may be freed from wickedness.”
The author of Wisdom proclaims how little we really are in this great universe God has created: “The whole world before you, O Lord, is like a speck that tips the scales.” Still, sisters and brothers, Wisdom proclaims to us today nothing other than the mercy and love of God by which we and our whole universe was created and continues to exist. As Dr. Denis Lamoureux here at St. Joseph’s College would say, this is the foundational truth of creation, which God “ordains and sustains”: “Lord, you love all things that exist.” We are “like a speck,” but one that “tips the scales”: “Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary” beyond measure in God’s eyes.
This love, this blessing to us, our existence and sustenance and that of all creation leaves us with one response worthy of us before the merciful love by which we are “ordained and sustained,” by which, as the beginning of our Eucharistic Prayer proclaims, “we live and move and have our being.” Our Psalm speaks of our due response to this merciful, creative, and sustaining love of God: “All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and your faithful shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom, and tell of your power.”
The second letter to the Thessalonians is a prayer for each of us, that the creative and sustaining love of God may work in our world through each of us: May “the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…be glorified in you, and you in him.”
But perhaps few Bible passages speak as well to God’s merciful, creative and sustaining love for us, for all God has created, than our Gospel story today of the tax collector Zacchaeus’ encounter with Jesus. Zacchaeus, even without his sinful past as a factor, is literally and figuratively “short in stature.” He is, as the Book of Wisdom says, “like a speck,” but a speck that will tip the scales, somebody dearly beloved in the eyes of God.
So what does Zacchaeus do? He climbs a sycamore tree when he realizes Jesus is about to pass by him in Jericho. All who see this (we can admit) ridiculous scene of the rich little tax collector, probably with his tunic caught high in a sycamore tree, begin “to grumble…: [Jesus] has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”
Yet these grumblers miss the point. Jesus has offered to be a guest at Zacchaeus’ house: “Zacchaeus, hurry down, for I must stay at your house today.” Indeed, Jesus has made this offer to all of us, an offer of pure mercy and love: “I will come and dwell in this house today, the house of the earth, the universe, and everything I have created in it. And by coming and dwelling in your house in human flesh, sisters and brothers, I will redeem it and wipe away your sin forever. I will come ‘to seek out and to save the lost.’”
If there is ever an act that shows God’s love for us and all he has created, every speck, this is it! Yes, there is sin in our world, acts of human ego-seeking, violence and injustice, greed and war. But this, nowhere else, is the house God in his Son Jesus has come to dwell and redeem. “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” And Jesus asks us to hurry to this celebration, because Jesus “must stay at [our] house today.”
