The whole world before you, O Lord, is like a speck that tips the scales, and like a drop of morning dew that falls to the ground. But you are merciful to all, for you can do all things, and you overlook people’s sins, so that they may repent. Lord, you love all things that exists, and detest none of the thing that you have made, for you would have not made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. For your immortal spirit is in all things. Therefore you correct little by little those who trespass, and you remind and warn them of the things through which they sin, so that they may be freed from wickedness and put their trust in you, O Lord..
First Reading from Wisdom 11.22 – 12.2, on the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
I remember walking on a beach on the east coast, early one summer morning in 1989. I had my son Luke, who was just a few months old, wrapped up in my sweater and held in my arms, and as we walked, the gentle rocking of my steps lulled him off to sleep. The morning stillness was carried on the ocean breezes, punctuated by the calls of birds and the song of surf on sand. My baby son was sleeping safe in my arms, and I was enjoying an exquisite experience of fatherhood, making a memory that I cherish to this day.
I remember looking out over the water and feeling drawn to look up. I saw that the moon was still in the sky, and I realised that the tide I had been pondering at the ocean’s edge was but the water being attracted by, drawn up to, the moon.
It was for me, a profound insight. Not about how the moon actually caused the tide … I knew that already. Rather, the insight for me was that in order to understand what was happening with the water, I needed to look beyond the water. For in those tides, I saw the waters being drawn to something quite other, attracted to something beyond its grasp.
This was, and is, for me, an image for the whole of humankind. Indeed, the whole of creation. For we too are drawn to something quite other, attracted to something beyond our grasp. It is an expression of the profound divine longing that links us to the source of all being, to the one we call God.
Saint Augustine wrote: ‘Look at the whole fabric of creation, all its intricate and ordered beauty … All of creation praises the glory of God’. ‘I asked the earth … I asked the sea … and they replied: ‘We are not your God. Look beyond us!’ I asked the sun, the moon, the stars, and they said: ‘Neither are we the God whom you seek!’ I said to all these things: ‘You have told me that you are not my God. Tell me about God’. With a loud voice they cried out: ‘God made us!’ My questioning was my looking upon them. Their answer …. was their beauty’
Today’s First Reading from the book of Wisdom reflects on these very same truths. The author is very conscious of how fragile we all are, like a grain of dust on the scales, like a drop of dew falling on the ground’. In many ways you and I are fragile beings both in who we are and how we live. You and I find it so easy to sin, to not be all that God creates us to be. We are cold and like a moth we rush towards the fire only to be burned. We are hurt and we struggle to free ourselves, only to find that we hurt others in the process. We are lost and so easily we follow any lead that promises to set us on the path to life.
And so the author of the Book of Wisdom, having spoken of our fragility, goes on to reflect on the wondrous mercy of God – a God who loves all that exists, who is both creator and lover of life, whose imperishable spirit is in everything. Yet, a God who knows our weakness. Who does not want us to stay lost or to keep hurting ourselves and others by our habitual fears and failings,
God’s gentle and pardoning love is most fully revealed in Jesus, perhaps nowhere more convincingly than in the scene portrayed in today’s Gospel. You see, Zacchaeus was one of the most hated men in Jericho. Not only had he acquired wealth from his fellow countrymen by extortion, he had done it in the name of the hated foreign overlords, the Romans. In the eyes of almost everyone there, this man was truly ‘lost’. But not in the eyes of God. For Jesus came to seek out and save the lost.
Today God is inviting us to look out at creation like Augustine did, and ponder the beauty that we see there: fragile creatures held in a wonderful harmony with creation and creator, and to whom we are deeply connected.
Today, God calls us to reflect on the wise words in our first reading, that reveal God to us as one filled with mercy, with steadfast love and tender compassion.
Today, God calls you and I by name, just as he called Zacchaeus, so that we too may hear the words, that salvation has indeed come to our house, too.
Today, God calls us to look beyond the turmoil that shows itself on the surface of the seas of our life, And to see the reason we are …..drawn to something quite other, attracted to something beyond our grasp.