Have you ever thought how peculiar it is that God can be both behind us, around us, and ahead of us? This isn’t a modern idea of course, because it’s part of St Patrick’s Breastplate, a Prayer in Irish from the 5th Century. You can see and hear me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sujibunZsxE
I love best the translation into English in a well-known modern Hymn.
“Christ be beside me, Christ be before me, Christ be behind me King of my heart Christ be within me, Christ be below me, Christ be above me, never to part.”
And that’s what happens to Zacchaeus in the Gospel today, (Luke 19:1-10) because God is at work in him way before Jesus actually arrives and calls him down from the tree that he’s climbed. The amazing truth is that only God, working within him, could have persuaded him, a rich and powerful Tax Collector, to run and then climb up a tree. People like him just did not run, and certainly did not climb trees!
We humans tend to think that it is always up to us to act first, to do something to link ourselves to God, before God will respond; and although there is a certain truth in that, for it does feel sometimes as if God works in that way; it is actually very arrogant of us to think it is always like this, as if God depends on us. In our Gospel, God is ahead of Zacchaeus twice. First in putting it into his head to do that ludicrous thing of climbing the tree; and then when Jesus arrives, by saying in and through Jesus to this hated and despised tax collector, ”Hurry, because I must stay at your house today.” This should shock us. We think that we have to repent in order to be forgiven; but here Jesus clearly accepts and forgives Zacchaeus first; and only then do we hear that this man will now change his life.
Actually, if we look carefully, we will find the same message in our 1st Reading (Wisdom 11:22-12:2) where the author proclaims to God, “You are merciful to all, because you can do all things and overlook men’s sins, so that they can repent.” It’s such an important point that it needs repeating – God is merciful, God overlook’s our sins – and why? So that we can repent. We don’t need to repent first. We don’t need to worry that we haven’t confessed all our failings correctly. We don’t need to stress about saying the right number of prayers at the right time. Yes, we need to repent, yes we need to confess, yes we need to pray; but we do all this in response to God’s mercy, in response to the fact that he “overlooks our sins”, that he is already and always at work in us.
There is too a very common idea that the only way to pray, is to slow down, to “Be still” and know that God is with us. Yes of course some prayer is like this, and we shouldn’t neglect it, because too often we do get too busy with our own affairs to let God in. But we also have to realise that God is an active force for good, and so is always also within us and way ahead of us. This means that sometimes the way to respond to God is to leap into action, not to descend into deep meditation. Too often, when we think of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, we think of the way he carries us, the lost sheep, when we are wounded and sad. And yes, he does do that. But actually, in that image of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is thinking of the way a Shepherd leads his sheep. So he says of this Shepherd, and thus of himself “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.” He calls them, he calls us, into an unknown future, his future; and we know that his future is way beyond anything we can imagine, for as we heard in our 1st Reading, “In your sight, Lord, the whole world is like a grain of dust that tips the scales, like a drop of morning dew falling on the ground.”
One of the words we sometimes use to describe God the Holy Spirit is “The Comforter”. This is unfortunate because in modern English a “comforter” is something cosy, like a comfortable armchair that we can sink into and relax. Well yes, God can be like that for us, but more often, as in the Creed, God the Holy Spirit is “The Giver of life” – the Lifegiver. Think for a moment of a human baby who has just emerged from the womb. There is a moment of stillness, and then almost immediately the baby takes its first breath, and bursts into life, and shows that life with a loud wail. So when Jesus tells us that we must be born again, he is expecting a similar awakening to a fuller realisation of what each of us can be for the world. We are called not simply to be awake to God outside ourselves, but much more to God’s Holy Spirit stirring us up from within. That’s what happens to Zacchaeus. It’s as if suddenly he becomes aware of all that he can do for others, rather than for himself.
But always we have to remember that our desire to respond to God, our sudden awareness of something God wants us to do, must not be for our own glory, but for the glory of God. St Paul makes this very clear in our 2nd Reading (1 Thess 1:11-2:2) where he writes first, that “God will make (us) worthy of his call.” And then reminds us where we will get the power to achieve this. For it is God who “By his power fulfils all (our) desires for goodness and completes all that (we) have been doing through faith.” And why? What for? St Paul continues, “Because in this way the name of our Lord Jesus Christ will be glorified in you and you in him.” We are like some powerful electric engine, full of potential, but unable to do anything until we are connected to the power source, and the engine can then spring into life.
At times it’s tempting to look back to a happier past, just as the children of Israel did in the desert looking back to Egypt. That past was a fantasy of course, but it is a very human fantasy that we all indulge in at times - the good old days as we call them! Instead, God points us to an uncertain future, and that is hard for us, because the future is always full of uncertainties that we cannot control. That is why we have to remember, as St Patrick did, that God is already there in that future, and will be with us there whatever happens to us – as he was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end . Amen.
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