Homily for Ordinary Time 31 - October 30, 2022

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 31

October 30, 2022

He Sees You

 

            16670. It was the number tattooed on his arm when he entered Auschwitz concentration camp. But we know him better as St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who gave up his life in exchange for a prisoner who had been sentenced to die.

            One of the common practices of all of the totalitarian governments – and everyday bureaucracies - in the twentieth century was to reduce people to solely a number. Prisoner number, citizen number, form number, account number, social security number. The modern world has a way of quantifying everything – we’re defined by our college application, our resume, the number of likes and followers and what we can produce.

            But our hearts cry out to be known and loved as individuals. We don’t want to be a number – we want to have a name. The recently-elected President of Italy, Georgia Meloni, had

a really powerful speech about this when she said, “When I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer. That’s why [Christianity] inspires so much fear. Because we do not want to be numbers. We will defend the value of the human being.”

            And thus we come to today’s Gospel. A couple of things strike me – first, Zacchaeus could have been a part of the crowd. Certainly mobs of people surrounded Jesus at all times. But he didn’t want to be a nameless face in the crowd – he wanted to be known and acknowledged as an individual. And then Jesus, passing by, calls him by name. Jesus and Zacchaeus had never met, but the Lord already knew him – not as Person 342, but as Zacchaeus, a man with a past but also one with great potential for holiness in the future.

            So what does this show us about the Heart of God? Three things.

            First, God knows us and loves us as individuals, and He calls us by name. I know sometimes we all wonder if God actually knows us. I mean, yes, He loves humanity, but does He love YOU or ME, in our own specific circumstances, in all of the messiness of our daily life? This Gospel shows us that He does know us by name – and loves us! He knows us, both our good points and our messy points, and still chooses to call us by name. A couple weeks ago we held a retreat for our high school freshmen where I teach. We all went to a retreat house run by these diminutive Indian and Philippino nuns. At a certain point, I couldn’t find one of our students, Jason. Jason is the kind of kid who always gets into trouble unwittingly – he’s not malicious, but trouble seems to find him, so I was worried when he went missing. After a few minutes of searching, I found him in a small alcove of the convent, speaking with one of the nuns. I told him it was time to go, and the nun said, “Thank you for this time with Jason. He’s one of the Lord’s chosen ones.” I thought, “Yeah, right. Do you know how many detentions he’s got this year, Sister?” So the retreat continued, and toward the end of the day once again Jason was lost. He finally wandered into the group room, explaining, “I’m sorry I’m late, I wanted to speak with the sister again. We had another long conversation, she’s really helping me.” It was interesting that when Jason felt loved, valued, and seen as an individual – he began to believe in his own dignity – and that it was possible to live up to his dignity. Do you know that God sees you? Do you know how God sees you? Why not ask Him – “Lord, show me Your Heart, show me who I am in Your sight.”

            Second, He calls us even while we are still sinners. Jesus didn’t wait until Zacchaeus changed his life to call him down from the tree. No, the Lord calls him first, even as a corrupt agent of the hated Roman empire. Now we have to be careful here, because some people like to believe Jesus spends time with sinners because He’s tolerant and open-minded. But that’s not why He eats with them. Rather, Jesus spends time with sinners because He sees them as future saints and wants to invite them to a life of holiness. As the old saying goes, “Ever saint has got a past, and every sinner’s got a future.” Jesus doesn’t wait until we are holy to seek us; rather, He seeks us in our sinfulness so that we might become holy.

            Finally, it is only through our encounter with Him that our lives are changed. St. Augustine describes this life-changing encounter with the Lord in his autobiography, The Confessions: “Late have I loved you, beauty ever ancient, ever new: late have I loved you. You called and shouted and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness.” After a life of sin, Augustine was so miserable and hungry for some peace that when he read the Scriptures for the first time, he encountered Jesus there – and Jesus spoke to his sinful heart through the words on the page: an encounter that would change the sinful Augustine into a saint.

            We are more than numbers, more than anonymous faces in a crowd. Our modern world often tries to quantify us, when our hearts yearn to be known and loved as persons made in the image of God. Thanks be to the Lord that He knows us and calls us by name – and invites us to follow Him into eternal life!