Meeting Christ’s Gaze – We are Transformed
1st Reading: Wisdom 11:22 – 12:1
2nd Reading: 2 Thessalonians 1:11 – 2:2
Gospel: Luke 19:1-10
Homily: Ted Keating SM
[The mass planners] spent most of our time [discussing] the Gospel and its striking image of the MO [modus operandi] or plan for Jesus when he would get to [a] town. “Where are the sinners, the marginalized?”
But we kept being drawn back to the beautiful first reading from Wisdom.
We have to insert the season of Creation into the Liturgical year because there is so little about the mystery of creation. Yet it is the foundational mystery. As one philosopher puts it “Why is there anything existing at all.” Today’s first reading lays that foundation.
If we accept, experience, are convinced that our universe and all in it is a gift of a loving and merciful God, we can then talk about Christianity and Judaism. Without that, none of it makes sense. Pre-evangelization?
Then the awe that strikes out to us from the photos coming from the Webb telescope helps us to “SEE” in awe the very origins of the universe and be stunned into love and gratitude by it. It also calls us to marvel at these beings who in a few centuries (nothing in cosmic time) have emerged into this. The axial age was a mere 2500 years ago for this emerging animal that amazes with its technical evolution.
Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.”
This is not unrelated to our Gospel reading. It is about a short, despised, very wealthy chief of the tax collectors in the small village of Jericho which some archeologists say is one of the oldest settlements in the world. Jesus is coming to town on his way to Jerusalem.
All have heard about his exploits across Galilee—curing the sick, touching and healing the lepers, stirring up Sabbath celebrations in the Synagogue on the Sabbath. Zacchaeus wants to see him. [Zacchaeus] has a name— [something] fairly unusual in the Gospel of Luke except for Lazarus in the parable. Some think [Zacchaeus] may have been a real person in the early Church community.
Not only is he short, but good Jews would also have been pushing him away in the crowd. “What is a man like you doing here to see this prophet?” So [Zacchaeus] climbed a Sycamore [tree] so he could see [Jesus] and he can see him. And Jesus looked up into the tree and saw [Zacchaeus]. Their eyes met.., Jesus invites him[self] to dinner at [Zacchaeus’] house [and] Zacchaeus’ life crumbles into dust below him.
Zacchaeus comes down the tree and many in the crowd grumble that wonderfully onomatopoetic word. Zacchaeus screams out a proclamation: “Half my possessions to the poor, repay anyone that I have defrauded.” A fairly instantaneous conversion after locking eyes with Jesus—with the Gaze of Jesus. Today salvation has come to a son of Abraham.
Jesus is fully human and fully divine—the oldest defined teaching in Christianity. But, as we and as someone quoted in the planning group, the eyes are the window to the soul –the divine soul of Jesus. There was something about the “Gaze” of Jesus—not a new description in the spirituality of Jesus in the Gospel.
Consider the call of Matthew who throws his whole tax collector life away at a look from Jesus and has a banquet with Jesus and all of Matthew’s tax collector friends. I will send out a copy of Caravaggio’s painting of that scene that shows the same gaze.
You could also look at the meeting of Mary Magdalene and the gardener in the resurrection scene.
In Luke, this scene is no surprise. This is what Jesus does in every town. Where are the sinners and the marginalized? He speaks a parable in one of these scenes where is instructing the Pharisees to do likewise. There is no question with Jesus about “second chances”—His God is always waiting for us looking off into the distance when we have run from him as in the parable.
Augustine says that the language of God desires and it is what he looks for in us, not perfection. Resurrection is the model of human holiness, not perfection. Our first reading already confirmed that. God corrects little by little those who trespass. It also has this strange saying that God’s immortal spirit is in all things already.
Here and in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Temple, do we dare to judge where these people were in their desires before [the] grace of Jesus comes along?
I leave it for you to talk about if you wish in your small [Zoom breakout] groups. How do two people fall in love? Many say that their eyes locked into each other and the rest was history. Is falling in love a sacrament of falling in love with God?
Let me close with a love poem “Colors” of Yevgeny Yevtushenko who had obviously fallen head over heels in love and was being tremendously changed by it.
When your face appeared over my crumpled life,
At first I understood only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light on woods, on rivers, and on the sea,
Became my beginning in the colored world
In which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
Of revelations, and tears, and the excitement finishing.
I don’t’ fight it. My love is this fear.
I nourish it who can nourish nothing–
Love’s slipshod Watchman. Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short,
And that the colors in my eyes will vanish
When your face sets.
[Community members joined breakout rooms to discuss when we have met Christ’s gaze.]
Ted also shares this by Pedro Arrupe SJ (1907-1991), a Spanish Basque priest:
Prayers of the Faithful: Opening Prayer
We pray to God that we may have the grace and courage to see ourselves as you see us.
To be in your gaze,
To know we are created in your image,
To welcome the gender identities and gender expressions that you see.
Protect our trans kids. Help us to love.
For this we pray.