31st Sunday: "Zacchaeus come down quickly!"

When you are asked what does salvation mean to a Catholic, what do you say? Salvation is at the core of the story today. Jesus says to Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house
because this man too is a descendant of Abraham.
For the Son of Man has come to seek
and to save what was lost.” The people of Jesus’ time expected that the Messiah would reach out and gather in the lost ten tribes that had disappeared from history at the time of the war with Assyria. For Jesus, gathering the lost takes on a much bigger meaning.
Zacchaeus is a chief tax collector. For the Jews of Jesus’ time, the chief collector is a collaborator and extortionist. He is hated by his community. As Jesus passes through Jericho, Zacchaeus fellow Jews crowd him out so that he can’t see Jesus or be seen. Because he is so short, he climbs a tree to look over the heads of the crowd. Jesus looks past the whole crowd and says to the biggest so called sinner in town, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly,
for today I must stay at your house.”
Jesus, reconciling people to their community and God is one of the marks of the Messiah. What is the power of evil? It is present even among the good people of Jericho as they shoulder Zacchaeus out of the way. Evil is literally nothing. Evil is the disintegration of anything that is good. Evil unravels the power of the goodness of God’s creation. It turns neighbor against neighbor and creates the outsider as when Zacchaeus is crowded out. Jesus by reaching out to Zacchaeus undoes the power of evil in Jericho.
The mission of the Messiah, our mission is to reach out to the people on the edges. We are not to create exiles from the kingdom of God. The book of wisdom instructs us how to deal with the evil in our community. “Therefore you rebuke offenders little by little,
warn them and remind them of the sins they are committing, that they may abandon their wickedness and believe in you, O LORD! For you love all things that are
 and loathe nothing that you have made;
 for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.
 And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it;”
 Wisdom 11  
The disintegrating power of evil runs through all of human history and disconnects us one from another. Slavery that is part of all cultures treats people like they are objects. Abortion, pornography, terrorism, human sex trafficking are all part and parcel of treating people as property. We create outsiders if we ignore the suffering of refugees and migrants. People can feel scapegoated or forced out of the community due to divorce and separation, imprisonment, sexual abuse, drug use, mental illness or any number of problems that tear at the fabric of our community. There is no war or government program that defeats the immensity of evil and the unraveling of creation.
One basic political principal that the church holds up to us is solidarity. We are supposed to work to build and maintain connections in our community, especially with those on the margins. Zacchaeus probably is a big sinner, but what about the people who ostracize him? It is a sin to try to keep sinners away from God.
Our parish does great work in this regard. Your support of Reachout Pregnancy center supports mothers faced with the temptation of abortion. There is a great story on our website about a young family that came to our parish and were married here last weekend. Like so many people, they felt that they couldn’t return because they made choices not wholly keeping with our faith. It was the love of one couple in our parish that encouraged them to reconnect with our community. We live in solidarity with others in so many ways.
As Catholics we should be concerned with how our exercise of our rights as citizens affects the least of God’s children. God created the world and called it good. Evil unravels the fabric of goodness. Jesus came to gather in the frayed edges of the community. We are called to cooperate in that work through our solidarity with those on the outskirts of the community.