31st Sunday C, November 3, 2007 (Novus Ordo)

There are some important truths in the first Scripture of this Mass that should not be overlooked in our great interest in the Gospel story about Zacchaeus, about which I will say a word later.

The Book of Wisdom well represents the now-forgotten science of Cosmology, once one of the staple courses of philosophy in scholastic education. Even though modern science has gained for us a great deal of knowledge through the scientific method, it has not superceded the essentials of that study of the cosmos which the Church has always fostered. This fact would strike the ears of many people today as incredible since there’s scarcely anything that was formerly thought true in the natural sciences that has not been corrected or amended by modern scientific discoveries. No one who is a person of faith today and still has his wits about him would pretend that what was once thought to be true about the world but corrected by today’s science should be sustained over and above modern discoveries. But these wonderful insights of science do not nullify the truths of Cosmology, the science by which we gain wisdom through the study of the universe. We may even go further and say that the modern scientific method, which admits only what can be verified in a very prescribed way, has imposed its own limits on what men know today. Rather than speak more in generalities, let me say that in former times, more primitive times from a scientific perspective, the minds of men more easily and more readily ascended from the study and contemplation of the created universe to a knowledge of God its Creator. This is not to say that their ignorance was spiritual bliss, or that because they lacked the sophistication of modern science they were fools. (There’s an infinite difference between ignorance, which people in earlier times could not have avoided on account of their limitations, and stupidity.) Nor should one presume to say that it was religion which made men narrowminded and ill-disposed to accepting the reality of the universe which we now know so much better, thanks to modern science. The historical truth of the matter is that it was due to the Catholic Church that modern science was launched and promoted, since the Church insisted on pursuing the path of human reason as a reliable source of knowing truth and not of religious faith exclusively. We are falsely told that in the Middle Ages people were ignorant because the Church held back learning until the Renaissance freed them from the limitations of religion. In fact, the Church championed learning because she had a great confidence in the power of the human mind to know truth through the study of purely secular subjects. This is why the Catholic Church founded the great universities in Europe so many centuries ago. Just for the record, it was not the Catholic Church, but rather many of the newly formed Protestant religions that disparaged human reason and pursued a course of “faith alone” according to which one must believe what the bible says–or what it appears to say–and then to close one’s eyes and ears to whatever the world of science or philosophy may assert to the contrary about reality. (This is indeed an involved matter. I only want to vent my frustration here at the unrelenting disparaging of the Catholic Church when the historical facts are exactly contrary to what they are said to be.)

My point is to establish some of the many truths that this Scripture readings opens before us, one of which is that God created all things, the enormous sum of which is as a grain of sand. This is a testimony of the omnipotence of God and a cause of wonder. We are so easily impressed by the immensity of matter, of the size of the universe, of the complexity and variety of things that exist that we can be easily so wowed by creation as to neglect or even disavow its Creator. But a still greater wonder is God’s omniscience, his all-encompassing knowledge. He knows all the things He has made; He has everything in His creation on His mind constantly and in its every detail simultaneously present to His consciousness. This particularly impresses us because we are necessarily consumed in pondering a single thing at any given moment. But God knows all things all the time.

This reading and the Gospel as well present to us something else that should make us dizzy with wonder. The great God who created all things has yet regard for each individual man, such that He knows the sins of all and that He is merciful towards them all. This personal God–a far cry from the distant, Big Bang sort of God that sometimes is proposed by scientists–has His complete attention focused on little ol’ me, on you. I ‘matter’ to Him and my acts are acts of consequence. A psalm exclaims the marvel of this when, after reciting some of the great works God has made, asks ‘What is man that you should have a care for him?’ Indeed what are we before Omnipotence and Omniscience? Yet for reasons we cannot quite fathom, God loves humanity more than His other creatures. We know this from at least two religious truths, the first of which is the incarnation of God: that He deigned to become a man Himself in Jesus Christ our Lord. (He did not, as the Letter to the Hebrews avows, become an angel, a creature in nature greater than we.) And the second reason we can assert so confidently that God has an especially choice affection for humanity is that His single greatest creation is a human person, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven and Earth.

There is the one little detail that I want to emphasize in the Gospel story about Zacchaeus–about which many other worthy things might be said as well. The infinite, the Divine Person of Jesus, who had the whole universe for His mission of redemption, stopped along the course of His travels to stay at the home of one single individual man, Zacchaeus. From this we can deduce that the knowledge and the love of God for humanity is not merely universal and generic but also individual and personal. Indeed, there is no sense speaking about the Judgment or about eternal rewards and punishments in the next life unless everything ‘matters’ to God and that our deeds as well as our intentions in performing them are known by Him and weighed by Him.

There are one of two basic things we might do upon recognition of these facts. The first might be that since we are under constant surveillance from God, we had better watch out. From Him there is not such a thing as a secret thought or desire, let alone a hidden deed. This is a lesson worthy of mastery but it is, by Christian standards, inadequate. The motivation for living a holy life is not merely to avoid the fire and eternal pains of hell, but to become a pleasing son or daughter of God. It is wanting to look and to be our best in His sight, for His sake, in gratitude, in love. While we cannot deceive ourselves into thinking that God just accepts us as we are without our sincere intention to do His will and keep His commandments, yet we ought so to act as if we wanted God to be proud of us, approving of the goodness that we allow to come forth from our hearts. Indeed the bible uses such a metaphor when, for example, God in the OT boasts about the good man Job, saying, “Have you seen my servant Job, how there is none like him?” or in the NT where, in a parable, our Lord addresses one man, saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” There is a generosity towards God that’s born out of real charity rather than out of servile fear. It’s the kind of thing, although in a manner of speaking, that we see in a human family when a child does some good thing right from his heart, without being told or commanded by his parents. Thus does God look upon us, I believe, when we respond lovingly to His immense (shall we say?) ‘thoughtfulness’ in looking upon us, His dear children.

I suppose from a purely pragmatic point of view, all that we need do is to avoid mortal sin so as to get to heaven. But this is playing the game of life too riskily and missing the heart of our faith which is a response to God’s love–through love.