St. Norbert's Church - Sunday Reflections

The wonderful thing about God being God is that He knows us and loves us as we are, even if we find ourselves in mortal sin. God never stops loving us and is always faithful in loving us. God created us to love us, not to condemn us. God is always with us, inviting us to live in His live and by His love.

For a lot of us, that is not how we ever experienced God when we were young. This is why the message of salvation must be repeated over and over. Only one who has come to know the love of God can truly be a witness to that love. We only come to know that love through faith. Daily our prayer can be: give me faith, O Lord, so that I may know your love.

In the first reading we continue hearing from the Book of Wisdom. We don't have to have any academic degrees to understand Hebrew Wisdom. Rather, we need only have an open heart. The Book of Wisdom is not written for academics, but for us ordinary people to understand that we too can encounter the love of the living God if we open our hearts and minds.

For many people, the choice comes down to believing in the kind of God revealed and spoken about in the Book of Wisdom or not believing at all. It can be a fairly simple choice: if there is a God, He must be like this one described in the Book of Wisdom. The only other possibility is that there is no God at all.

The problem, of course, is that we humans often think of God as only an extra nice human being. Our God is almost always too small. Someone like Zacchaeus in today's Gospel from Saint Luke, is an extraordinary person because he so longs for salvation that he is able to see the divine presence in Jesus Christ. Most of us probably want salvation, but without any work or almost without any belief on our part.

Jesus comes to save us and invites us out of our trees to follow Him. That call is just as clear today as it was in the time of Zacchaeus. When we see the homeless, when we see the hungry, when we see the naked, when we see the confused and crazy - and in every similar situation, it is our Lord asking us to help Him. These are the people who are Jesus for us today and invite us out of our trees to know the Lord.

We can leave the comfort of the distance we have in our trees and climb down the tree to follow the Lord. In this, our God makes us worthy of his calling and powerfully brings to fulfillment every good purpose and every effort of faith - as we hear in today's second reading from the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. Transform us, O Lord, and draw us from our trees to walk the path of salvation.