Gospel: Luke 19:1-10
At that time Jesus came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town.
Now a man there named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a
wealthy man, was seeking to see who Jesus was; but he could not see him because
of the crowd, for he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a
sycamore tree in order to see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. When he
reached the place, Jesus looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for
today I must stay at your house.” And he came down quickly and received him with
joy. When they saw this, they began to grumble, saying, “He has
gone to stay at the house of a sinner.” But Zacchaeus stood there and
said to the Lord, “Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the
poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times
over.” And Jesus said to him, “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.
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Reflection:
Who is Zacchaeus?
He is a corrupt chief tax collector, a bigtime extortionist and a bigtime
sinner too! It would seem that this sinful man would drown in his sinfulness
and be sinful for the rest of his life. But Jesus intervened in the life of
this sinful man so from being sinful he repented and became a renewed man.
God works in mysterious ways in our lives, He always calls us sinners to
become His faithful followers. Zacchaeus is such kind of a man, a sinner
like you and me. His call to conversion may seem like his own initiative but no
it was not his own. It was Jesus who called him, it was Jesus who spoke to his
heart to tell him to return the money that he stole and leave behind his sinful
life.
Jesus always calls us to conversion He uses many avenues to do it for us.
There are times that He bothers our conscience. There are times that He uses
other people for us to follow Him, let us be sensitive to this intervention of
Jesus in our lives.
Life is never the same when we live it without Jesus, we may temporarily
enjoy what this world would offer us. But at the end of the day everything that
this world offers us is passing and temporary. Let us carefully discern this,
let us wake up with our love affair with sin and materialism while we still
have time to walk away from it.
And after we walk away from materialism and sin we immediately go to
Jesus so that we can receive the same forgiveness and healing that Zacchaeus received.
– Marino J. Dasmarinas
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