WORD 2day: Tuesday, 33rd week in Ordinary time
November 19, 2019: 2 Maccabees 6: 18-31; Luke 19: 1-10
The Sunday liturgy this week called our attention to end times and the theme follows on during the week. If you pay a keen attention to the readings these days, the first reading continues to talk about the disasters of the end times, while the Gospel would offer a recommendation, as to how to confront them. Yesterday, the recommendation was to have a new vision: O Lord that I may see! Today the recommendation is to allow the Lord to touch you.
The Zacchaeus episode in the Gospel is an evergreen example of an encounter that transforms a person. As St. Paul would say, 'if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation' (2Cor 5:17). When we allow the Lord to really encounter us, the Lord transforms the whole person. Nothing remains the same, everything is new because we begin to see everything from the perspective of the Lord.
As Pope Francis says, 'Faith is not just to see Jesus, it is to see with the eyes of Jesus' (Lumen Fidei 18). When our faith is authentic, the whole perspective changes. What seems to be important, what seems to be necessary for someone may seem totally secondary to me, because I see as the Lord does, because I think as the Lord does, because I love as the Lord does. That happens only when I allow the Lord to touch me.
Eleazar in the first reading demonstrates the same to us - 'such pretense is not worthy of our time of life' (2 Mac 6:24), he says, caring the least to safeguard his life, because he did not want to lead the others astray from God. A life touched by God, cannot be contaminated by anything ungodly! What matters is that we allow God to touch, to touch our selves, to touch our innermost being!