If Jericho is the impregnable city par excellence, today’s Gospel tells us of the conversion of an impregnable sinner who converts and breaks down the walls of his heart when he encounters Mercy.
The story of Zacchaeus is paradigmatic because we could define his story as a Gospel within the Gospel. In fact, his story encapsulates the whole dynamic of the Gospel: the man who is incapable of opening himself to God’s love can only cultivate the desire to see, but he does not have the means to go further. “And there was a man named Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector, who was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but he could not because of the crowd, for he was small in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way“(Luke 19:1-4).
It is Jesus who bridges this distance and fills his impossibility with possibility:” When Jesus reached the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house. He quickly got down and welcomed him with joy” (Luke 19:5-6).
The sinner who can only cultivate a hint of desire and Jesus who builds a radical change on that small foothold is nothing less than the whole history of salvation. None of us ever truly has the strength to achieve the happiness we need. Many times, we are buried by our stories, our mistakes, the events that have happened to us.
Yet, all we need to do is keep alive within us a small desire to encounter meaning (Christ), and from that very point, He is able to bring about a revolution. Spiritual life does not begin when we stop sinning, but when, in the midst of our sins, we begin to truly desire to encounter Him despite our unworthiness.
And it matters little if this breaks the human patterns that calculate love like mathematics: “Seeing this, everyone began to mutter” (Luke 19:7).
Faced with this kind of gratuitousness, we are able to do what we have never been able to do in our entire lives. Zacchaeus is overwhelmed by love.
(The work “Zacchaeus on the sycamore tree waiting for Jesus to pass by” is a painting by James Tissot, created between 1886 and 1894.)
