Hi everyone, and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 36 of Season 5 for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time: October 30, 2022. Our Gospel reading is from Luke, Chapter 19, verses 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 all 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."
The Gospel of the Lord
“The Root of Restlessness” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut
I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other God but me. I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other God but me. Now, if I gave you a piece of paper and a pencil right now, and I asked you to think about that first commandment a little bit and think about your life, and on a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being a perfect score, how would you rate yourself in terms of abiding by and keeping that commandment?
I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other God but me.
Well, if you have some humility in you, you might start thinking like this: Well, I'm here. So, therefore, I believe in God, and God is God. So, therefore, because I'm human and I do sin, and I make mistakes, maybe I'll give myself an eight. I keep it pretty good. Well, let's think about that a little bit and see whether we're all worthy of eights, nines, or tens when it comes to keeping that first commandment.
As you look at our lives, how do we - how do you - satisfy your restlessness? Your restlessness, your emptiness, your longing? Where do you go to find peace? Now, as we begin to think about that question a little bit, we begin to ponder those things that are our go-to's, those things that if we're feeling a little bit of anxiousness, if we're feeling restlessness, we tend to cling to them.
Now, some of them are seemingly harmless. You know, that extra piece of chocolate that just makes you feel good because you need it, and you think you want it and deserve it. Some of this stuff isn't so healthy and we make choices and invest ourselves excessively in money or power or possessions. Or we find ourselves becoming a little bit overly concerned about our livelihood, what we have in the bank, our securities.
We begin to think of restlessness in terms of having more, of maybe accumulating things so that we're not in want. Or maybe we think of easing the restlessness in our heart by somehow easing our pain. And so we find ourselves maybe falling into some addictive behaviors because it just masks what's going on inside.
How do we satisfy our restlessness?
We've talked before of Julian of Norwich, an amazing lady. And in one of her visions, God showed her a hazelnut. Now think about this; it's very profound. And the hazelnut was in her hand, and we all know what a hazelnut is. It isn't a very big nut. It's actually on the smaller side, but it's very round hazelnut.
And in this vision, God showed her that that hazelnut represented all that God made. Everything that God ever made was in that hazelnut. So the world, the universe, every individual, all amounted, when put together, to the size of a hazelnut. But the intensity and the power and the grandeur and the greatness of God in all of his eternal being is so much greater than the size of that hazelnut. So as we consider all times and ages, all of the universe, as far as our minds can see, each one of us, every created human being, All of that is in that hazelnut.
And God is so much bigger.
See, the problem with the way we negotiate around that first commandment is that we often do make substitutions for God. You know, Julian of Norwich said, "I'm not gonna be able to rest until there is no created thing between me and God." No created thing between me and God. So until my spirit, my soul, is freed enough from who I am and rest completely and wholly in God, I am always going to be restless. I'm always going to be restless.
I'm never going to be able to quench that ache or that desire, or that emptiness. And so, as human beings, if we believe in God and we believe that our hearts are truly restless until they rest completely in God, and that's the truth of who we are, then we have to acknowledge that truth. Otherwise, we find ourselves falling into error. We find ourselves falling into sin. We find ourselves breaking that first commandment more so than not because we foolishly think that there are things out there, people out there, that can fill this ache, fill this desire, fill this emptiness when the only one who can do that is God. And unless we realize that about ourselves, we're going to be scrambling all over the place.
And that's what Zacchaeus did. Zacchaeus was a tax collector. In his day, he was the lowest of the low because he would cheat people. So if you owed $10 for taxes, let's say Zacchaeus would charge you $15, put five in his pocket, put $10 to the Roman officials, and be done with it. And so, it was a very corrupt system that led to a lot of abuses, especially abuses of people. And so on the level of society, Zacchaeus in people's minds was it's really low. But we can assume that he himself was a tormented soul because even though his bank account was growing because of the cash he was putting into it, his own sense of self-esteem was going lower and lower and lower. His status within the community was seen as lower and lower and lower.
And so while he was building himself up, on one sense, he was really weighing himself down in another. And he was this tormented, conflicted soul who really didn't know where he belonged or what was going to make him feel better, or what was gonna give him a sense of self-worth, a sense of well-being; a tormented soul.
Maybe there's some tormented souls here tonight. Maybe some of us struggle with where to find peace with, where to find a sense of well-being, an okayness with life, or maybe we know of somebody who isn't here tonight that's struggling, that can be considered a tormented soul. Someone who is lost, someone not quite sure where their bearings need to be.
So Zacchaeus was really curious about Jesus because there was something in Jesus that Zacchaeus saw and knew that he wanted. And so he scrambled up to get a sight. And Jesus, when he saw Zacchaeus, loved him. He loved him. And that's what God does. See, when God looks at us, God loves us as we are: you, me, the most horrendous of sinners. God loves because when God looks at us, you know what God sees? God sees himself. Think about that. When God looks at us, God sees himself. And the reflection of himself comes back to him because that's in the core of our soul. He doesn't care about what we've done; that can be fixed. He cares about who we are.
And so, as we begin to ponder things a bit, we begin to see that once we understand just how much God loves us, once we understand that our hearts are always going to be struggling, always going to be searching, always going to be restless until we orientate ourselves properly, then we're going to just flounder, and sometimes invest ourselves in the wrong things. We are, from time to time, going to think that one thing over another is going to bring me this happiness that I seek. We're going to err in terms of where we look for our sense of well-being, but that's where God's mercy comes into play. God doesn't expect us to get it right. He just expects us to know where to go, and that's to him, as Zacchaeus did. He ran to Jesus. So too, do we, when we find ourselves lost, broken, confused, lonely, off-axis, seek the mercy of God, and then you'll know what salvation truly is.
Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.