November 4, 2010

"Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. (Luke 19:1-6)

A few years ago on a Friday afternoon, my family and I were on our way to the Wisconsin Dells for the weekend. Heavy flooding caused portions of I-90 westbound between Madison and the Dells to be shut down. All cars were diverted to the smaller 2-lane State Highway 51 causing it to become overburdened with bumper-to-bumper traffic. One of the cities that Highway 51 runs through is the city of Portage, Wisconsin. The road through Portage was so crowded that when at one intersection, even when the traffic light turned green, we couldn't go - simply because there was nowhere to go! The only reason we we had to contend with the major traffic jam - the only reason we were even in Portage, was because we needed to go through it to get to the Dells. In this Gospel Lesson we find Jesus entering Jericho, and His whole purpose for entering Jericho was because He needed to go through it to get to Jerusalem, "Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through." And in attempting to pass through, Jesus ran into a traffic jam of His own - there was quite the crowd surrounding Jesus as he traveled the road through Jericho. It's possible that many of those people who were adding to the human traffic jam were people of Jericho who had just witnessed Jesus give the blind man his sight outside the city gates, people who were following Jesus to see what He was going to do next. What Jesus was planning on doing next was making His way through town to the other side - again His purpose in entering Jericho was to pass through. But Jesus' purpose in entering this world superseded and took precedence over his purpose for entering Jericho. At the end of this account, a few verses later, Jesus explains what His whole purpose in entering this world was, He tells Zacchaeus: "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:10) This primary purpose took Jesus' focus off the crowded course and to the lost Zacchaeus.

On our daily paths through life, whenever one of "the lost" looks our way (as Zacchaeus was looking Jesus' way), we have an opportunity to show Jesus to them, to "let [our] light shine before [them.]" (Matthew 5:16) But do we sometimes fail to shine or fail to even pay any attention to the lost at all, because our path is so crowded with all the activities and responsibilities that consume our day? The holidays that are fast approaching only seem to add to to the congestion and worsen our daily activity traffic jam. When I was driving in that bumper-to-bumper traffic jam in Portage, I put the blinders on and focused on the bumper of the car ahead of me. Do we ever find ourselves putting on the the blinders to focus on the activity that's ahead of us in our bumper-to-bumper daily schedule? We should pray that God would take our blinders off so that we might not only gain peripheral vision, but that we would scope out the opportunities we have to share Jesus with the watching world. "The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost," - the saving part Jesus took care of - what's left for us is to emulate the seeking part, and we have the perfect template when we use Jesus as our pattern. We should pray that we become more and more like Jesus so that our true purpose in this world - to seek the lost and make disciples of the lost - always takes precedence over all the other bumper-to-bumper activities that so often crowd our path.