• Habakkuk 1: 1-4; 2: 1-4

The text of Habakkuk describes an era when justice was “slack” and judgment “perverted.”  But, it also announces that the Lord will act boldly.

• Psalm 119: 137-144

The psalmist feels overwhelmed– “Puny as I am and despised”— but resorts to what he has come to trust: “Your decrees I have not forgotten… Your commands are my delight.”

OR

• Isaiah 1: 10-18

Isaiah conveys the Lord’s disgust with ceaseless and elaborate fasts and feasts.  “Wash yourselves… seek justice….”  The Lord is willing to “Argue it out….”  It is possible for your “scarlet,” “crimson” sins to become white as “snow,” or “wool.”

• Psalm 32: 1-8

The psalmist gives thanks and describes her experience of complete forgiveness.  “I said, ‘I shall confess my sins to the Lord/And You forgave my offending crime.'”  And she wants to “teach” others from her experience.

• II Thessalonians 1: 1-4, 11-12

In the tradition of Pauline letters, this “second” letter to the church in Thessaloniki praises their growing faith and their increasing love, which is exemplary for other Christian communities.  The writer holds them in his prayers, “so that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

• Luke 19: 1-10

Luke’s narrative highlights this unique encounter by placing it at the climax of his major section devoted to Jesus’ teaching and healing and the converts and growing list of enemies; it occurs just before Jesus’ final and fateful days in Jerusalem.  It is classic Luke! Luke sets the scene.  A man named Zacchaeus, “A tax collector and rich,” was eager to see Jesus as he passed through Jericho.  Because he was short, he “ran ahead and climbed a … tree….”  When Jesus got to the tree where Zacchaeus had positioned himself, he looked up at him and called to him to come down.  Take me home, Jesus asks, and Zacchaeus did “immediately.”  The crowd murmured, “he has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”  The response of Zacchaeus is quick and specific: “Half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor….”  And to those I have cheated, I will repay “four times as much.”  Jesus responds also immediately and to the point: “Today salvation has come to this house….”  Jesus assures those listening that he has come to the children of Abraham “to seek and to save the lost.”

Luke’s little scene is chocked full of big, unexpected, provocative, even scandalous,  surprises.  He provides just enough details about Zacchaeus to spark our imaginations; he is a short, rich, tax collector (hence a double-dealing collaborator with the occupying Romans who enriched himself by exploiting his own people) and in the eyes of everyone a blatant “sinner.”  Yet his curiosity causes him to shimmy up a tree when Jesus passes through town. Luke emphasizes that then everything happened very quickly.  Jesus spots Zacchaeus, tells him to “hurry” down from the tree and take him home.  So he “hurried and was happy to welcome him.”  In no time, the despised, diminutive man announces that he is going to give half of his money to the poor and anyone he has cheated he will repay 400%!  Jesus’ response is just as quick and definitive, “Today salvation has come  to this house!”

Generosity begets generosity; invitation can beget transformation; “salvation” is more accessible and immediate than we might have thought!

An understanding of “gift” is central to many post-Modern writers.  If one accepts it, it defines who we are and how we are to regard one another.  For many, the ultimate gift-giver is God, whose unexpected, undeserved, unrepayable, reckless impetuousness saturates our whole perception of this life and can transform us.  It is it’s sheer limitlessness, surprise and even a kind of madness that knocks us off our feet every time and induces its own kind of madness/impetuousness in us.

Concentrating on the treatment of “the gift,” especially in the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Robyn Horner writes in Rethinking God As Gift: Derrida and the Limits of Phenomenology: ” …there is every reason to conclude that the gift incites a kind of madness, that the gift only belongs to a kind of madness, that the gift ‘is’ madness.”  She asks, Yet who would rather stay sane than enter into this madness?  Part of her answer continues, “it is possible to trace in the madness of the gift the figure of desire, of expectation, of anticipation; of faith.”  Now her train of thought moves to all our future days, “throwing oneself into the madness of the gift is throwing oneself into the groundlessness of what has not been realized, and what cannot be realized.”  With Zaccaheus so vividly in our imaginations, her concluding thought hits directly, “such is the movement of desire, which is not grasping, but in being grasped.”  And then she adds, “such is the movement of madness to which I might surrender.”   (pp 199-200)

The crowd that day must have been baffled and peeved at how quickly the indiscriminate initiative of Jesus produced such quick results in such a notorious “sinner.”  With whom do we identify in Luke’s little masterpiece?  The disapproving majority or the one who immediately and spontaneously responded to and then initiated his own flood of generosity (400%!) ?  Jesus took the initiative, but someone had to respond for the exchange of generosity to commence.