This is the homily I preached at the Opening Mass for the 2018 Lasallian Buttimer Institute Summer Programme
Readings: Wisdom 11: 22 - 12:2 / Psalm 145: 1-2, 8-9, 10-11, 13, 14 (R/v cf 1) / Luke 19.1-10
Sisters and brothers, have you ever considered climbing up higher?
I suspect we struggle with this thought, let alone do it. It involves too much effort and sweat, we say. So we don’t climb up higher often. We would rather find easier ways to climb higher if we have to.
Yet we have climbed to come here today. Not just the many steps to come up this Chapel for Mass, but to reach Manhattan College for our Buttimer Programme. Wherever we have come from and wherever we disembarked at in New York City, be it Penn Station, JFK or Newark, airports or a bus station in the city, we have all metaphorically climbed up to be here at 109 feet above sea level.
This is a detail many of us would not know. But it is a significance we should attend to and reflect on as we begin our Buttimer experience.
Climbing up higher is very much part of today’s gospel.
We know this gospel well. Zacchaeus is a short man. He wants to see Jesus. There is a crowd. He climbs up a tree. He encounters Jesus. They return to Zacchaeus’ home. Zacchaeus has a change of heart; he lives differently.
Many homilies focus on the act of seeing and the miracle of transformation. Today I’d like to suggest we focus on Zacchaeus’ climb because it offers us three thoughts to meditate what Buttimer can mean for us.
First, climbing up creates necessary distance. Zacchaeus climbs up the tree because of his limitation and the discrimination he suffers as a tax collector. If he stayed on the ground, he would not be able to see Jesus. He would be caught up in the crowd. He would be overwhelmed by the masses and submerged by their collective concerns. He would be prevented from meeting Jesus. And so, he climbs up in hope to see Jesus. This is his deepest desire.
We are like Zaccheaus in Buttimer. We want to see too. We want to see and encounter John Baptist de la Salle better. To know him as Founder. To understand his pedagogy. To live his spirituality.
But we too are caught in the crowd that surrounds us every day. The crowds around us immerse us in many everyday concern each of us has as educator or administrator, as family and friend, as person and believer. In the everydayness and crowdedness of life that we are so closely connected with, we cannot see so clearly.
So we need to climb. We need to climb physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Most of all we need to climb spiritually to see, to know and to follow de la Salle, and the Jesus he himself followed. Buttimer affords us space to climb. It is a graced space.
Second, climbing up gives right perspective. Climbing up, now higher, Zacchaeus can see better. He sees the crowds below. He observes the action unfolding. He recognises Jesus coming towards him and the crowds. Most of all, climbing up higher allows Zacchaeus to see Jesus calling out to him -- Jesus calling out to him, even before he called out to Jesus. Here is true perspective Zacchaeus learns: that it is Jesus who always comes to him, and to all, first. This is right perspective he gains.
Here we are at Buttimer. Many reasons bring us here. Our desires and hopes. Someone else’s instructions and commands. Time to renew. Time to rest. Time to take a bite of the Big Apple. Whatever our reasons, I’d like to suggest that our climb to be here to Buttimer will help us open our eyes, and even more open our hearts to the one who has really called us here: God alone. Not ourselves. Not someone else. Everything in Buttimer can help us to become aware of this right perspective, so as to know this truth.
But even more this, I believe God calls us here to give us clearer perspective of who it is we follow, whose pedagogy we use in class, whose spirituality informs our daily prayer and our constant charity: de la Salle.
Third, climbing up helps us on our way again. Jesus calls out to Zacchaeus who is up a tree. But he encounters Jesus by calling him down to continue his way in life again. To continue as a changed man however. To continue like Jesus does with compassion for others.
This transformation is the mercy of God for his own creation; God is never one to discard his creation. He always loves it. His love transforms the created to become a bit more divine by becoming a lot more human each time his mercy forgives and renews. We hear this truth in our first reading. This must be today’s good news we hear and our hope for the journey onward.
Hope because we who have climbed up to Buttimer will climb down when this programme ends and we have to return back to our workplaces and homes. The value of Buttimer in our lives will not be in the knowledge we gain. Rather, it will be in the transformed lives we bring to all. God’s gift of transformed lives we can have when we predispose ourselves to Jesus, like Zacchaeus did, by climbing up.
Will you and I predispose ourselves to encountering Jesus who wants to transform in our choice to climb up in Buttimer?
I believe all of us want to be transformed because we know the grace of climbing up is to meet Jesus. Here in Buttimer, God is opening our eyes and hearts to know more fully, to love more intimately and to follow more closely Jesus who worked in de la Salle’s life and ministry. And Jesus worked particularly by empowering de la Salle to do the very opposite of climbing up -- to lower himself before God, to empty himself for God, to create space in his life to be with God, in such ways as:
- to give up wealth and become poor for the Brothers and students to have more and have life;
- to give up the status of a canon-priest and to remain a founder-priest so that the mission could thrive; and
- to give up control and command and to led God increasingly and imperceptivity shape him and the mission.
This downward movement of becoming less so that God can become more in us is really what you and I are being challenged to embrace in our choice to climb up in Buttimer.
Will we dare to do this by giving ourselves permission to climb out of our comfort zones about who we are as Lasallians, to breakdown our fixed mind-sets about Lasallian education, to expand our understanding of de la Salle, and even during these two weeks, to reach out to one and another in the spirit of Lasallian fraternity?
May be if we dare to do some of these -- totally, freely and loving – and more during Buttimer -- we might come to know that what was so true and alive for de la Salle in history must also be for us today. What this truth, this wisdom, this joy is is what we see and hear in a transformed Zacchaeus.
And it is simply this: that our lives have no meaning apart from Jesus who lives in us. Indeed, “live Jesus in our hearts forever”.
Preached at Buttimer Institute, Manhanttan College. New York City
photo: kbat.com (Internet)
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