A reading from the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. On entering Jericho, now remember that's the city down near the Jordan and very close to the Dead Sea. It's tropical. It's an oasis, very beautiful city and it is so today. On entering Jericho, Jesus passed through the city.
There was a man there named Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector and a very wealthy man. He was trying to see what Jesus was like. But being short he was unable to do so because of the crowd. So he first ran out in front and then climbed a sycamore tree which is along Jesus' route in order to see him. When Jesus came to the spot, he looked up and said, Zacchaeus, hurry down.
I mean to stay in your house today. Zacchaeus quickly came down and welcomed Jesus with delight. When this was observed by the people, everyone began to murmur. He has gone into a sinner's house to be a guest, to be a tax collector was automatically to be a sinner in the eyes of the Jews. Zacchaeus, however, stood his ground and said to Jesus, I give half of my belongings, Lord, to the poor.
If I have defrauded anyone in the least, I pay him back fourfold. Then Jesus said to Zacchaeus, today, salvation has come to this house for this is what it means to be a son of Abraham. The son of man has come to search out and to save what was lost, and this is the gospel of the lord. Lord In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Attractive as that story is of Zacchaeus and our lord and all the ramifications of it, I cannot resist going back to the first reading about Eleazar.
Now in a word, here's what happened. Eleazar was a man of 90 years. Even today, that's considered old. And all he is asked to do is to eat a little bit of pork. Now there's nothing in the 10 commandments against eating pork, but this was just one of the thousand rules and regulations that came to be added and cumulatively came to be called the law, the law.
So that's important to notice that we have no direct command of God not to eat meat, I mean eat pork. Indirectly, maybe yes, but the point is the point I'm making is that this man Eliazar gave his life voluntarily for appearance sake. Here he is 90 years old and he's about to be all they ask him to do is to eat a little bit of pork and they're stuffing it into his mouth and he spits it out at them. You could see the the activity of that scene. The old man throwing it out as fast as they can stuff it in.
He has friends among his persecutors. They don't want to be doing this to this poor old guy. They're sorry for him. They think he's silly. So they come up with a plan.
We will bring you some of your own meat and just go through the motions of eating it and you won't be doing anything wrong because it's your own meat. And at the same time, you'll be satisfying the king who will be think who were thinking you're eating his old pork. So there wouldn't be anything wrong in what he was doing. The king would be satisfied, and he wouldn't have his life beaten out of him. A very attractive alternative to being beaten to death.
But what does Ali Azar say? He says, I'm an old man. Let me no. Let me I can't improve on what it says here if I can find it. He says, but Eliazar made up his mind in a noble manner worthy of his years, worthy of his years.
Age brings worthiness. And the dignity of his advanced years, age brings dignity or should. The merited distinction of his gray hair. Think of this in terms of going into some retirement home and see how true this ain't. And then he goes on, and of the admirable life he had lived from childhood.
All of those points you can, you know, you can count them off. And so, Eliazar said he would be loyal to the holy laws given by God. Because he said, even if I even if what I'm doing isn't wrong, eating the good meat, the beef or whatever, lamb perhaps, I will be giving the appearance of eating the pork. And what will the young men think of me? They won't know what I've done.
They won't know how we've disguised it. They will think I have surrendered to the king's whim of eating his old pork. This is an admirable passage. Look at the look at the dignity, the respect, the value it gives to age. That he expects himself to act his age with respect, with dignity, with nobility.
He says, what if I to lose? I'm 90 years old and I've been a I've been a loyal son of God from my childhood. I'm going to throw that all away now. And you know this is what happens with many people in their old age. When Barbara Wright died just before she died in Georgetown Hospital, some people were there and said would you like us to say some prayers with you?
Barbara said yes I would because and here's what she said, because you know it's so good to have someone pray for you when you can't pray for yourself. That's what happens when sometimes when we're in the worst possible situation we cannot pray. Now you'll say what how does that tie in with Eliazar? It ties in plenty. It ties in this way.
Eliazar is a man of the old law. We are men and women of the new law. Eliazar is a man under the law of God of not eating pork and he won't eat the pork and he lays down his life for it even to just keeping the appearances of it. He lays his life down for it. That's his sincerity.
But he's alone. He's alone. All he can appeal to is to his old age, to his admirable life, to his dignity, to his nobility. A Christian faced with the same we're faced with these alternatives, but we're not alone. We belong to God's living church.
Living church. Living church. I think of a man like Colby going into that dungeon to know he's going to be starved to death. It's it's not a very bad parallel, you know. Now when Colby went down into that dungeon, he was about as alone, as isolated as any human being could possibly be.
And yet he was not alone as a Catholic, as a Christian, as a priest, and he knew it. He knew it. He knew he was with the company of the faithful of the church. I've said so many times, do we realize the company we keep? The associates we have, not in the sense of a memory of like we can talk about Lincoln or his last night that I thought it was a very fine program on Kennedy recalling all of those magnificent, spectacular, and dramatic incidences almost and the crises he passed through.
It isn't that kind of a thing at all. We're talking about a living present. When we talk about Saint Paul, we're not talking about a memory of a man who lived about several thousand years ago. We're talking about a man who is living with Jesus Christ with me today. And my problem is, am I living with him?
There's the problem. That's what I have to be sure of. There's no doubt. There's no doubt at all about Christ being with me. My choice is whether I will be with him.
The name