PRIEST: With echoes of the Holy Year of Mercy three years ago, we today celebrate God’s great yearning for us, His compassion and acceptance of us – His passionate desire that we should allow him to love us and so to change us … to restore us to our truest selves. We hear how Jesus reaches out to someone everyone else rejects and calls a corrupt, wealthy but outcast man, Zacchaeus, to conversion – coming to know the power of Jesus’ love converted him from his old life of injustice and sin to a new life of generosity and holiness. Let us now allow the mercy of God to change and convert us into the ways of the Kingdom.
READER: When we hide from the injustice that lurks in our own hearts,
the prejudices hidden in our own minds…
LORD HAVE MERCY …
When we judge others, condemn them and shun them,
And yet are not honest about our own failures and sins…
CHRIST HAVE MERCY …
When we are afraid to let God love us and change us,
when we fail to struggle for honesty and justice in our world…
LORD HAVE MERCY …
PRIEST: May the God who comes searching for us speak our name,
bring us forgiveness, lead us into justice and heal our hardness,
bringing us all into everlasting life…
AMEN!