PRIEST: Today we 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. As he answered the call of Jesus, he came to know the power of Jesus’ love converting him from his old life of injustice and sin to a new life of generosity and holiness. We all stand in need to deeper conversion, welcoming God’s mercy into our hearts. 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!