Dinner with a perfect stranger!
Over the past few days there seems to be a recurrent theme of Scripture passages where Jesus is out dining or even invites himself to dinner! The Gospel both today and yesterday and tomorrow invite us to reflect on whom we welcome or don’t welcome in our homes. We are called to the hospitality of the heart. Yesterday we had the story of Zacchaeus. It is the story of the hospitality of God shining a light into Zacchaeus’ darkness. Jesus goes to eat at the house of a tax collector. This story presents two kinds of “lostness.” There is the lostness of Zacchaeus, a social outcast, a man who suffers from a different kind of poverty than we normally think of—and there is the lostness of the crowd, which we need to identify with ourselves. We who call ourselves Christians are not immune to this kind of lostness. Often, we judge and we look-down-upon, we fold our arms and we distance ourselves, and we make little biting comments about each other to others or in our own minds. Yet Zacc...