The incarnation means that my God is small and weak. The basic Christian fact of the incarnation flies in the face of the human presupposition that God must be an overwhelmingly grand and glorious presence. How God loves to turn our human expectation on its head and do what is best for us, rather than what we expect of Him. We have a God who is willing to be so small and so weak as to be a little child and to seek and to save the little and the weary. This is a mystery that transcends all wonders.

This is the mystery confronting Zacchaeus ( Lk 19:1-10). We are quite clear on his problem. Zacchaeus was no Texan. "A wee little man was he," as the child's song goes, "A wee little man was he." He asked himself, "If God is so big, how could I approach him?" And when finally the wee little man was confronted by Jesus, who looked up into the sycamore tree and looked upon him with compassion, how Zacchaeus must've been shocked! If this was God, why was He a man just like him? How amazing that God should condescend to bear our humanity, to be born of a virgin, to live out his life as a teacher in obscure Judea, and after taking up His cross, to be crucified for us poor sinners! God's greatness is precisely in His littleness, His weakness, His suffering, His stooping to our need, His reaching into our situation, His bearing our flesh in His own person on the tree of the cross. As the apostle Paul says, "You, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him" ( Col 1:21-22).

Jesus invites Zacchaeus, the sinner, down from his tree, because climbing up is not the way to find the God who stoops to be where we are. Clambering up the ladder is the way of the Tower of Babel. The ascent to God by our own efforts collapses in the end; the ladder of our own efforts will always be pushed off of the parapet of heaven. There is no escalator up. St. John's beautiful simplicity puts it this way: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth....No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known" ( Jn 1:14, 18). The only seeing of God that is possible is the seeing of Zacchaeus. He sees the inviting God, who calls the sinner. He sees the God who comes to his house, sits down at his table, and communes with him. He hears this man, who is God, speak holy absolution. This God recovers that which was His in the first place. For this God comes to seek and to save that which was lost ( Lk 19:10).