An old Jewish friend (she insisted I use this description when I asked her permission to use her words) said to me this week “faith for the elderly is a comfort; faith for the young is a challenge”. Her words sat with me this week not because I believe it is that simple or that easy a dichotomy to describe. Rather, I’ve mulled her words over because my experience leads me to think that, perhaps, sometimes faith is both a comfort and a challenge and, rather annoyingly, can be so simultaneously.

Zacchaeus’s encounter with Jesus (Luke 19: 1-10) was the appointed reading for the Eucharist on Tuesday evening, held at Cuddesdon. The focus, which often is Zacchaeus’s stature, role as a tax collector and Jesus’s sharing a meal in his home, sometimes diminishes from the moment Jesus meets Zacchaeus: “And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him” (v.5). If this were a photograph made for our digital age, there, for me at least, would be the Barthesian punctum: Jesus’s gaze making clear the subject and object that we are also meant to see.

In her sermon, Dr Joanna Collicut, suggested that, in this story, we see one of those examples of the "existential moments in (and made possible by) the presence of Christ". Like the story of the woman at the well or the other myriad examples in the New Testament, encountering Christ becomes not so much about him as it is about the person he meets. Jesus’s gaze settles on Zacchaeus, but also on us. The discomfort and unease of Jesus’s gaze is perhaps only mitigated by an unwavering curiosity in us, about us, and a reach that touches all the in-between spaces of the clustered branches of our lives.

So I return to my friend’s words. If faith is a comfort and a challenge at different stages of our lives, how do we reconcile our lived (and sometimes turbulent) experiences with our faith? I’m not really sure, actually. I do think, though, that there is something there about the ceaseless questioning of God, and God’s insistent, but not threatening, questioning of us. Again, in those moments where life challenges faith, and faith challenges life, the invitation is to look back at God. We can then, perhaps, ask God “what on earth are you looking at?”. As one commentary writes, “we think that God knows simply what we know, sees simply what we see; and consequently we rarely stop to ask God what God actually sees or knows or feels”.

Since joining St Mary’s in September, there are have been so many wonderful Christ-filled encounters at the church. And often I am left wondering what Christ is looking at, seeing, and asking of me, and how can I respond. It is both a joy and a challenge to step down from the tree, with a deep empathy for the inadequacy felt by Zacchaeus, and “receive him joyfully” (v.6).

Dr Mariama Ifode-Blease
Community Engagement and Outreach Officer