We talked about St. Paul before meeting Christ; he had things he was very confident in. He built his life on that. But once he met Christ, all that paled in comparison. In Christ, he found something so much more valuable. One of the questions was, is there anything in your life that you would be willing to trade away for something that is so precious and valuable? What St. Paul found was a new relationship with Christ that surpassed everything else. It was ultimately a relationship with God. This relationship gave him security, peace, hope, joy. It was present and real, no matter what circumstances he was going through.
Indeed, for St. Paul, this relationship became even more real as things became more difficult. That’s why he mentions many beautiful sentences and passages. For example, he says, “I will boast in my suffering, because suffering produces endurance. And endurance produces character. Character produces hope.” These are genuine words from a real place. This relationship with Christ was precious and valuable, more than anything else. That’s what it means to know Christ, to find this relationship that will be a rock. That’s why we sing songs like “Cornerstone.” A cornerstone is a foundational stone on which a whole structure is built. When we build our life on this relationship, we can live with hope. We can live through anything and everything. That’s what St. Paul found. That’s the good news given to us. That’s something I pray can be real for all of us.
You know, every relationship has its origin story, right? I’m a sucker for these things. I love hearing how couples met, their unique origin story. It’s wonderful to ask questions like, “So, how did you guys meet?” Recounting these tales often brings about warm feelings. In a church circle, I enjoy asking, “How did you first come to this church?” and “How did this become your community?” Everyone has their own story about what they were doing before in life and how they coincidentally stumbled across this community, and how being part of it has influenced them. But most beautifully, I love origin stories about faith.
How did you come to know God? How did faith become real to you? When these questions are answered with honest sharing, they create the most beautiful stories because they’re so personal. They recount what you’ve been through and how God, in a tangible way, truly touched your life. So, when it comes to knowing Christ, there is always an origin story. It’s not just at the very beginning but also throughout our journey. There are always moments when this relationship with God gets rekindled. Therefore, it’s important to reflect on what this relationship is like. This morning, I want to explore the dynamics of an origin story of knowing Christ. This evening, I’ll delve more into the actual journey of knowing Christ and what it entails. But for now, I want to reflect on origins: what happens when we first meet Christ and what impact this meeting has on us.
So, that’s what I want to reflect on this morning. There’s a quote I’d like to share by Paul Tillich, a theologian from the sixties and seventies. He authored an important book in the history of Christian thought. In it, when he discusses the 19th and 20th centuries, he brings up a groundbreaking philosopher named Nietzsche. Nietzsche introduced the concept of the ‘last man.’ He predicted a time when traditional value systems would break down, and everyone would essentially try to find their own way in life. This ‘last man’ concept rings true in many ways. Tillich quotes Nietzsche’s ‘last man’ as someone “who knows everything, but does not care for anything.” Half asleep, half indifferent, he’s completely conformist and has abandoned creativity. He avoids being controversial at all costs and willingly accepts subjection to conformism In all respects. He is disinterested without any ultimate concern. He is bored, cynical, and empty.
What do you think? Quite interesting, isn’t it? I believe it’s a pretty accurate representation of life as we see it today. We know everything, as information is literally at our fingertips on our phones. However, despite having access to all this knowledge, we often find ourselves indifferent or uninterested.
There was a prophet named Ezekiel, a prophet of Israel. To give some historical context, the Kingdom of Judah, the homeland of the Jews, was conquered by Babylon’s mighty empire. When they conquered Judah, they deported the upper-class elites to Babylon. It was a deeply traumatic event. Everything the people had built their lives upon crumbled. When such trauma occurs, it shakes you to the core. It was in this context that Ezekiel arose and gave his people a message of hope. He said, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” I love this imagery: “I’ll remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” I think the whole Bible, what God is trying to do is precisely this.
Remove from us this heart of stone that we’ve grown, that’s calcified, hardened, and give you a heart of flesh. The ‘last man’ represents a world of hearts of stone. I believe that’s the environment we’re in, and it affects us, making our hearts stony too. So, I believe what Jesus came to do is precisely this – to awaken our hearts, to give us hearts of flesh, and ultimately, to set our hearts free. That’s what happens when we meet Christ. This is the origin of our journey with Christ, of knowing Christ. Our hearts awaken.
I want to reflect on two Bible stories and deeply examine these dynamics of our hearts becoming flesh, our hearts being set free. I think that’s what we need nowadays when we’re all talking about being bored, being cynical. We have no ultimate concern. We just want to live for the day. And the hardest stone, it can still feel pleasures. So we enjoy a lot of pleasure, we have a lot of fun, but ultimately it doesn’t fill our hearts. It’s just another way of getting through another day, enjoying that day.
Christ came to give us much more than that. So I want us to grapple together. In your groups too, I want you to grapple. How can we gain a heart of flesh? That’s what God created us for. This is how we should live life. So let’s do that.
He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
The story of Zacchaeus is one many of us learned in Sunday school. He was a tax collector, more than that, a chief tax collector. When the Romans conquered territories, their primary interest was revenue, necessary to fund an empire. They had to pay their legions well. To collect revenue, they cleverly recruited local people to collect taxes from their local populace.
They knew their communities, so they collected the taxes. They made a deal: meet our quota, and keep whatever you collect on top of it. We will give you the power of our state apparatus to enforce this. So there were huge incentives to become a tax collector. You could become very rich, with state power behind you. But think about how your own community would react. They probably wouldn’t like it. But this is how power works in any context.
In the slavery system in the US, plantation owners often appointed a strong slave as a taskmaster over other slaves to enforce production. This practice, similar to the tax collector system, separates these individuals from their community, leading to a sense of self-loathing. They become harsher on their own people. This is similar to what the Japanese did when they colonized Korea. They recruited lower class Koreans. As you may know, Korea was a very class-based society.
These people likely harbored resentment towards the upper classes. They were recruited to police and report suspicious activities, often with a sense of vengeance, creating significant division among the people. This is a similar context to the Jews. They were fiercely independent and proud, believing they were the chosen people of God, yet now politically and militarily conquered by a pagan empire. Imagine how they felt. Then you have someone like Zacchaeus, a puppet of this empire, enforcing upon his own people. Deep resentment arose, as it seemed he was acting against the will of God and his chosen people.
Tax collectors in the New Testament are often seen as sinners because they’re acting against the will of God. Zacchaeus wasn’t just a tax collector; he was a chief tax collector in charge of a region, responsible for collecting enough taxes for Rome while also enriching himself. What qualities do you think are required to do that? If any of you are in sales and work on commission, you understand that it requires aggression, even ruthlessness.
Just like in some movies about drug gangs, leniency is not an option. If you show softness, they’ll see it as a weakness and you won’t get your money. You must be ruthless. You have to suppress any conscience, doing what it takes. This hardens your heart. If you let emotions get to you, you won’t do your job well. The result is a heart of stone.
This relates to our human nature, which I touched on yesterday. We have a primitive animal side that needs to survive. The survival instinct is incredibly strong, just like any other creature on earth. It’s inherent to us because we need to eat and protect ourselves. But humans have developed an additional side to us, which I referred to yesterday as consciousness, an awareness. Another term for consciousness is heart. In biblical times, the heart, or ‘cardia’ in Greek, is not about emotion. It’s considered the seat of the soul, the center of the person, much like the mind that directs the person. That’s what the heart is. So whether you call it heart, consciousness, or something else, it’s about discerning what is right and wrong.
Human beings have developed that deep awareness, and that’s where ethics originates from. This awareness lets us question, “Is this the right way to live?” But there’s a spectrum, a lot of shades of gray, so there’s plenty of philosophical pondering about what is right and wrong. That’s all part of our consciousness. This is what distinguishes human beings from all other creatures. However, there’s often a kind of clash in humans between our primitive survival instincts and our consciousness that reflects on what is a good life.
The question becomes, which side is going to drive us? Will it be our consciousness that directs and even regulates our primitive side? Or is our primitive survival side going to take the wheel? I think that’s really what’s at issue here. But our primitive survival instincts are very powerful, driven by fear. Fear is an incredibly potent instinct, it truly propels us. On the other hand, it’s within our consciousness where we develop things like empathy, love, and a sense of peace and wellbeing. Animals, as far as we understand, don’t reflect on their feelings of contentment, they operate based on instincts such as hunger or the need to mate. But we as humans can reflect: “I’m feeling happy, or I’m not feeling happy.” Our consciousness is the gateway to God. It’s the spiritual side of us that senses a presence beyond ourselves.
The question becomes which side will be predominant in us. This is how Jewish law came into existence. When the Israelites escaped Egypt, they spent 40 years in the wilderness. Moses then descended from Mount Sinai, providing them with the Ten Commandments and additional laws. These guidelines were meant to show how they should live as God’s chosen people, driven more by consciousness and an understanding of what a good life looks like. As God’s chosen ones, they were set apart to be an example of a true human life for other nations to see, to be blessed, and to follow. That was the entire purpose of the law. It was a beautiful concept: we, as a people set apart, will live in this specific way. St. Paul had a profound understanding of this. As I mentioned yesterday, he was an expert in the law. Eventually, he came to realize that while the law could curb excessive behavior and regulate it to some extent, it couldn’t achieve what God truly desired: to change the human heart.
The aim is to change us so that our consciousness, our heart, is what drives our lives, not our instincts. According to St. Paul, while the law existed, our instincts were just too strong, too overpowering. We are essentially powerless against them. In life, for many of us, the crux of the matter is that the life we’re living isn’t the one we believe we should be living. The person we are at present isn’t the person we should be. We live in this tension, this contradiction between the person we are and the person we believe we should be. St. Paul saw that, regardless of how much we desire to be more like the person we should be, we are essentially powerless against our instincts. He identified and articulated this struggle excellently, as he demonstrated in Romans.
“We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”
Can you see this conundrum that St. Paul is talking about? Essentially, he’s saying, “The person I want to be is not the person I am.” That’s our reality. He talks about sin. Sin is this force. To St. Paul, it isn’t necessarily just individual actions. It’s this power that stops me from becoming the person I want to be, from doing the good that I want to do. There’s something blocking it. That’s the power of sin for St. Paul – a force that prevents me from truly living the good life that I aspire to.
This was, I believe, Zacchaeus’s inner struggle. Because when he heard that Jesus was coming, something stirred within him. We don’t know much else about Zacchaeus, but he heard Jesus was entering the town, and he felt a need to see him. Zacchaeus was short in stature, as Luke points out, perhaps both physically and in the eyes of others. But his clever mind, which had served him so well in his tax collecting, devised a way for him to see Jesus: he climbed a tree. This shows his urgent need to see what Jesus was all about. I don’t think he knew what to expect; he just wanted to see Jesus. And what happened? Jesus came by, stopped, looked up, and called him by name: “Zacchaeus.” More than that, Jesus said, “I’m coming to your house.”
He wanted to go there. You saw everyone else grumbling, questioning why Jesus would choose to go to Zacchaeus’s house. They were all well aware of Zacchaeus’s reputation; they knew he was not well-regarded. Despite all this, Jesus chose Zacchaeus. Nonetheless, he called. He wanted to go over there.
We see what happens. There’s a change. Reading this text carefully reveals a lot. Jesus didn’t utter a word to him. He didn’t ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He simply went to his house to eat. From Zacchaeus, we see a transformation. Jesus declares, ‘Salvation has come to this house.’ What is salvation in this story? Salvation is the change of heart, from stone to flesh. Meeting Christ is the moment when this heart of stone is pierced, transforming into a heart of flesh. This marks the beginning of the journey. It’s challenging to live with a heart of flesh in this world. There are many things that turn it back into stone.
I looked at my father, who’s in his seventies now, and I realized genes are very powerful. I’m a very idealistic person, and I don’t think it just comes out of nowhere. Genetics are strong, and I believe my father is naturally idealistic. But if you looked at him, you would never know because the stories I’ve heard about him suggest otherwise. As a child, he was the youngest of four kids and they escaped North Korea, moving down to the south. He grew up in a war-torn, redeveloping country. They were poor, but even in that context, he enjoyed growing small farm animals, like chickens.
It seems he had all these chicks that he would name, and they recognized his voice, following him wherever he went. According to stories from my aunt, there was even a day when a chick got hurt and died, and my father was in tears. I found that surprising. It didn’t align with the image of my father that I grew up with. I saw him as a tough man, not a soft-hearted one. I was taken aback to learn he had an imaginary world with these farm animals. I wondered, ‘Who is this man?’ Later, he did well on his university entrance exams, gaining admission to a prestigious university. He had the opportunity to join programs that could lead to excellent jobs.
However, he chose to study horticulture. He had this dream of owning a piece of land, growing things, and creating something of his own. But this was the sixties, and it was different from now. Unlike today, where you can switch majors several times, back then once you made a choice, you were stuck with it. I think he quickly realized this path wouldn’t lead anywhere in a war-stricken, poor country. He questioned how he would ever obtain land. He became aware of the reality of his situation, and afterward, he moved into teaching. He discovered that there were a lot of politics involved, and being not adept at politics, he wasn’t sure if he would make it in that field either.
They decided to immigrate to Canada, which was a challenging decision. Life here was harsh. They arrived with only $200 in their pockets, so they had to scrape and claw to get by. The harsh reality really sunk in. Such experiences can turn one’s heart into stone as survival instincts take over, leaving no room for the heart. That’s how my father lived. For me, I met Christ at a young age, in seventh grade. It was unusual because not everyone gets a strong sense of calling so young. By high school, I wanted to go into ministry, which seemed idealistic at the time. I remember my dinner routine in high school involved eating while reading physical papers like the Toronto Star. Afterward, I would walk around the house to aid digestion.
But I’m just dreaming about church and like, “oh, yo, man, it’s gonna be sick.” I’m a weirdo. It was so deep, man. I loved it. But as many of you know, it took more than 30 years for me to finally go into ministry. The journey was deep and something I truly cherished. As many of you know, fears and uncertainties get passed on from generation to generation. That’s why, during our last meeting, I emphasized the importance of reflection. What matters to you could also become important to your children. It’s been a struggle, a battle between a heart of stone and a heart of flesh, the brain versus consciousness and heart. Surviving in this world while living from your heart is no easy task. But meeting Christ initiates this journey. In Christ, we find assurance and trust.
Living by a heart of flesh requires trust. The relationship with Christ and knowing Christ is about trust, as Christ came to restore this trust. Let’s go back to the very beginning. God created the world in Genesis. After creating everything, God said, “It is good.” Everything was good. When He created humankind, it was very good. God created humankind in whose image? God’s own image. Here’s an interesting theological perspective: it’s not that human beings innately bear God’s image. Some theologians may disagree, but this is my interpretation. It’s not solely by our existence that we’re in God’s image. What God meant was, He created humankind for an intimate relationship with Him. In that union with God, His image is reflected in us.
You get that? It’s not me as a standalone human being for sake, but it’s me as a human being intimately connect with God and we reflect the image of God. It makes perfect sense to me because human beings we’re not meant to live alone. I said to Hi-C repeatedly, the worst form of punishment for a human being is to solitary confinement where they cannot interact with any human beings. We’re just not meant to. We cannot survive literally. And so even in a spiritual way, we are meant to be in deep connection union with God. And God told Adam, right, you can enjoy all the bounty of this earth, right? Enjoy it. But here, for your own good, for your own sake, you should not eat from this tree because it’ll lead to death. So I’m doing this for your own good. So for all parents, we know we want what’s best for our children, right?
We know what’s good for them and what’s not. For their benefit, we advise them against certain actions. Deb and I often feel like we’re constantly saying, “Don’t do this.” It’s challenging. While sometimes it might be excessive, generally it comes from a place of care. In a trusting relationship, when advised on what’s good, we trust and follow. When told what’s harmful, we trust and abstain. But what happened in the story of Genesis? “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?'” This question planted a seed of doubt. Does God truly have your best intentions at heart? That seed of doubt is the onset of mistrust.
God told me this, but is it really for my benefit? Or is He withholding something? This led to mistrust. As the story goes, they ate the fruit. The Bible mentions a fruit, but many picture it as an apple. I’m not sure if apples were in the Garden of Eden. After eating the fruit, “They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.'” Fear and hiding arise from lost trust. When a child loses trust in a parent, they become fearful and tend to hide.
Very deep. I think mistrust governs our whole world, doesn’t it? It affects everything from our intimate relationships. The cause of hardship and difficulty is mistrust. ‘Why did you say this? You don’t care about me or you don’t love me. I don’t trust that you do.’ Mistrust is at the root of all our problems. In friend groups too, what’s the issue? Mistrust. Among groups, among nations like the United States and China, there’s so much fear and mistrust.This mistrust creates conditions for all sorts of dubious behavior and actions that hurt. Mistrust breeds fear, and fear breeds actions that cause harm. It’s an endless cycle. This is what St. Paul’s talking about. We are living in this cycle that we are powerless to change. For St. Paul, it took a divine action on God’s part to break this cycle.
That action for St. Paul is Jesus Christ. How it manifests in our lives is this heart of stone. Mistrust breeds hearts of stone in us because we cannot trust in a good loving God to guide us in a world where survival is paramount amidst all the chaos. Do you see what I’m saying? Christ came to free us from this world, where we rely solely on our survival instincts, to transform our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. In the story of Zacchaeus and the woman at the well, it remains a mystery. What truly changes us? All we know from these biblical stories is that Jesus came, was present, and for someone like Zacchaeus, because of his decisions, the world around him rejected him.
He was abandoned, but Jesus came to him. We don’t know what he said, but his presence signified grace. He said, “Today salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham,” meaning Zacchaeus, you belong. The presence of grace changes us. Meeting Christ allows us to experience this grace in a world that has little of it. That is my prayer for all of us. It’s an origin story. Reflect on that. Have you experienced this grace where your heart feels affirmed in a world where it’s challenging to do so? I’ll leave it at that for now. I hope this provides some valuable reflection.
