In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen, my Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence, I ask your pardon for my sins, and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My emaculate mother, St. Joseph, my Father and Lord, my guardian angel intercede for me.

Well, today we have in the Gospel the account from St. Luke about Zchaeus, the tax collector, who got his salary from the Romans,

and we can imagine he was making a good salary, and was quite well off, and provoked a certain antagonism from the people because all that money was gotten

off their backs because he would charge them taxes and keep all that money for himself,

or a lot of it, at least for himself.

And indeed, many public officials at that time were guilty of such abuses

like this. So people really painted him with the same brush as all the rest. So the gospel

implies that this man also had things to seek forgiveness for, but it is really beautiful to see that despite

the fact that he had committed wrong we don't know exactly how much but we know

he committed wrong that he had been unjust that he kept you know, money that was really not his own,

he nevertheless was quite keen about seeing Jesus.

He was eager about this idea of being able to see you, Lord Jesus,

meaning that he had both a good curiosity and also an openness to Jesus, to this man that he had heard so much about.

But he really wanted to see Jesus for himself.

He wasn't going to go just by hearsay and what he had heard.

He didn't really trust entirely the gossip that he was hearing.

And one can imagine that he was moved by grace because his keenness was not simply an external curiosity.

And I would imagine that there were other tax collectors around two that were, well, also unjust,

and maybe even received a grace from God, but they resisted, and they didn't change or convert, as we see in the story of Zakeos.

They kind of dug their heels in, they would not change their lifestyle. As we will see, Zakeos. They kind of dug their heels in. They would not change their lifestyle.

As we will see, Zakeos changed his lifestyle. It completely changed his life, really, after meeting

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