In our culture, many people seek happiness. Advertisers con us into believing that the secret to happiness is to buy this product or holiday at that destination. Then our life will be happy, our family members will all get on marvellously with each other and life will be full of laughter. We know that advertising works, so many people buy into this shallow understanding of happiness.

The reality, though, learned through experience, is that true and lasting happiness can’t be bought so easily. Even if we do buy the advertised product, our family members won’t necessarily get on and there will still be stresses and anxieties aplenty, especially at this time of year. Happiness is fickle. It depends on how we are feeling on any day, how well we slept last night, what particular circumstances we are facing today and even our brain chemistry.

But joy is different to happiness. Joy is an emotion that comes from a different place to happiness. We can feel joy even if our circumstances are bleak. It’s an emotion that says we’re in the right place and doing the right thing. It often comes from God’s Spirit, which was the case for Mary, the mother of Jesus. Outwardly, her circumstances are not good … she is expecting a child but her husband-to-be, Joseph, is not the father. This will most likely cause her to become a social outcast and the subject of gossip.

Yet God’s promises to her about who this child will become and how God will transform the world through him fill her heart with joy as she sings the song we know as the Magnificat. God is acting to bring change and life and hope and Mary has a significant part to play. So she is filled with joy and sings her subversive song.

May we too find ourselves surprised by joy at what God is doing in our lives and in the world.

Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us find change quite difficult, especially as we get older. We feel comfortable in what is familiar and form lifetime habits and ways of thinking. This thinking includes our views of other people. This week’s Gospel story about a tax collector named Zacchaeus, however, shows that change is possible.

The usual interpretation of the story is that Zac is a despised individual who has grown very wealthy at the expense of the poor. The crowds label him a ‘sinner’ and grumble when Jesus goes to share a meal with him. The good news is that Zac has a change of heart after meeting Jesus and commits himself to give away half his money to the poor in the future. A lost person has been found and their life transformed by an encounter with Jesus. Zac changes for the better.

There is an alternative reading of the story, however, that turns on a point of grammar. The verbs that describe Zac giving money to the poor and repaying anyone he has defrauded are both present tense, which suggests actions and attitudes that Zac is already doing. So who needs to change? In this reading of the story, it is Zac’s neighbours who need to change their thinking towards him. Rather than seeing Zac as a despicable tax collector working for the Romans, Jesus encourages them to see Zac as he really is – a son of Abraham who is acceptable to God.

I wonder what prejudices we hold of certain types of people that might need to change – whether towards indigenous people, the LGBTQI community, other drivers on the road or even towards other Christians. The story of Zacchaeus shows us that we all have prejudices and blind spots but that we can change our thinking and our attitudes towards people.

One characteristic of we humans is that we have lots of feelings – about ourselves and about other people. Some of us are more in touch with these feelings than others, and some of us are better – or worse – at expressing these feelings in appropriate ways.

Ways to explore these feelings might include sharing your thoughts with a trusted friend (or counsellor), writing them down in a journal or talking to God about them in prayer. This last option may seem odd, but God is both a very good and patient listener and a person who can point us towards a better understanding of ourselves and others.

In this week’s Gospel reading, two quite different people share their personal thoughts with God through prayer. The first person, a Pharisee, would have been considered a respectable and upright citizen who took their religious faith quite seriously. Their prayer is rather self-focused – reminding God of their virtuous habits and comparing themselves – favourably – to other more dubious people like tax collectors and robbers. In this prayer, the Pharisee appears to do most of the talking – a bit like us often when we pray. As in the image, this person also puts themselves above other people.

The second person is one of the afore-mentioned tax collectors, who were despised by most people as traitors to Israel (since they collected taxes on behalf of the occupying Romans) and as greedy bastards (as they tended to overcharge people and pocket the difference). This person’s prayer is short and simple – they recognise how their life falls short of God’s ways – a harsh but probably true assessment of their practices – and they seek God’s mercy. The sting in the tail of this parable is that it is the second person, the tax collector, who goes home in right relationship with God, rather than the Pharisee. The moral of the story is that God wants us to come to a realistic and honest perspective of ourselves first and foremost and to be humble enough to seek God’s forgiveness. Only then can we hope to come to a realistic view of another person that avoids stereotypes and arrogance. Too often we are quick to judge another without knowing their full story.