When you’re
traveling from Galilee in the north to Jerusalem in the south, as Jesus has
been doing for several weeks, maybe months, the last town you come to before
you go up the hill to the holy city is Jericho, and Jesus passes through there.
For that whole journey, up until this point, Jesus’ ministry has sought out the
poor and the sick, foreigners and social outcasts. And Luke, of all the gospel
writers, highlights this perspective on Jesus’ mission the most. It’s the
people at the margins—be they women, or children, or lepers, or non-Jews, who are
lifted up as centerpieces of God’s kingdom. God’s mercy in Christ Jesus comes
first to those who have been excluded, to those who have little relative power.
Then, suddenly,
here in Jericho, when the crowd that is following him is at its largest, right
before he enters the city that will claim him as king, his final encounter is
with Zaccheus.
And Zaccheus is anything but powerless and
poor. He is a chief tax collector, so he likely knows most everyone in the town
and has some kind of influence over their financial well-being.
Zaccheus is wealthy. If he is like most
tax collectors of his time, he has found a way to enriching himself somehow from
what he has collected from the people. Along the way he has clearly been
promoted, so he has probably earned favor from the Roman government and gotten
kickbacks as a result of it. If you’re looking for the type of person that
Jesus would reach out to based on the shape his ministry has taken so far, Zaccheus
would probably not fit that bill. He is a person of great means and, in
addition to that, many of Jesus’ more direct and unsettling teachings have been
about the dangers of money.
Funny enough, the
main thing that Zaccheus is known for is his size. He’s a “wee little man,” which
was a character trait looked down on by people of that time (pun intended). Unfair
though it was, one’s stature was thought to be a reflection on one’s
personality. Right or wrong, I have always imagined Zaccheus to be like that
short little guy Vizzini in The Princess
Bride. He’s the guy who says, “In-con-ceivable!” If you’ve watched the
movie, you know Vizzini’s got influence out of proportion to his size. He has some
wealth, and he has some power, but no one really seems to like him. He’s not
the type of guy, for example, that people are going to give up their front row
seat for when a famous guy comes through town.
So, of all the
people Jesus could have chosen that day to speak with, to make a point of extending
God’s mercy to, Zaccheus would not have been the most obvious. It would have
been…(wait for it)…in-con-ceivable! But Jesus is never going to be contained by
our definitions and expectations. How often do we try to decide who Jesus is
and is not going to approach and befriend, or direct what Jesus is going to do?
Based on their
reaction, that is clearly what the crowd following Jesus is doing. This doesn’t
fit their picture of what Jesus is. Up until this point he has tended to
befriend the poor and the downtrodden and now, at the last, he is freely
associating with this wealthy person, someone they see as a scoundrel. And
Jesus doesn’t just approach and address this chief tax collector, he invites
himself into his home, a very uncommon thing to do! By announcing he will come
to Zaccheus’ house, he is essentially putting himself in Zaccheus’ debt. To be
a guest in someone’s home meant sharing table fellowship with that person, which
was the most intimate kind of public relationship you could have.
Zaccheus’
reaction to this gracious news is astounding. Because of this interaction with
Jesus, becoming his friend, we hear of his generosity to the poor and his
honesty in his business dealings. He gives half of his possessions to the poor and
repays those he has cheated. “Today salvation has come to this house,” Jesus
says, reminding us that God’s eternal grace and redemption is not something
that only happens once we die. God’s kingdom is something that finds us even
now, in this life.
It is not clear
whether the two of them ever make it to Zaccheus’ house, but we may assume that
they do, that Jesus and Zaccheus have a meal together. The joy and rich life
that Jesus brings us is not something we must wait for. It comes to us now as
Jesus meets us and transforms us with God’s mercy and forgiveness. We turn and
serve our neighbor, for we meet the face of Jesus in her or him.
With Zaccheus,
in this last stop before Jerusalem, we get the clearest, most direct
description of what Jesus is all about. He says he has come to seek and save
the lost. And the lost, as it turns out, can be anywhere. They can be along the
side of the road of Jericho, down in a ditch, beaten and left to die. They can
be at the top of a sycamore tree. We know this: there is nothing anyone needs
to “be” in order to receive God’s mercy other than lost. You don’t need to be
poor. You don’t need to be rich. You don’t need to be churched, fluent in the
Bible. You don’t need to be unchurched. All you need to be is lost, distant,
endangered. and the lost, distant, and endangered can be anywhere. In fact, they
are us!
And as he
continues up that hill out of Jericho into Jerusalem, Jesus will increasingly
feel lost, himself. He will become abandoned by the crowd that currently loves
him and the disciples that he has called to help him. Eventually Jesus will
even feel abandoned and lost from God, his Father. To the top of another kind
of tree Jesus himself will climb, rejected and ostracized by the people. He
becomes all of our lost-ness, all of our estrangement from God. All of that gets
nailed on the tree of the cross so that God can transform us all into his found people.
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| "Jesus receives Zaccheus" Church of the Good Shepherd, Jericho |
“To seek out and
save the lost.” It strikes me that this is the core message of the Reformation,
the banner that Martin Luther held high as he tried to re-direct the church back
to its gospel center almost 500 years ago. He thought that the church of Christ
had adopted some practices and beliefs that sent the message that people were
not saved by God’s grace alone. People had to pay a certain price or go through
certain rituals not found in scripture in order to be assured of God’s love and
redemption. And Luther knew this flew in the face of what Jesus does in the
gospels, especially with people like Zaccheus. Jesus says, “Come down,
Zaccheus. I know your find it inconceivable that you could host me in your
house, around your table, but that’s where I want to be.”
Five hundred
years after Luther’s efforts at reforming the church, Christians, at least in
the West, find themselves in very interesting times. Tomorrow, to kick off the
500th year since the Protestant Reformation, Pope Francis will be
participating in a worship service with Lutherans in Lund, Sweden. It is the
first time in history that a Pope will mark this event in such a way. People
are calling it ground-breaking, saying that it may open up new ways for
Lutherans and Roman Catholics to be people of faith together. Already, in the
last twenty years, all the condemnations and accusations that these two
religious groups formally hurled at each other have been repented of and
repealed. Significant progress is being made for our two church bodies to one
day come together in some way. And that will have major positive implications
for all of Christianity and the world.
We are also in
interesting times because our societies are becoming more and more fragmented,
socially, politically, and economically. There is a whole host of reasons for
that, but suffice it to say we all feel that in some way. The church as an
institution may not be powerful or influential in the same ways that it used to
be. Some of us may lament that, wishing for the good old days, but we must
remember that in any day the church always has the gospel. Into our fractured
and pluralistic societies and world we get to announce what Zaccheus hears: “Come
down. I’m coming to your house today.” Jesus is still traveling, walking,
calling people together from the bottom and the top of the world to unite
around a table where he is the holy guest, where he gives his body precisely
because we don’t deserve it.
There was this
story earlier this week about a mom and dad with a son in the Washington, D.C.,
public schools who found out that one of his friends often came to school
hungry. The parents told their son to invite him home for dinner and to sleep
there, if he needed it. As it turns out, that kid knew someone else who didn’t
have a stable home life, and he, too, started to show up at the Frantis’ house
for supper each night. Pretty soon they started hosting sometimes up to 20 kids
from the area, most of whom were dealing with homelessness, poverty, and the
wounds of abuse or assault. In a word, they all feel lost, and they find around
the Frantis’ humble table a warm meal, a loving community, and a place they
feel found, where they belong.[1]
What an image
for the church—an always reforming church—as we enter these exciting and
interesting times! A church that is constantly being renewed by God’s word, is
a church that concentrates on seeking out the lost, that is not doing something
for its own members but widening the circle to bring down even the people from
the sycamore trees, giving them a place to gather and be fed. Grounded in Scripture,
encountering a crucified and risen Lord, we are all the lost whom Jesus has
found. Whether we’re Lutheran, or Roman Catholic or Presbyterian or we’re-not-sure-yet, may Zaccheus teach us that
Jesus comes to our house today. May we learn that God’s grace is beyond our
understanding, defies human boundaries and borders. It claims all of us, in
spite of our sinfulness.
May we learn from
all our church leaders, Luther and Zaccheus, and mostly from Jesus on the cross,
that God’s grace is, quite literally …in-con-ceivable!
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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