Luke 19:1-10, from Proper 26 (31)
Zacchaeus, the funny little man in the funny little story that opens the 19th chapter of St. Luke’s gospel, perhaps comes off as comic relief during the otherwise intense, ominous story of Jesus’ trip through Jericho on his way to betrayal and execution in Jerusalem. I remember much being made in Sunday school when I was a boy about the facts that Zacchaeus was short and that he resorted to climbing a tree so he could see Jesus over the heads of the rest of the crowd. Show of hands: Who remembers the song? It started out, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he …” Bonus points if you can still do the motions.
Luke may well have smiled as he penned the story, and I think we’re allowed to do the same. It’s amusing enough to imagine a middle-aged short guy with a desk job scrambling up a tree. Now imagine him doing so while wearing, basically, a dress, and with a crowd watching from below, elbowing one another, pointing and snickering. And while the more benevolent souls among us might ordinarily feel sympathy for someone enduring such humiliation, it would take a true saint to feel sorry for Zacchaeus. He was a notorious traitor and swindler, five feet of man and 10 feet of attitude, a guy whom everybody wanted to throat punch and would have long ago had they not feared what his Roman employers would do in retaliation. The only means of revenge available to Jericho’s citizens was to hate and exclude him, to let him know, with crystal clear certainty, that nobody loved or even liked him, and catching him up a tree – both figuratively and literally – was a perfect opportunity for doing so.
And that’s precisely where this funny little tale turns dead serious, because Jesus, rather than joining the crowd in ridiculing the treed runt or at least having the decency to ignore him, instead comes to his defense. Imagine the crowd’s stunned silence, and then scandalized whispering, after Jesus calls Zacchaeus by name and invites himself to eat at Zacchaeus’ table – a table furnished with the coins Zacchaeus had stolen from the crowd’s own pockets and purses. Jesus’ granting mercy and personhood to the blind beggar whom everyone had tried to ignore a few verses back had been, perhaps, refreshing and inspiring. But this … this, the crowd thinks, is way over the line.
So that’s the take-away, then, is it? Be kind and loving, even to people you have a right to despise? Alas, no. If you learn nothing else from me about Jesus, I hope you learn this: Jesus isn’t merely another in the long line of philosophers and moral teachers before and since who have urged us to become better people and have tried to show us how to do it. What happens next between him and Zacchaeus helps show that Jesus is much, much more.
Sometime later, at some place (Luke would lose a letter grade or two in a journalism class for leaving out the “where” and “when” in this part of the story), Zacchaeus “stood up” and made a little speech. It was probably at his house, in front of Jesus, any cronies Zacchaeus had rounded up for the occasion, and quite possibly a number of Jericho’s more respectable citizens who, despite their dislike for Zacchaeus, had been lured there by their desire to see and hear Jesus.
“Look, Lord!,” Zacchaeus says. “Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” Jesus then makes a little speech of his own. “Today salvation has come to this house,” Jesus says, “because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Luke doesn’t tell us why either Zacchaeus or Jesus said what they said, what they meant, how the crowd reacted, or whether Zacchaeus followed through on his promises. Luke’s grade in that journalism class would be down to an “F” by now. But here’s an interpretation that I think is consistent with what Luke has been telling us about Jesus all along:
Everyone within earshot would have understood that Zacchaeus was saying he had decided to become a rule keeper. He was referring to a rule in Exodus 22:1 specifying that anyone who stole and slaughtered an ox or a sheep had to make restitution to the victim of the theft. A stolen ox had to be replaced with five new oxen, and a stolen sheep, with four new sheep. Note, here, that Zacchaeus gave himself the discount rate and also added an “if I have cheated anybody” hedge, presumably so that the exact impact on his bank account could be decided later on a case-by-case basis. It’s also worth noting, perhaps, that this is the same rule King David, that fellow rascal, had in mind when he declared that the rich man in Nathan’s story who had confiscated a poor man’s pet lamb and had turned it into dinner for a guest should be required to give the poor man four new lambs. Nathan’s story, of course, turned out to be a parable designed to call David out over his sin with Bathsheba.
It’s telling, I think, that Luke records no rejoicing or “Praise God, Zacchaeus has seen the light!” eruptions from the crowd here, as he did in last Sunday’s story about Jesus’ restoring the blind man’s sight. I can picture the crowd thinking, instead, something like, “That’s it? Dude rips us off for years with a Roman Legion at his back, and now he’s off the hook, just like that? I don’t care what Moses said in Exodus – this isn’t anything close to justice! Where’s the nearest pile of rocks? What we need, here, is a good stoning.”
Which puts Jesus’ speech in a whole different light. Allow me to paraphrase. Salvation, Jesus says, isn’t like the food and wine you have decided to put here on this lovely table at your own expense, Zach. You can’t get salvation by paying for it. Remember all that stuff I said in a sermon on a certain mountain a while back? Offer your remaining cheek to someone who has just belted you across the other one. Don’t let a mugger leave with your coat unless you’ve also given him your shirt. Never hate; it’s the same as murder. Never lust; it’s the same as adultery. Dig your eye out of its socket or chop off you hand if either will cause you to sin. That’s the real price of salvation, buster, and it’s miles above even your pay grade. Fortunately for you, I am Salvation, and I invited myself to your house when my showing up here was the last thing you or anyone else expected to happen. Congratulations on your having done what is required to rejoin the “son of Abraham” club that all these angry people watching us right now have excluded you from and really don’t want to let you back into. I’m telling you that the whole lot of you are lost, publican, Pharisee and everyone in between, and that you’re just as blind and poor as was that beggar I bumped into outside the city limits. But I’m on my way to Jerusalem to do for you the only thing that can be done to save any of you.
As the kids like to say these days, “Oh, snap!” Perhaps Luke chopped off the story because what followed involved too much profanity to repeat! In one blow, Jesus devalues Zacchaeus’ newfound piety and equates it to the lifetime of devotion and rule-keeping that the crowd thinks has made God absolutely gaga over them compared to jerks like Zacchaeus. No humanly possible amount of rule-keeping is going to save anyone, Jesus says, so it’s basically all the same. Here in a few years, a black-hearted fellow named Paul whom you folks haven’t heard of yet is going liken your good works to a pile of … well, that’s not exactly dinner table conversation. And he’s going to be exactly right. Instead, your salvation has simply walked, uninvited, into Jericho – and into this house – on his own two sandaled feet. If you think your sheep swapping is going to let your survive standing before God, feel free to try. But the smart money is on stepping aside and letting the Son of Man stand before God in your place.
At least that’s my take on what Jesus meant. It’s good to do good, and someone who claims to be a Christian but rarely does anything good probably needs to do some soul searching. But Jesus didn’t come to tell us or show us how to be more righteous. He came to make us righteous by laying down his life for us. Let’ see Buddah, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Gandhi, King or any of those other guys, as good and as inspiring as they were, pull that off. When Christians say Jesus was divine, that’s part of what they mean. Jesus was – make that “is;” the tomb is, after all, empty – a man, but not only a man. He is both a man and God, and through him, God has given – given! – salvation to anyone who will stop trying to earn it and simply receive it.
