Thursday March 18th: Zacchaeus: Luke 19 v 1-10: ‘Today salvation has come to this house.’
Zacchaeus was perhaps a bit like the school bully, somebody nobody liked but everyone was afraid of. First and foremost because he was collecting taxes for the hated Roman authorities you had no choice but to pay him if you didn’t want to land in hot water. As a chief tax collector (v 2) he would have staff working under him and would be in an ideal position to cream off whatever he wanted and make himself extremely wealthy; something he took full advantage of (v 8b). He lined his own pockets at the expense of others and, to cap it all, he was not even a Roman, he was ‘a son of Abraham’ which made him, in many people’s eyes, a collaborator.
And yet, if you will pardon the pun, there was something in his life that didn’t add up. He had everything he wanted materially and you would have thought that he would be the last person to show any interest in the itinerant rabbi with his uncompromising views on the perils of wealth. So why is he scrambling up a tree to get a better view (v 4)? None of those who worked for him or were being cheated by him would have known it, but he was a deeply unhappy man. One of very many who have discovered that possessing everything you could possibly want and more does not bring fulfilment or contentment but is actually a road to nowhere.
This story is about how it is possible, whoever you are and however far down the wrong road you have travelled, to embrace change. I always find it inspirational to read of people who have found themselves in the grip of addiction, whether that be to drink, drugs, gambling, food, computer games or whatever, who manage to turn their lives around and get back on track. I wonder how much of an addiction money had become for Zacchaeus and how much of his life he had spent worshipping at the shrine of mammon? And yet there is still hope for him.
As for the locals, they did not share that hope! It’s clear from the text that Jesus’ decision not just to talk to Zacchaeus but to go to his house for a meal (v 5) did not go down well at all (v 7); their unanimous view was that he was the last person whose hospitality Jesus should be enjoying, especially considering the possibility that the food they would eat was paid for with fraudulently obtained funds. They may well have subscribed to the cynical but very often accurate view that people like Zacchaeus are incapable to taking their noses out of the trough for long enough to even notice the pain and hardship they are causing.
But Jesus was able to see not just what Zacchaeus was (a pretty nasty piece of work) but also what he might become. His world was one where anything is possible and where nobody is beyond redemption. We’re not given any details about the meal Zacchaeus and Jesus shared; without doubt they talked about many things. But by the end Jesus was listening to a changed man who had a completely different purpose in life. After a transformative tea Zacchaeus committed to giving 50% of his dishonest gains away and repaying anyone who he had cheated fourfold (I’m sure they very quickly formed a queue). In promising to do this he went way beyond the Law which stated that the amount defrauded plus 20% should be repaid (v 8 see Num 5 v 7). It’s interesting that Jesus accepts Zacchaeus’s offer of restitution and does not insist, as he did in the case of the Rich Ruler in the previous chapter, that he give away every single last penny (Luke 18 v 18-30). Maybe it was the fact that Zacchaeus himself offered to give such a large sum of money away off his own bat (as far as we can tell) that made a difference.
The upshot of all this is that somebody who had lost his vocation as a son of Abraham has been found and saved (v 9-10); the Good Shepherd has found one of his lost sheep and brought him home. In doing so he upset many of the citizens of Jericho and would have become ritually unclean in the eyes of many by sharing food and drink with a collaborator. Yet his core task was to reach out to all those blundering around in a darkness often of their own making and lead them into the light. That is still a core task for today’s church which means reaching out to the kind of people many people would rather not associate with. That is why every prison has a chaplain offering pastoral care and a listening ear to people who, for whatever reason, have made a mess of their lives by committing criminal acts. This expresses eloquently one of the central truths of the Christian faith; that God doesn’t give up on anybody and ceaselessly reaches out in love to everybody. This doesn’t mean that God condones criminal, addictive, abusive, narcissistic or destructive behaviour – very far from it. It was because evil has disfigured the world and couldn’t just be waved away with a flick of the divine hand that God gave his only Son in an act of painful love. The Bible makes it abundantly clear just how seriously God takes the fact that we have all lost our way.
Which people assume, or have assumed, the role of Zacchaeus in our lives? They might be people we know or have known who we feel we have been hard done by, who have upset us in a way that we have found impossible to forgive, who get on our nerves, who we have written off as a bad job or who have done well out of behaving badly. I have sometimes found that when I think about somebody in that way it helps very much to pray for them. If I bring that person into God’s presence and ask for his blessing on them (rather than just saying ‘please make them easier to deal with!’) then I begin to see them more from God’s point of view rather than my own more jaundiced perspective. They may be lost in one way or another but God is reaching out to bring them home and the story of Zacchaeus underlines both the possibility of change and the indefatigable nature of God’s search for all in need of bringing home.
The bottom line is that all of us are lost in one way or another and we need to remember that there may be people who find us difficult! It might be that reading these words brings an awareness that we ourselves are not in a great place. The global pandemic has taken from us much of the fabric that makes up day to day life and many of us have felt a bit lost as we have been unable to go to church, meet up with family and friends or go to work. We have all spent much more time in our own company! Yet the message of the story of Zacchaeus applies to us as well; God is searching for us and every moment reaching out to us in mercy and love did we but know it. There is nothing that we have ever done or could ever do that would stop God loving us. That, of course, does not give us carte blanche to do whatever we like (Rom 6 v 1-2)! But it is the amazing grace of God, undeserved but freely offered, that shapes our lives and calls us home.
Questions: Has there been anyone in your life who has been unfair to you, upset you or made you angry? Have you ever prayed for them? If not, why not give it a go.
Prayer: Lord, thank you that you came to find the lost and bring them home. When we are lost, find us and when we encounter the lost give us your compassionate love. Amen.