Next Sunday, we will be remembering loved ones who have died – and we will be using alternate texts from the lectionary for All Saints Day. And so today – while I will just be preaching on the Zaccheus story – I thought that we could hear – two gospel texts read from Luke – the assigned passages for this Sunday and the next.
Both stories come as Jesus is about to arrive in Jerusalem. Both stories involve money and giving and tax collectors: the parable of the contrasting prayers of the tax collector and the Pharisee and then Jesus’ remarkable encounter with Zaccheus, a leader among the tax collectors. Both stories offer a surprising message about justification and salvation! How are we made right with others, right with God?
“All who lift themselves up will be brought low,” Jesus says, “and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.”
Please pray with me: Jesus, bring us low enough to know your gracious love. May we hear and respond to that Word that wants to stay with us bringing salvation today to our lives, to our homes. Amen.
The gospel of Luke is challenging for us to read as a congregation made up predominately of folks in an upper middle-class American economic bracket. Because Luke’s gospel invites us to peer into that chasm between rich and poor and to participate in the great reversal that God is bringing about.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells stories that center the poor as those welcomed into the care and abundance of God’s table. It is the poor invited to the banquet, the poor beggar outside the gate of the wealthy man’s house who is embraced into the comfort of heaven. And right before our passage – a wealthy man who has kept all the commandments asks what he must do to obtain eternal life. Jesus tells him to sell every single thing he owns, give the money to the poor and to come and follow Jesus. The man is saddened.
“It’s very hard for those who have wealth to enter God’s kingdom!” Jesus responds, “It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom.” Those listening in are flummoxed, they wonder, “who then can be saved?” “What is impossible for humans is possible for God,” responds Jesus. Jesus challenges those who have wealth as he embodies a message of good news to the poor and reliance on the gracious abundance of God.
And so the story of Zaccheus is an outlier in the gospel – not because Zaccheus is a wealthy man – but because Zaccheus of all people embraces the holistic salvation that invites itself over that day. Zaccheus participates in the good news of Jesus, embracing abundance, reparation, and celebration.
The story begins by telling us that not only was Zaccheus a tax collector – he was a ruler among tax collectors, a boss tax collector, and wealthy because of it. He was a middle man between the mighty Roman Empire and the subjugated Jewish population in the state of Judea. He made his living in percentages – taking his cut with every transaction of trade that flowed through Jericho, forging deals with those above him and using a crushing calculus to squeeze those below. He is a symbol of the way that unjust transaction itself enacts a human toll.
Zaccheus is known by his community, perhaps respected for his power and what he has accumulated. But he is not beloved. The money Zaccheus has accumulated has estranged him from the community he longs for. He is homesick while living in a house purchased by injustice and greed.
Wealth imperils us because it separates one from another, the valuable from the discardable, the one who collects and the one who remains permanently indebted. Wealth can separate us from God through the lie that because of our possessions, the money in our accounts, we convince ourselves deep down that we are the enactors of our own salvation. Although we might not say it this bluntly, the logic is that we can buy our way to paradise. If we just had a bit more money, things would be better. Money is enticing because it can get things done, solve problems quickly, and cause others to listen.
Wealth brings with it great peril…but money is an inescapable part of our reality. We are humans, each one of us enmeshed in economic frameworks. We are each, like Zaccheus – caught up in the branches of an old, old, tree. And I pray, that like Zaccheus – each of us has the childlike wonder to look for Jesus from our perches, and the childlike joy to swing down from its branches when Jesus calls to us.
The possibility in our passage comes when Jesus passes by that sycamore tree and Jesus sees Zaccheus and tells him to get down from up there. And he listens. So many of us never climb down. It’s easier, much easier to look down on others than climb down and join Jesus when he invites himself over.
Because a problem with Jesus is that he’s got a lot of friends. His whole entourage…the disciples who talk too long and loud, the women, the man once blind who just received his sight on the outskirts of Jericho…all these and more are now traipsing home with Zaccheus. And the text says that Zaccheus came down at once, happy to welcome Jesus. A life following Jesus, means that Jesus spurs us to offer him hospitality, and with him, all of God’s beloved, broken people.
Zaccheus participates in the salvation of God when he freely repays and offers reparations to those he has harmed and stolen from. Zaccheus gives without controlling what will happen with his giving. His wealth, his money – is messy and complicated as the money in any of our bank accounts and wallets – becomes a small tool, in the freeing kingdom, the messy table that Jesus sets.
There are so many examples we can think of what it looks like – not to separate ourselves from this world of wealth and taxation and empire and inequality – but to freely, joyfully, even like Zaccheus – happily – offer the excess of what we have to the work of God.
There are churches in our Mennonite conference – Central District- who after time in Sunday school and sermons on anti-racism and Indigenous justice and building community organizing relationships – congregations have asked how they, like Zaccheus, can offer financial reparations, repair in awareness of injustice past and present.
For a summer in seminary, I was a pastoral intern at Columbus Mennonite Church in Ohio. As a predominately white, land-owning congregation, they were in the process of journeying towards making reparative debt payments. I was moved by how they placed these funds – not in the Mission or Peace & Justice line-item of their budget – but in the baseline operating expenses, alongside heating and cooling their building. They gave funds to Black and Indigenous organizations in their community – with no caveats with what would happen, no oversight or expectation. That kind of free, joyful release comes with trusting that God desires the flourishing of all, and our material possessions, our money, our land, our homes, are ultimately not ours, yet nevertheless might be used by God for the building up of a more just world. Columbus Mennonite put that line-item into their house-keeping budget essentially.
And in our text from Luke, Jesus tells Zaccheus, rich as he is, impossible as it is, Jesus tells him, that “Today, salvation has come to this household.”
Zaccheus, through his reparative release and through his hospitality and through Jesus’ disruptive inviting himself over, Zaccheus is reminded that he too, is a son of Abraham. No longer estranged by the taxes he had to exempt. No longer feeling the pit in his stomach every time he knocked on a door or looked the other way when he saw the poverty that his own gain was wrapped up in. Zaccheus feels free, happy, full of joy. Down from the tree.
Wealth brings with it great peril to separate us from God and from each other. And yet there is great possibility. To share whatever it is we have in the face of profound injustice, harm, disparities and despair – is to participate in the abundant salvation that Jesus invites us all to know.
For the human One came to seek and save the lost. So come down from the tree and follow Jesus home.