Sunday, November 03, 2013

From Sunday, Nov 3, 2013


Scripture: Luke 19:1-10
Sermon:  The A to Z of Zaccheus
 
What kind of people does Jesus recruit?  When Jesus wants people to join, what kind of people does he look for?
 
When Jesus enters Jericho he is not intending to stay long.  He is on his way to Jerusalem – 20 kilometres away, and he wants to be in Jerusalem in good time for the Passover.  He has a great, politically theatrical entry all planned, and then probably an appointment with a cross.  So he doesn’t want to be held up.
 
All the same, though, it’s 20 kilometres and a meal would be good, maybe even a place to stay the night, and – yes, there is that one person he’s heard of – no idea where he might be – but who he wants to be sure to invite to join him.  So as Jesus passes through Jericho, he is on the look-out for him. 
 
And there he is!  Up ahead!  In that tree!  No, not that tree!  The sycamore to the right of it!  That little man named …
 
“Zaccheus!  I see you up there!  Hurry and come down!  I must stay at your house today!”
 
And thus out of all the people of Jericho, Jesus recruits Zaccheus to join him on his way to redeeming all the world on the cross.
 
And who is Zaccheus, that Jesus specifically seeks him out?
 
One view of Zaccheus is that he is a little man – “short in stature.”  This is why he climbs the tree, because he can’t see or be seen in the midst of the crowd.  He is easily lost and often overlooked.
 
He is a high achiever in life – chief tax collector, no small feat.  But isn’t that how it often is – that the smaller we feel, the less significant or powerful, the more inferior, the more we compensate by acting big, by trying all the harder, by putting up the biggest numbers and putting on the biggest show we can?
 
There are all kinds of things that make us feel small – from physical smallness to even more debilitating psychological or emotional belittled-ness.  No end to the number of things that make us feel inferior or less than others, and we get really good at not letting it show, covering up, pretending, hiding.
 
I wonder … if Zaccheus had not gone up in the tree to see, and be seen by Jesus … would Jesus have found him anyways?  Or would he have missed his chance?  Would they have failed to meet – to do the one thing that day they both were looking forward to? 

Sometimes we have to come out and let our littleness be known … admit it to ourselves and let others see it … go out on a limb and say, “Here I am!  I feel really small and unimportant!  I need you to see me for how I feel!”
 
And Jesus says, “There you are!  I was hoping you’d come out!  So glad you let me see you as you feel … because I must stay at your house today.  It’s you I really want to be with!”
 
Another view of Zaccheus is that he is a sinner – and a terrible sinner at that!
 
He is tax collector for Jericho, meaning he is a Jew who has gone over to the other side.  He makes his living collaborating with Rome against his own people.  And he’s so good at squeezing money out of his own people that Rome has made him chief tax collector, so good at adding his own percentage on top of what Rome extracts that he has grown rich.
 
No wonder people don’t like him.  Don’t want to let him through to the front of the line to see Jesus.  Tell him if he wants to see he can go climb a tree.  People don’t see him as a good or likely candidate for Jesus’s company.  
 
And are we sometimes in that place as well – either judging someone else not good church-material, or afraid we’ll be judged that way ourselves?
 
There’s a myth abroad – hard to resist, that church and church membership is for good people – that being a church member means we know how to behave, not get into trouble, not do bad things, not hurt other people.  
 
So we tend to look for good people to join us, and maybe ignore people who don’t fit the mold of “good.”  We also tend to feel anxious when we find ourselves not being good, and we do what we can to not let anyone know.  We wouldn’t want to be kicked out of the club.
 
Also, any time the church as a whole acts badly – acts less than polite, less than loving, less than harmonious, we feel discouraged and disillusioned.  We pull away, confused by the human reality of what we’ve just witnessed.  We don’t know how to handle it, and some leave because of that. 
 
But then there’s Jesus, looking specifically for the one no one else wants in their company – the one who seems to know only how to act badly and hurtfully, and he says, “Zaccheus!  Whatcha doin’ there all by yourself?  Come on down and join the rest of us here.  We’re all in this together, and I want to be in your house this night.  
 
“And the rest of you?  If you want to be with me, come on and let’s eat together in the house of the sinner.  The place surely is big enough, given how rich this Zaccheus-sinner is.  And hey!  What a great name for a church.  I can see the sign board now: Jericho United Church – House of the sinner, home to all fellow sinners in the city.”  
 
To their credit, after first grumbling at Jesus’s idea of what the church is, a lot of people accept the invitation to be part of the party.
 
Which leads then to a third view – another way yet of looking at Zaccheus – as local hero. 
 
With Jesus’ openness to him Zaccheus tastes firsthand the kind of love and justice and healing community that Jesus brings into the world.  In response he climbs down from his perch and hurries home to get the place ready.  He needs to clean up the house, and now he wants to clean up his act as well.
 
He’s been a tax collector – a collaborator with Rome.  He knows – when he thinks about it, how wrong and unjust the system is.  But it’s a job, and it’s easy enough to rationalize.  You have to make a living somehow.  If he doesn’t do it, someone else will.  He’s just doing his job.
 
And how familiar are we with that phrase – I was just doing my job?  It became famous – infamous, as person after person offered it as their only defence after working as guards in Nazi prison camps.  And since that horrible time it’s become a way of describing the disconnect that often exists between what people find themselves doing for a living and what they really feel deep down in the holiest part of their heart and soul.
 
How many around us are caught in such a bind?  And how terribly soul-destroying can it be?

Whether it’s company practices or government policy, neighbourhood attitudes or cultural assumptions and prejudices, even when you know they’re wrong and unjust and you really don’t like them, even when we know it’s doing something wrong to the world, it’s hard to take a stand, to step outside whatever box we’re in, to blow the whistle, maybe bite the hand – or the system, that feeds us.
 
But Zaccheus does that.  Even though the system pays him well, when he comes to know Jesus he decides he can’t do it anymore – can’t continue to play a game so wrong, can’t stay inside a system so immoral.  It’s time, he says, for his behaviour and his life to change, to match what he sees in Jesus. 
 
Word of what he does starts to spread through the city.  Jericho buzzes with the story of how Jesus has changed the life of Zaccheus, and how Zaccheus is now spending his time giving back to his people instead of taking from them.  Can this be the kingdom of God, they wonder.  
 
And I wonder … did Jesus know Zaccheus was ready for this?  That Zaccheus was ready for a new kind of life for himself and for his city? 
 
Is this the kind of person Jesus looks for when he’s looking for people to join him – little and belittled people who are hungry to be accepted, sinners and wrong-doers who don’t pretend to be otherwise, people trapped in systems that are wrong who are ready to step outside and try a different way of living?
 
Is that the kind of people he’s found in us? 
 
And are those the kind of people we’re looking for, to join us?

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