Zacchaeus

Pentecost 23 + Proper 26 (Year C, RCL)
Luke 19:1-10

Two years ago, the Dalai Lama came to Washington, and he stayed in a hotel one block from my office. At lunchtime, I walked over and arrived there just as he was leaving the hotel to meet the President. He acknowledged all the people around him simply by joining his hands and bowing to each of them. He didn’t speak a word, but I could feel the power of his holiness reach deep into my body and soul.

Zacchaeus must have had a similar experience when he found himself in the presence of Jesus in our Gospel story today.

Zacchaeus was a bad guy. He worked for the Roman empire, forcing his neighbors to pay for Rome’s wars and the extravagant lifestyles of the emperor and his minions. He not only collected the tax from his own neighbors, he always took more than he sent back to Rome. That was how he became rich – by adding his cut to what the people owed in taxes. Zacchaeus knew that everyone hated him, and Jesus knew it, too.

Nevertheless, the tax collector felt an overwhelming desire to see who this Jesus was. Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was not a tall man, which may haved affected his self-esteem. He probably went through his life feeling that he always fell short.

That may explain why he didn’t mind taking a job that he knew would make people hate him. It might have been his way of getting even, or of proving to himself that he really was somebody of stature and importance. It may be why he devoted his life to becoming rich and powerful at the expense of his brothers and sisters. It surely explains why he had to climb a tree in order to see Jesus!

That’s a pretty odd picture, if you think about it. Here is a grown man, a person known to – and probably feared by – everyone, someone with a reputation for being hard-nosed and even cruel, and he’s acting like a little boy. That’s how important it was to Zacchaeus that he see Jesus. I wonder what he wanted. Was he just curious? Did he only want to see what Jesus looked like?

And what a surprise Zacchaeus got when he made eye contact with Jesus! “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” [Luke 19:5]

Those are strange words: I must stay at your house today. There was urgency: Jesus realized immediately that his mission that day would take him into the home of this hated tax collector.

Once the Lord was in the house, the complainers outside began to gripe about it. Zacchaeus was a known sinner, so why was this holy man staying in his house, rather than with one of the “good” people in the town?

Upon hearing the complaints, Zacchaeus had an epiphany. He always knew that what he was doing was wrong, but he had found some way to live with it. Suddenly, he was in the presence of the holiest person he had ever seen – someone who was famous far and wide, who had performed miracles, who was preaching a new Gospel of love and the coming of God’s kingdom.

All this came to a head for Zacchaeus. He was transformed in that moment. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” [Luke 19:8] Suddenly, being rich at the expense of others wasn’t so important to Zacchaeus. He was willing to do anything to make up for his sins, even to give up the thing that made him a big man – his money. It is not insignificant that what Zacchaeus promised was much more than what the Pharisees believed that the law required them to do. They felt it was enough to give one-tenth of their income back to God; Zacchaeus resolved to give five times that much. Pharisees were required to make equal restitution if they had deprived someone of that person's property - one for one, as it were; Zacchaeus promised to give four times that much. Jesus must have smiled as he said, “Today salvation has come to this house.” [Luke 19:9]

I didn’t have to climb a tree to see the Dalai Lama (which is a good thing, at my age!), but I can understand Zacchaeus’ desire to get close to such holiness. I felt an overwhelming sense of holiness and peace in his presence, but Zacchaeus’ life was changed forever by his encounter with Jesus, and that’s the message that Luke leaves with us: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” [Luke 19:10]

What about you and me? Are we lost? Do we need the Son of Man to seek and save us? That’s always a challenge when we hear stories like this. There is no doubt that Zacchaeus was lost until he met Jesus. His life was a long history of bad acts and cruel treatment of others. So often in the Gospels, the person who meets Jesus is thoroughly bad, or sick, or lost in some way, and that person’s life changes in the instant of that encounter. You and I, though, have to work a little to discover ourselves in these Gospel scenes.

We are not thoroughly bad. We are not total sinners, doing evil to everyone, every day. We think, and we are correct, that we are pretty good, that we are really trying. We might even go so far as to say that we are doing everything we can in order to be the kind of people that God expects us to be. So what’s the message for us in this Gospel story? There are three things that stand out for me.

The first is that Jesus is attractive. I'm not talking about being good-looking, although he may have been. I mean that we are drawn to Jesus. We have heard all about him – most of us for our entire lives – and we think we know a lot about him. But when we have that unexpected opportunity to get really close to him, we cannot resist. Jesus draws us to himself, he is a magnet, and we cannot withstand that attraction, even if we’re a little afraid of it, even if it means going out on a limb to get close to him.

The second thing is that Jesus is greedy. He wants all of us. Even though, like Zacchaeus, all we wanted was to get a little closer to Jesus, just to have a look, he turns toward us and tells us that we have to go all the way. All he needs from us is a tiny spark of interest, and he takes it from there. He pays no attention to who we are, what we have done in our past, or what we were busy doing. He just says, “I must stay with you today.” Of course, what we hear is “you must come to me today,” and we do it.

The last thing is that we know what we have to do. Getting so close to Jesus changes us. it doesn’t matter how good we’ve been, how hard we have tried to follow Jesus: we will be changed by every encounter with him. Like Zacchaeus, we realize that we fall short of who we wish we were and who Jesus wants us to be, but it doesn’t matter. He accepts us and renews us, and we are never the same again.

We can’t climb a tree and see Jesus the way Zacchaeus did, but that’s not necessary. Just when we are least expecting him, he is right there. And it only takes a glance in his direction for him to hook us. He doesn’t even say anything. Simply being in his presence is all it takes, and we know right away what we have to do. It’s different for each of us, but the outcome is always the same.

You and I need to be ready for these close encounters with Jesus, and we need to respond to them just as Zacchaeus did: “Lord, I know what I have to do, and I’ll do it!”