Zacchaeus

Proper 26                                                                                      31 October 2010

Is there a Sunday School child the world over who does not know the story of Zacchaeus climbing the tree to see Jesus as he passed by?  “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he; he climbed up in the Sycamore tree the good Lord for to see.”  Etc.  I remember the old flannel-graph pictures of Zacchaeus which were popular when I was a child.  I suppose Jesus and Zacchaeus are on video now—I went on line to see if there were a Zacchaeus vegetable in the Veggie Tale series, but all I could find was the Veggie Tale cast singing the old Zacchaeus song.  Now all of this is cute and maybe the children enjoy it.  But the story of Zacchaeus is not really a children’s story—a kid’s tale—a cute, easily-imagined episode from the day-journals of a wandering prophet-messiah.  The story is actually about something real, something quite radical, in the life of a man who was not a nice guy before he met Jesus.

Zachaeus was a publican—not an owner of a public house, that is, a tavern—but a public official employed by Rome to gather the taxes in his part of Palestine.  The system that Rome had set up in its conquered territories—at least in Palestine—to make sure that money continually flowed into the capital, could hardly have been organized better in order to encourage graft and corruption.  Zacchaeus was a tax-farmer.  That is to say, he bought the right to collect taxes from Roman officials.  They let it out on bids—rather like Indiana let out the toll-road to bids from large corporations, or like the federal government contracted with suppliers for the war in Iraq.  The deal was that, once you had the contract, you agreed to return to Rome a certain amount in local taxes, and whatever else you could collect was yours to keep.  We hope the toll-road lease doesn’t turn out that way.  We already know what happened in Iraq—huge cost over-runs and little accountability—just think Halliburton.

So you could see how an unscrupulous person could accumulate quite a fortune.  That was how the system worked.  I joke with some of my Honduran friends about the way their politics works: every four years amongst the small group of rich families, a couple run for president.  It makes no difference, really, who—and everyone goes through the process of casting ballots.  And the winner gets to enrich himself and his family for four years until it is someone else’s turn.  Of course, it is not only in Central America where the likes of Zacchaeus are familiar figures—they have operated much closer to home.  Interestingly, Zacchaeus made most of his money by gouging the poor or at least the less well-off.  He knew that he could not cheat the rich—they were too powerful and had powerful friends.  So people with a small business or a little farm ended up being cheated the most—and there was nothing they could do about it. 

Life was good for Zacchaeus—he had a big house, servants, plenty of the good things that his fortune could buy.  And yet—there seems to have been some kind of nagging doubt or some kind of restless uncertainty lingering around the edge of his awareness.  All of his ill-gotten gains were not serving him well, apparently, when he awoke in the middle of the night and the faces of some of the folks he had ruined came to mind.  But he didn’t know quite what to do about it.  The very thought of changing his whole way of life was frightening.  There were people who collaborated with him and who were his friends.  He had recognition and power.  There were also those who hated him, of course.  The so-called righteous, who were zealous for Israel, considered him a collaborator and traitor to his people.  But, as he thought to himself, no one was going to defeat Rome and someone had to work with them: it might as well be him.  Still, there was this doubt.

And that is when Jesus appeared in his town.  Zacchaeus had heard about Jesus, of course.  Everyone in the provinces had heard about Jesus.  And one day, he heard, in the midst of his business as usual, the report that Jesus was passing through his own town.  He wasn’t much for crowds and was a smallish sort of man.  So he climbed a tree—a little beneath his dignity to be sure—in order to be able to see the famous man pass by.  But Jesus stopped beneath the tree and told him to come down and take him to his house for dinner.  He gladly agreed, although the crowd that was with Jesus started to grumble about it.  Here was Jesus, the prophet-Messiah, going off to have dinner at the home of a man who was a cheat and a scoundrel and a traitor.  But Jesus knew what he was doing.  This dinner with the Master was life-changing for Zacchaeus.  Jesus knew the man was lost—that is, he was wandering in error and futility, that his life, though rich, was without point or purpose, that he was living in such a way as to betray his own heritage as a son of Abraham.  During that meal with Jesus, the lost man was found.  He came to himself, much as the prodigal son did, although in nicer surroundings.  How do we know that he was a different man? 

Note what he did not say first:  Lord, I promise to stop cheating on my wife, I promise not to swear and curse so much, I promise to be nicer to the servants and go to Bible study at Synagogue.  I will spend more time with my children and try to be more understanding towards my wife.  Now those are all good things to do and if he needed to do them, it would have been good for him to attempt them, as a sign of his conversion.  But none of that spoke to the real nature of his problem: his unfairly gotten wealth as a crooked part of a corrupt system.  Note also that Jesus did not get a pledge for a new educational wing for the local synagogue either—propitiation by means of donation.  Instead, Zacchaeus promised to give away half of everything he owned to the poor and to repay any actual fraud by 400%, which was the Roman penalty for convicted thieves.  And Jesus said that salvation had come to the man’s house.

 It is interesting that Jesus did not insist the man leave his tax collecting business.  He must have known that it was an ambiguous kind of job with every possibility for corruption and compromise.  But then Jesus knew that the world itself is such a place.  Very few of us can be completely free of any involvement in the immoral effects of the systems within which we live and work: we are related to everything.  But Zacchaeus Jesus had now planted as an outpost of the Kingdom of God in the midst of that crooked system.  He was to be a fair tax-collector, exacting in taxes no more than he was obliged to collect.  He might even be able to do some social good in his community by being an advocate for the local community with the Roman government.  Zacchaeus was now to be an agent of the Kingdom within the system, and by his life and actions, become a transforming influence toward social justice. 

Of course, that is the job of all of us, isn’t it?  To be representatives of the Kingdom in the places where we live and work.  We are to be agents of transformation within the sinful systems of the world in which we are involved.  Most of us don’t have the opportunities Zacchaeus had, but we all have to deal with the system in which we find ourselves.  Where do we shop, what do we buy, what kind of standards do we expect from those we work with or those we work for?   Jesus expected that Zacchaeus would now be a man to care about the needy of his community, for justice in the process of taxation, and not act as if all he had to attend to was his own welfare. In fact, Zacchaeus probably never again knew business as usual.  But he was no longer lost.  He was found—he had found himself and God in serving people and caring about the needs of others, and not in enriching himself.  Or perhaps we should say, in finding God and himself, he saw that serving other people and caring about their needs was the natural outflow of finally knowing who he was and where he was going.

You can imagine that the change in Zacchaeus made a huge difference in his home town.  Since he was the head tax collector, it is likely that all the other tax collectors soon began to be held to a new standard of doing business.  It is likely that the poverty of the poor was lightened a little, that the small business person could operate more securely. 

Did the Kingdom come to Jericho?  Yes and no.  The subversive force of the Kingdom started to operate there in a powerful way, as Zacchaeus started living as an agent of the Kingdom.  He showed that by Jesus’ very own words, it was, after all, possible for a rich man to be saved, though difficult.  Many probably saw it as a miracle—all things are possible for God if a person will only cooperate with him.  But in another way Jericho was much the same place—if you did not want to see the signs of the Kingdom, you didn’t have to.  The life of the city was not totally transformed.  Jesus’ followers still had to deal with the way things were as they attempted to be faithful to his teaching and way of life.  So it is for us.  But they also knew that transformation was possible—they had seen it in Zacchaeus.  So it is also for us.