Digging Deeper Into the Story of Zacchaeus
And always finding something fascinating. A guest post.
Dear friends,
I am finally at my computer. My puppy is asleep in the other room. I have time to give a short update and then a terrific message from my minister, Judith Visser.
I plan to get back to writing. Each morning, I diligently study a few passages in the Bible from my chronological Bible study (in a year). I journal a bit. I hope to put those thoughts into my writing soon.
Bentley, the pup, is almost 9 months, and still active, chewing and getting into mischief. We watch him carefully but he still manages to get into trouble. I can see signs of his listening improving and calmer attitude - signs - not always.
This past Sunday, my minister Judith Visser1, spoke about Zacchaeus. I had never thought of this story the way she tells it. She has opened my eyes to search into passages and discover new ways of reading God’s Word. These are her words and thoughts.
Enjoy and discover.
Blessings,
Jan
Please tell me your thoughts. And as always if you need prayer, please send me an email.
Making Eye Contact With Jesus
I wonder how many of you first heard the story of Zacchaeus as I did: in song. With actions. Do any of you have Sunday School memories of this?
Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see.
And as the Lord passed by that way, he looked up in the tree;
And he said, “Zacchaeus, you come down
for I’m going to your house for tea.
I’m going to your house for tea!”
Now, for me, that song and those actions left a number of impressions on me about that gospel story.
For example, I imagined Zack as a very short little person, probably not much taller than I was when I sang about him. I knew that he was not a well-behaved man because, after all, Jesus wagged his finger at Zacchaeus and told him he’d better get down out of that tree. And my experience of tea was that it was served in china teacups. I had no idea that “tea” could be an actual meal, and it was hard for me to imagine Jesus with a teacup and saucer in hand.
A confusing song, in some ways then, but I was always given the traditional spin on the story at the end:
Jesus went to Zack’s house and then the tax collector was forgiven because he was sorry for all the cheating he had done and he promised to pay people back many times over.
It worked for me for a long time, that version of the Zacchaeus story.
It’s neat and tidy and it fits in nicely with all those good Sunday School lessons of salvation that many of us grew up with:
Sinner repents; God forgives; happy ending.
Don’t get me wrong. There are good moral lessons in such a reading—don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t be greedy or materialistic, own up to your sins honestly, atone for what you’ve done wrong.
But is that really why Luke tells this story?
You know, it’s an interesting thing, storytelling. Every story told is always coloured by the storyteller. A good storyteller generally embellishes and stretches a little— not to be dishonest but, rather, in order to accentuate the point of the tale.
When we tell a story, we have images in our minds, our own pictures that we’re trying to recreate for our audience. And then there’s the business of what the listener or reader brings to the story. Our own perceptions and life experiences will influence what a story might mean to us.
Take that Zacchaeus song again, for example—
What do you actually imagine Jesus doing when he stops under that big sycamore tree and looks up at the perhaps-little man clinging to that branch way up there?
Does Jesus shake his head reprovingly and wag his finger?
How does the story change if we imagine Jesus peering up into the leafy branches and then, making eye contact with Zacchaeus, grinning broadly and saying,
“Ha! There you are, Zacchaeus!
Come on, get down from there.
Let’s go have dinner together!”
When we receive a story that has been handed down to us over many centuries, through many translations, by the many hands of tradition, through the many filters of culture and context, coloured by the many voices of storytellers and scribes—
Well, what we have then is a most interesting story!
When Bible scholars start to scratch beneath the surface and explore what this story might have meant to its first audience, they come up with some intriguing ideas.
Whatever actually happened in Jericho that day when Jesus was passing through and maybe stayed over at Zacchaeus’ house, what we get is Luke’s account of what happened.
And Luke—the only gospel writer who brings us this story—has his own reasons for telling it the way he does. Luke, of the gospel writers included in our canon of scripture, has been hailed as the best storyteller.
He’s very good with the human interest element. His gospel account is well known for parables with a narrative plot—a good story line: like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
Luke brings that same literary artistry to his non-parable accounts—such as this one about Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus.
It’s an engaging story,
told in a way that captures the listener and invites us to connect emotionally with the characters in the story. Luke is trying to make some important points here and he wants his audience to really take them to heart.
But for us, a 21st-century audience, some of those points may be lost if we don’t take the time to unpack this story and look a little deeper, underneath and behind our pre-conditioned responses.
So let’s take a few minutes to do that...
For starters, let’s establish the setting for the action. We need crowds for this story. Not much is known about New Testament Jericho, and we can’t tell what its population might have been. But archaeologists can place the frontier post of Jericho at a crossing of the Jordan River and on a route to Jerusalem, so there must have been a good amount of traffic through the town.
And the gospel writer tells us that large crowds are following Jesus. Jesus is nearing the end of his ministry; he’s built quite a reputation and people are following him for all sorts of reasons—some are hoping to see miracles; others want to hear his teachings; still others are trying to trip him up, hoping to discredit him.
So we have crowds.
Now we need a sycamore tree. The Mediterranean sycamore is a type of fig tree that will grow up to 15 metres in height—lots of places to climb and hide in that tree!
Oh, and we need a short tax collector. Well, maybe.
Now we encounter a slight hiccup in the traditional version of the story. Because it’s not at all clear who exactly is the short person.I know we all have this indelible picture of Zacchaeus at five feet, no inches tall, but, as a matter of fact, the scripture text could just as easily be referring to Jesus as being short.
Here’s verse 3.
Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was but, on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. (Luke 19:3, AMP)
Who was short in stature? Zacchaeus or Jesus?
The Greek text permits that phrase to refer to either one of the two characters. In fact, there was apparently a fair bit of discussion about Jesus’ height in the early church, and an early Jewish critic of Christianity commented on Jesus’ short stature as contrary to what one would expect in a son of God.
Maybe it doesn’t really matter who’s short or tall, but a good jolt of the unexpected can prompt us to rethink something we haven’t thought about in a while!
At any rate, Zacchaeus is given other identifying characteristics. Besides being a resident of Jericho, Zacchaeus is marked as the chief tax collector in town.
And, as Luke bluntly puts it, he’s rich. This is information we cannot push past if we want to understand the thrust of this story.
Being a tax collector in 1st-century Palestine does not make for a pleasant social dynamic. A tax collector deals in “dirty” money, on more than one level.
On religious grounds, a tax collector is ceremonially unclean since he is in constant contact with the impurities of foreign currency and foreign people.
On political grounds, a tax collector is treasonous, collaborating with the enemy—the occupying Roman forces—collecting taxes from his own countrymen for the galling purposes of maintaining the imperial military presence and increasing Rome’s wealth.
On social grounds, we can only imagine the insults that might be hurled at Zacchaeus, who’s not just any ordinary tax collector, but a chief tax collector, willingly part of a corrupt system that robs and crushes other people.
The way it works is like this:
Zacchaeus pays his Roman supervisors out of his own pocket whatever the required taxes are for the townspeople, and then makes his living by collecting more than he has spent.
Zacchaeus is rich. Filthy rich. And not too many people are exchanging pleasantries with him in the town square.
And now Jesus is coming to town.
Zacchaeus, the social outcast, the rich man who has no friends out on the street, hears the commotion and wants to see for himself who Jesus is.
Why, I wonder?
What stories has he heard about Jesus? What is he hoping to see?
Whatever it is, he wants it badly enough to go out where the crowds are.
This cannot be easy for Zacchaeus.
And if the snubs and cold shoulders are not enough of an assault on his dignity, he ends up running ahead of the crowd as it surges down the narrow street and scrambling his way up a fig tree— fancy robes and all—just for a good look at Jesus of Nazareth.
I think Zacchaeus must not have been short on courage.
I wonder how many outcasts find the resolve to break through the crowds in our places of gathering around Jesus.
But maybe people on the fringes of acceptability have less to lose. Maybe desperation gives people strength to climb very tall trees...
Let’s leave Zacchaeus in the tree for a moment.
What’s happening at street level?
Jesus is drawing close to that fig tree…. People are milling about him, jostling one another as they try to get close enough to see what he is doing, hear what he is saying.
And so they all notice when Jesus chooses his moment—and stops.
Perforce the whole crowd stops, straining and balancing and leaning in....And then that beautifully poignant scene unfolds, as Jesus performs an act of radical grace:
His head tilts back and his eyes search—the original Greek word of the text here means that Jesus looks up with deliberate intention—
and then he makes eye contact with Zacchaeus.
I would submit that this is the precise moment that salvation begins for Zacchaeus.
Radical grace. Unconditional love, sparking from Jesus’ eyes to Zacchaeus, and all those broken pieces of that wounded soul begin to be gathered up and find each other again....
Oh, but wait, we say.
What about Zack repenting of all his thievery and corruption and fraud?
Doesn’t Luke tell us that Zack shows he’s sorry for his sins by promising to make good?
Would it surprise you, as it did me, to discover that Verse 8 of this reading— that vow Zacchaeus makes to repay and donate—that this verse was almost certainly inserted into the original story by a post-Easter church wanting to instruct Christians as to what the fruits of repentance would look like?
Such a teaching has its merits, yes— but, regrettably, it softens and blurs the radicality of what Jesus does that afternoon when he invites himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’ home.
And we can gauge just how radical Jesus’ action is by looking at the reaction of the people standing around watching!
Lots of grumbling and complaining:
Look, he’s gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner!
Shocking. Disgusting. Downright inappropriate.
You know, the good news is so good! Sometimes we just water it down or muddy it up by putting our own spin on the greatest story ever told.
The point is never that we must do something to merit God’s love and acceptance.
It is God who names us beloved and blessed, those to whom favour is extended.
Salvation is not something to be earned by us so that we will inherit God’s favour and maybe have a place reserved for us in the hereafter.
Salvation is a process of transformation that begins when grace touches us in our deepest places, when we make eye contact with the Holy One who yearns to heal our brokenness and make us whole.
I don’t always live in the reality of that grace.
Some days I can feel overwhelmed by human brokenness, including my own— by the ways we mistreat each other, our so-often unkindness and self-absorption.
But the stories we hear and tell as we journey, of encountering the beauty of the Sacred, of experiencing the loving presence of the Christ, of being part of beloved community, of seeing glimpses of God’s sovereignty—all these stories encourage us, and remind us that the journey to wholeness begins in the places where we meet God.
Who knows how Zacchaeus began his morning on that day so long ago— maybe he felt a little spurt of hope, thinking he might hear or see something lifegiving before the day was out.
Something life-altering happened for him that day. Something that moved in him so deeply that transformation took place.
And whether or not Verse 8—that part about Zacchaeus making restitution for injustices that he has visited on his neighbours—whether that is actually part of the original event or has been inserted into the text at some later date, it is part of the story as it’s been passed on to us, and it carries a vital truth.
When Zacchaeus opens his heart and home to the Christ, a whole new version of his story begins to unfold—and it’s a story about the overflow of grace.
Zacchaeus doesn’t just take Jesus home and leave it at that.
Grace in his life becomes grace for others.
And isn’t that the story of our faith?
It is always a story about us in community. Justice and love and forgiveness and peace are relational words. They have to do with how we treat each other.
Jesus calls us to follow him, to do as we see him do—to seek out the hurting, to make eye contact with the outcast, to sit at table with those who are named unlovely and unclean.
Jesus calls us to follow him. And so may grace follow grace.
Amen.
Rev. Judith Visser, Midhurst United Church, Midhurst, Ontario. Permission granted to reprint this.
Thanks for sharing this one. I always thought the same as you with the song from my childhood.