All Saints Sunday (readings for 4th before Advent)
Isaiah 1.10-18, Luke 19.1-10
“Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today…”
I wonder how you feel about unexpected visitors. Are you the kind of person who cheerfully expects people to take you as they find you – dust and all - or would you be mortified if someone turned up when you hadn’t had a chance to put the hoover around?
Zacchaeus wasn’t expecting to host Jesus on the day he heard he was coming through Jericho. He thought he’d be lucky even to catch a glimpse of him. He was short, we are told, and couldn’t see over the heads of the crowd, and even if he could have done, it’s clear that this particular crowd weren’t exactly well-disposed to him.
He was a chief tax collector, “and was rich” the story says. Tax collectors have probably never been the most popular of people, but in 1st century Palestine they were particularly hated because the taxpayers knew that the money they took was going to be used to fund the Roman occupation. They were being made to pay for their own oppression.
Tax collectors often seem to have skimmed off money for themselves too. Zacchaeus admits he has done this, and the fact that he is rich underlines it.
So tax collectors were regarded as cheats, and collaborators as well. No wonder people didn’t like them. No wonder this crowd grumbles when Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from his hiding place in the sycamore fig tree and invites himself to Zacchaeus’ home. How could he eat and drink under the same roof as this sinner?
But Jesus isn’t bothered. After all, he has a track record of associating with outcasts, and being criticised for it. Zacchaeus may not seem like an outcast – he has wealth, and the favour of his Roman masters. In some ways he is part of the in-crowd, but Jesus sees the lonely, rather desperate man beneath all that. Zacchaeus climbs a tree to see Jesus, but actually it is Jesus who sees him.
The effect on Zacchaeus is transformative. Instantly, before he and Jesus have had any real conversation at all, he announces that his life is going to change, that he’ll give half his possessions to the poor and repay those he has defrauded four times over. Jesus didn’t have to persuade him with any clever theological arguments. He didn’t have to shame him – there are no words of accusation or blame here. All he had to do was announce that he was coming home with Zacchaeus, staying in his house. Everything seems to have changed for Zacchaeus in that simple act of homecoming.
We sometimes describe our deepest moments of change as times when something “came home” to us, when something strikes at the heart of us. It can be a challenging time. We talk about the “chickens coming home to roost” – there have been some high profile examples of that in the news this week - the moment when we wake up to the reality of something we’ve done and have to face the consequences. It can be a heartsink moment, but it can also be a new beginning, because it’s only when we see what’s wrong that we have a chance of changing it.
But for that chance of change to mean anything, condemnation on its own isn’t enough, challenge on its own isn’t enough, and that’s what makes Jesus’ simple action so powerful. He doesn’t just bring home to Zacchaeus the accusations which the crowd clearly want to throw at him, that he is a cheat and a collaborator, he also brings home to Zacchaeus that, cheat and collaborator as he is, he is still loved by God.
“Today salvation has come to this house” says Jesus, “because he too is a son of Abraham” - he belongs just as much as you do, Jesus says to the grumbling crowd. He is a fellow human being, part of the family of God. Jesus isn’t talking about getting a ticket to heaven when we die – that’s not what the Bible usually means by salvation. He is talking about the change Zacchaeus needs here and now in his heart, in his life, the change that will spill over into the world around him, because God has come home with him, and God has come home to him.
“Cease to do evil, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow,” our Old Testament Reading reminded us .This is what counts as far as God is concerned. These things are the evidence – not fancy words or rituals – that God has come home to us, that “salvation has come to our house”.
We don’t know anything about Zacchaeus’ life after this. There are a few legends – the Eastern Orthodox churches say he was the first bishop of Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Palestine. And there’s a very far-fetched medieval Catholic legend which says that, under the nickname of St Amadour, from the Latin word for Love, he travelled to Southern France and became a hermit in a cave dug out of a cliff face which eventually became a shrine to the virgin Mary. It still bears his name, they say - Rocamadour. I’ve been there – maybe some of you have. But the Bible tells us nothing more about him.
I’m convinced, though, that the change in him was genuine and lasting. And the reason I’m convinced is that he is named. Peripheral characters in the Gospels – the bit part players we meet only once - are very rarely named. I can only think of four others,– Jairus, Bartimaeus, Simon the Leper and Simon of Cyrene, who helped carry Jesus’ cross, and who we are told in a throwaway comment is “the father of Alexander and Rufus”. Usually, though, the people Jesus encounters along the way are anonymous - a blind man, a Samaritan woman at a well. We don’t need to know their names for the story to make sense. We don’t need to know Zacchaeus’ name for this story to make sense – he could have just been “a tax collector”.
And yet, Zaccheus along with these few others, is named. The only plausible reason I can think of for that is that the early Christian communities for whom the Gospels were written would have known this man, or known of him. Luke’s Gospel was written about 50 years after the events they described – that’s like 1975 to us, well within living memory, so it’s quite likely that there would still be people around who’d come across him. I’m not a Biblical literalist, who thinks everything in the Gospels has to have happened exactly as it is written. But it seems to me, working from logic, that this isn’t the tale of some anonymous character, created as a plot device. To the people who first read Luke’s Gospel this is Old Zacchaeus, who their mum and dad knew, who told his story to anyone who would listen to him, ad nauseam, because it was the most important moment in his life, the moment when his life turned around.
Today we celebrate All Saints Sunday, that moment when we think of the saints who may not be famous, not the big hitters like St Peter, St Paul, St Francis, but all those people, named or unnamed, whose lives have been changed because the love of God came home to them, connected with something deep within them, made sense of their lives in a new way. Today we celebrate all those who found that a light had been kindled in them, maybe just a small light, but one that made a difference to the way they lived their lives, and who passed on that light to others, and, eventually, to us. The feast of All Saints reminds us that God wants nothing more than to come home with each of us, and come home to each of us, not with condemnation but with the love that brings us the salvation we need, the change that changes the world.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment