Jesus Goes Slumming
Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 26 Year C RCL)
30 October 2022—9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
Isaiah 1:10-18; Psalm 32:1-8; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12; Luke 19:1-10
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
“It is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God than to put a rope through the eye of a needle.” “Go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor.” “Woe to you rich, for you will one day go hungry.”
Jesus apparently did not care much for the rich.
Neither did his followers. The early Church Fathers were pretty unsparing. St. Basil the Great said that the riches common to all are held by the wealthy not because the wealthy earned them, but because they were the first to seize them. St. John Chrysostom said that the rich do not enjoy what is their own, but what belongs to others. St. Jerome said that every rich person is either a thief or a thief’s heir.
Yet in today’s Gospel, Jesus invites himself to dinner with a rich man who everyone knows got his money all the wrong ways. Zacchaeus is an architelones, an “arch-toll collector” of Jericho, a wealthy trading center where collaborators with the Roman occupiers could make good money by serving as customs agents, extorting fees, customs, and tolls from their fellow Judeans and skimming from the proceeds.
The crowd criticizes Jesus: “Can you believe it? He is actually having dinner with one of those sinners.”
The toll collectors, called publicans or tax farmers by various translations, were universally seen by their compatriots in Palestine as quislings, collaborators with the Evil Empire, blood suckers who profited from the misery of God’s people, or anyone kind and good. To let one marry into your family meant being expelled from Synagogue and the society of all decent folk.
Jesus saying he would have dinner chez Zacchaeus would be like one of us saying we would go out partying with a Nazi, or a Mafioso, or a Terrorist.
There is irony here. Zacchaeus’ name, Zakkai’, means “innocent” or “pure,” and often appears in poetic pairs with Tsedek, or ‘righteous’ or ‘just’ almsgiver. But he is a toll collector, a traitor on the make looking out only for number one.
But when the crowd tries to dissuade Jesus by telling how bad his intended dinner companion is, this diminutive wealthy man replies, using the present tense, “Look, I give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone, I repay quadruple the sum.” He is not boasting. He knows he is an outcast and labeled a crook. He is only trying to explain that he tries to do the right thing, despite the odious profession he has found it necessary to pursue to get by.
Most people think this guy is a scape-gallows. But in fact, he is a scape-goat, blamed for the wrongs of others that he himself has not done. His defense of himself is not so much a boast or a declaration of intended reform, but rather simply saying he is not a scape-grace. While he is not beating his breast like his fellow toll-collector in that parable last week and saying “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” he most definitely is not following the lead of the Pharisee in that parable and saying “I am better than others.” He is just saying, “See here, I’m not the rotten crook you think I am.”
And Jesus praises him for it. He even calls this short man’s standing up for himself “salvation.”
Who are the scape-goats we like to point fingers at? What does it take for us to identify someone as “one of THEM,” beyond the pale, and hopelessly outside of grace?
We hear scape-goating in various ways.
“I just couldn’t take it anymore. On Facebook, I had to unfriend one of my old pals from high school. He was just beyond the pale: racist, sexist, and wholly inappropriate remarks about the political campaign.”
“A basket of deplorables.”
“Evil, demonical, Muslim Jihadists who torture and kill people for any reason, however, slight.”
“You Nazi!”
“You Communist!”
“You people stole our country from us. You have ruined it. No punishment is too harsh for you.”
We can accuse each other of a great variety of really wrong and rotten things. Such accusation is scape-goating when we reduce the person to that one thing. And label them that and nothing else. It is when we see only the bad, and none of the good. But remember what Sister Helen Prejean said abou people on death row: “People are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their lives.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the Gulag
Archipelago, talks about the moment during his decades in Stalin’s prison
camps that he recovered his Christian faith, and began to heal even while in
prison. In the chapter, “Resurrection,” he notes that he realized that no
matter how tightly his interrogators pressured him, he still had some choice,
however limited, however constrained. While tortured, he was always forced to
tell his tormentors what they wanted, but he still could do this willingly or
unwillingly, hatefully, or with empathy. This led him to realize that even his
interrogators themselves were constrained. They too enjoyed, even within the
constraints placed on them by their roles, small choices between good and evil.
He realized that it wasn’t an issue of good people on this side versus bad
people on the other side. The line between good and evil does not lie between
interrogator and prisoner, between political parties, between economic classes,
countries, or religions. It does not lie between any groups of people, however
defined. It lies in that small space of choice, no matter how tightly
constrained, in each person.
He writes, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people
somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them
from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece
of his own heart?”
Solzhenitsyn understood the principle behind Jesus’ praise of Zacchaeus. We are all God’s creatures and all bear
God’s image, no matter how we may have distorted and twisted it. We are all in
this together. “Treat others as you
would have them treat you” for Jesus means that we should give
others—especially those who are deplorable to us—at least the same benefit of
the doubt that we expect for ourselves.
In this season of partisan division
and mutual reproach, I pray that we can be fair-minded to each other and see
God’s hand at work even where we least expect it.
In the name of God, Amen.
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