Jesus and Zacchaeus

          He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He
          was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account
          of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature.  So he ran on ahead and climbed up
          into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way.  And when Jesus came to the
          place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your
          house today.”  So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully.  And when they saw it,
          they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.”  And Zacchaeus
          stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have
          defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.”  And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has
          come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of Man came to seek and to
          save the lost.”
The story of Zacchaeus is a story full of ironies, full of things one does not expect.  First we learn that Jesus is passing through Jericho, which gives us our first bit of textual irony.  In Jericho, the City of Palms, the city of desolation and curses about whom it was written,  "Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho.  At the cost of his firstborn shall he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son shall he set up its gates.”  In the city of cursing, Jesus finds one whom others call a notorious sinner, and his house finds salvation.  Long ago, Rahab the harlot was such a one as this, and she found salvation for her house as well, though all others were destroyed.
    But Jesus goes to the cursed city on his way to Jerusalem, the city of David, the city of those who inherit the promise.  In Jericho, Jesus stops to restore a sinner to life and to bring salvation to his house, but in Jerusalem, despite the procession of joyful hosannas, he stops only to weep over the city, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”  In Jericho, the word of salvation is preached, in Jerusalem, a word of condemnation.
     Zacchaeus himself hardly looks like the model convert.  He seems to be unfaithful to the Jewish nation in every possible way.  He takes a Greek name though he lives in the heart of Palestine.  He is a tax collector, a Roman collaborator in the employ of the Empire.  He is chief of the tax collectors, and has become rich because of it--rich because he has unrighteously harvested from the labor of men less fortunate than himself.  Perhaps he has taken bread from the mouth of the poor, and one would be likely to think that the God of justice would reckon Zacchaeus his enemy.
    But, somehow, Zacchaeus really is the model convert.  His is the heart that both shows receptivity to the gospel, and the "fruits in keeping with repentance."  His is the good ground upon which the seed is sown, where that seed grows and blossoms into a true harvest of righteousness.  How can such a thing be, in the midst of such obvious sin?  Why is Zacchaeus' heart not irrevocably closed to the Lord?  Why does he greet Jesus with great joy where the Pharisees only envy and conspire to kill him?  Why is the tax collector more righteous than the Pharisee?
    Sin can do one of two things: it can break the heart or it can harden the heart.  Sometimes, in the Providence of God, God lets a sin go on and on in the human heart, not that the human heart be lost forever, but to break that heart, to humble that heart, to prepare that heart to receive grace and mercy and salvation.  As Jesus says, only those who are sick go to the doctor.  Sometimes it is only by sinning, or by being lost in a sin, that a human being comes to know she is lost and in need of healing and salvation.  It is hard to think too well of ourselves when our sins are very obvious, so the sin of greed might in fact be a kind of proof against the sin of pride.  Other times, of course, sin can be a hardening, a blindness that does not lead one to God.  But the tax collectors and prostitutes were public sinners--their sin was public, communal, universally condemned.  It is harder for them to be so proud as to not consider themselves in need of help, redemption, healing.
  Not so the Pharisee.  The Pharisee has spent his entire life in being instructed in the Law.  He has either learned to keep the parts of the Law that can be observed from a real zeal and a real moral strength, or else he has learned to fake it, or else he has learned a deeper form of humility: he has learned that it is impossible always to love one's neighbor as oneself and love God with everything one has.  Having failed, the Pharisee will find that true righteousness consists only in faith and repentance, not in perfectly keeping all the inward and outward works of the Law.  But how easy it is to be deceived!  And how tempting to protect and perhaps to promote one's reputation for holiness, for moral strength!  How easy to sidle past true Biblical righteousness into a real self-deception, into very dangerous pride, vanity, vain-glory, self-righteousness.  If the tax collector is going to think well of himself, he will probably glory in his ability to have power over someone else, but he isn't too likely to be securely deluded that he is a good person.  In this way, greed and graft can be less dangerous than pride and vanity.  He has the power of a rich man, but not the power of a rich man upon which society dotes its approval.  I am not sure that the prostitute has much to glory in, he or she will find it perhaps in a successful rebellion against society.
    Against, then, what we might imagine, Zacchaeus' heart is open, wide open to the chance of salvation.  He must have heard of Jesus before, must have wondered about him, wondered whether he would ever actually see him with his eyes.  So when he hears of the crowd and hears of Jesus' coming, he runs ahead to better see Jesus.  Running--an undignified pastime for a respectable man in the Ancient Near East, but Zacchaeus does not care about this at all.  If running isn't respectable, I imagine climbing a tree must be far more disreputable, but Zacchaeus is up and away.  He doesn't try to overpower the crowd, he doesn't posture or threaten or use his position as leverage to get ahead in seeing Jesus.  Rather, he employs his wits so he can just get a glimpse of the Lord.
   And then, curiously, he doesn't say a word.  He doesn't try to get Jesus' attention, he just watches.  Maybe he thinks Jesus won't notice--maybe he even hopes no one notices him up in that tree.  But then Jesus looks up to him and knows his heart.  He knows his heart and speaks words of impossible welcome and blessing: "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today."
   Why "hurry" and why "must"?  Why must Zacchaeus hurry and why must Jesus stay with him?  Salvation is the thing at stake and no time must be wasted: and Zacchaeus' response is perfect obedience.  Jesus says, "Hurry, and come down," and thus Zacchaeus' hurries and comes down joyfully receiving Jesus' word.  He is the perfect disciple who does not question his master's word, he only obeys and does so with joy.  "All of them," everyone, grumbles, everyone speaks against the Lord's visitation to this sinner.  No one speaks for Zacchaeus, not a one considers he might be a worthy man, that there might be some treasure for the Lord to harvest.
   But there is such a treasure.  This small man, this sinner, has his heart lit on fire by Jesus' taking notice of him.  God sees Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus knows he is known by God, and knows he is given a gift of the presence of God and the beginning of the kingdom, and he also knows what the proper response to all of this is.  Repentance.  Zacchaeus is a sinner, and the mean of his sin has helped him see his own need for salvation, and to see Jesus and his Gospel as the means and end of that salvation.  He sees his own sin, and takes on the character of his Lord instead.  In following the Lord of Jubilee, he restores not only what he has taken unrighteously, he also has mercy on the poor.  He sees in himself what the Pharisees do not see in themselves, and this sinner in the city of destruction finds salvation that they do not find.   For all that the Pharisees live in the city of kings and priests and that the Law and the Prophets are their inheritance, they do not see Jesus and they do not receive him with joy.
   The Son of Man is the Good Shepherd who seeks and saves the lost, who is perfectly able to restore sinners to repentance and amendment of life, to reconcile those sinners to God, and to give them a new life.  Part of the good news is believing that God is capable of restoring, in his own ways and in his own timing, absolutely anyone whom the Lord goes out to bring home.  Ours is the part to have faith in the Lord's goodness and hope for all to come to repentance and newness of life.  It is also our part to understand how small we are.  Not that human beings are insignificant: we aren't insignificant to God and that's the only measure of significance worth having.  But we are small--we don't have much strength or power or intelligence or goodness of our own.  The angels excel us in every way, and our sacred history starts with humans beings deceived and naive, fragile and mortal.  Our lives are gifts of grace that are in God's hands, not our own.  We are, like Zacchaeus, quite small.  But we are loved and we are imprinted with the image of God, which is a great dignity.  There is something to being mindful of what we lack and how we fall short as a protection against the greater evils of thinking we have no need of any help or saving.