I
got grants and loans to help my parents pay for the elite private college I
went to. But I had to earn the money for
my personal expenses by working at a campus job. In the public schools I’d attended in Indiana
and Vermont, my family’s income was somewhere in the upper half of the broad tier
of those of us who knew we weren’t poor, but weren’t rich, either. Which included almost everyone I knew. But when I got to college I grasped for the
first time that there are some people who are rich. Not rich like we are all in this country relative
to peasants in the underdeveloped world, but really rich. Like, children
of middle-eastern despots or Wall Street hedge-fund managers kind of rich. And I found being in the same world as them
to be intimidating. I was lucky, in that
I was spared the humiliation of wearing a hairnet and slinging hash in the
dining hall. My job was in the library,
re-shelving books. And it’s funny to me
now to think back on the embarrassment I felt wheeling my book cart past my
fellow-students as if there were something shameful about being on a
scholarship.
But
one Saturday evening in my sophomore year, a friend invited me to party with a
friend of his in the next dorm over from mine.
This friend of a friend was someone every on our small campus recognized,
because his last name was on, not one building on campus, but an entire
quadrangle of science classrooms, and laboratories, and faculty offices. And after I’d been hanging out for a while, feeling
kind of awkward, I asked our host if I could play a record from his
collection. (Side note here--I’ll never
forget how Bob Marley’s Babylon by Bus
album sounded on his unbelievably awesome stereo). And in his eager response to my request, I
perceived something that had not occurred to me before. Which was that he was deeply lonely and
almost pitiably eager to be liked. In
that moment I saw that his privilege was an isolation cell, keeping him from
ever knowing the freedom of being just an ordinary guy.
The
fellow named Zacchaeus who features in today’s Gospel lesson is not the only
one in Jericho eager to see Jesus. The
crowd that lines the road through the town is so dense that a little guy like
Zacchaeus can’t see over it. The people
in the crowd know who Zacchaeus is—everyone does—and if he had any friends
among them, they might have moved aside a little and let him push his way
through to the front. But they all
detest him, this rich tax collector, who hardly needs another privilege granted
him. So they stand, shoulder-to-shoulder,
with their backs to Zacchaeus, while he jumps behind them, trying to get a
glimpse of the man everyone’s talking about.
But Zacchaeus
is nothing if not resourceful. He runs through
the back alleys, to get ahead of the parade, and clambers up a sycamore tree to
get an obstructed view. And when Jesus
gets there he looks up and greets Zacchaeus as if seeing an old friend. “Hurry down from there, Zacchaeus. I need to stay at your house tonight.” And with touching eagerness, Zacchaeus scrambles
down from his perch, and welcomes Jesus to be his guest.
Now where
the point in the story where we learn that Zacchaeus is driven to try to see
Jesus by something more than idle curiosity.
And maybe this is only just dawning on Zacchaeus, too. But when Jesus recognizes him and calls him
down out of the sycamore tree, and tells him he is worthy to take Jesus under
his roof and be his host, Zacchaeus suddenly understands what he was really
looking for— to put things right in his life.
He sees what he has to do to be restored to wholeness, and he finds the
resolve to do it. “I will give half my
possessions to the poor, Lord, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I
will pay it back four times over.”
Now Jesus
confirms that Zacchaeus has got it right.
He says it there, in the street of Jericho, in front of the whole crowd,
so everyone can understand, that no matter what kind of person Zacchaeus has
been in the past, no matter how his wealth, and his manner of getting it, have
alienated him from them, today Zacchaeus belongs again to the community. He is once again truly what he has always been
in his essence, a member of the family of Abraham. Because today he sets out on a new path, the
path that Jesus call everyone to follow, no matter their history, or station in
life, the path of integrity, and generosity, and compassion.
This
is the story of the call of a disciple, the final such story in the Gospel of
Luke, and Luke’s is the only Gospel that includes it. Mark and Matthew tell of a different
encounter that Jesus had in Jericho, which also turned into a call to
discipleship. And Luke tells that story,
too, right before the one about Zacchaeus.
It is the story of a fellow who also wants to see Jesus but can’t, not
because he is short, but because he is blind.
Like Zacchaeus, he is marginalized, kept at the back of the crowd
because he cannot see. But he cries out “Jesus,
Son of David, have mercy on me!” and the more those in front of him tell him to
shut up, the more he shouts it out. And
as with Zacchaeus, Jesus stops, for the one that others tried to exclude; he
asks the blind man “What do you want me to do for you?” and he asks to receive
his sight. Jesus tells that his faith
has saved him, and immediately he is able to see, and goes after Jesus, praising
God.
In
one sense the rich tax collector could not be more different from the blind
beggar by the roadside. But by adding in
the Zacchaeus story, Luke sets up a parallel which seems to suggest that they
are really much the same. They share the
same determination to make a connection with Jesus in spite of the disapproval
of the crowd. In both cases, Jesus takes
notice of them, and initiates a conversation.
In both cases, the result is healing and transformation. And yet the differences are also
significant. The beggar asks for and
receives a gift from Jesus, the physical restoration of his sight. While for Zacchaeus the restoration is
social and moral, and it begins with giving Jesus what he asked for—the hospitality of his house. The one man goes off to follow Jesus, on the
final miles of the journey to Jerusalem, but Zacchaeus is to stay put and set
things right with the folks in Jericho.
It might
help us understand what Luke was trying to say here if we consider that this is
not the only place in his gospel where wealth is a wedge dividing people from
each other—think of the rich man who feasts while Lazarus lies starves at his
gate, or the younger brother who squanders his inheritance, and is too ashamed
to go home. The strange parable of the
dishonest steward is a story, only found in Luke, in which ill-gotten wealth,
like that of Zacchaeus, becomes a means of reconciliation. All of which suggests that Luke was wrestling
with a problem that wasn’t much of an issue for Matthew and Mark, namely how to
bring people of unequal economic status together in the same community.
Luke’s
says nothing to soften the warnings we hear in the other Gospels against making
an idol of wealth. And, if anything, he
makes an even stronger case for what modern theologians have called God’s
“preferential option for the poor.” But when
Jesus calls Zacchaeus to come down from his high place, and join the rest of
us, he adds nuance to this picture, a nuance sometimes missing from our
contemporary debates about inequality.
We see a growing awareness nowadays of how destructive our grossly
unequal distribution of wealth is to the poor, and even to the endangered
middle-class, how it is corrupting our public institutions, and eroding social
solidarity. But the gospel reminds that it hurts the rich,
too, who in their own way are excluded from the unity God wants us to
share. Like people marginalized by
disability or poverty, or ethnic or sexual prejudice, they need a way to be
reconciled and restored to communion. They
are called to a path of discipleship.
And the example of Zacchaeus provides it, a path that, like the struggle
of the oppressed for liberation, requires courage and sacrifice. It begins with redistribution and
reparations.
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