NewCreation

Homily for Thirty First Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today we have the story of Zacchaeus. It means a bit of a jump from where we were last time, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, but what has happened in between are passages which appear in other Gospels. So we're moving on with things that are particular to Luke. And this account is only found in Luke's Gospel. And it's rather beautiful for a whole variety of reasons. It's psychologically extraordinarily apt and apparently legally it's very correct also. So I hope you'll enjoy what we do with Zacchaeus. So Jesus enters Jericho and was passing through it. This means that he's coming towards the end of his journey to Jerusalem. This would probably be the last stop on his way to Jerusalem. That's how it's presented in the other Gospels. So he's been on this long walk, or relatively long walk, slowly through Galilee and the part of Judea that was between Galilee and Samaria. And now he's come into Judea and he's going up to Jerusalem. As he's gone through, he's brought out how a number of people are children of Abraham: this woman is a daughter of Abraham, this person is a son of Abraham, and this is going to be another in that series. And that's quite important, as we'll see. He enters Jericho and was passing through it. Now that means he was not intending to stay, and there were quite clear ways that a man accompanied by a group like his would indicate that he was on his way through, that he didn't intend to stop. Otherwise he would have had people, friends of his, looking for somewhere to stay for him. So by this stage, remember, he's a famous person. People have heard of him, they've heard of his wonders, his miracles, so there's no doubt a good deal of curiosity as to who he is and where he's going and what he's been talking about, and questions about whether he is the promised one. So he's on his way through. And a man was there named Zacchaeus. Well, Zacchaeus apparently means "the righteous one," but it means rather more than that. It was probably a nickname given to him, whatever his name was, after this account, because it really describes — apparently in the Aramaic background to it — a person who has become just because he made a legal matter moot. He made a legal matter no longer important. And of course that is a very exact description of what is about to happen with the person now called Zacchaeus, the one now referred to as Zacchaeus. Now, it says here he was a chief tax collector and was rich. Okay, you had to be rich in order to be a chief tax collector. In order to be at any level of tax collector, You had to be able already to show you owned at least the equivalent of double the tax that you would expect to have to bring in and owe to the Roman authorities in any year. So you had to start from showing that you could afford to be a tax farmer, and that meant that you could bear on your own two years' worth of paying tax if you failed to collect anything. So you were rich if you were a tax collector. If you were a chief tax collector — and this is going to be important later — then it probably meant that you actually owned the tax farm and you had lots of employees under you, normal publicans as it were, normal tax collectors, who worked on your behalf. And it was something of a Ponzi scheme. Those of you who've lived in countries with corrupt police know how this works. Your low-level traffic cop has to fine you a small amount whether you've done something or not, because he himself needs to give a certain amount — maybe the equivalent of five tickets a day — to his boss, and so on up the scale, so that the big boss at the top is going to receive a huge whack. And there would have been something like that, a pyramid scheme, going on with a tax collector. And here's the interesting thing: that a tax collector, even if there was one who was honest, would have very little way of knowing how dishonest his employees had been. It was an industry that relied, for instance, on doing as our own revenue services do — charging us too much at the beginning of the year and then giving us back at the end if they've overcharged us. Well, if the people you've overcharged too much at the beginning of the year had enough legal clout to make you pay them back, then you probably did. But if they were poor widows and other people like that, you could probably get away with not paying back. So in other words, you were much more inclined as a tax collector to rob the poor than the rich, simply because the rich could fight to get back what was owed. So anyhow, you can imagine that Zacchaeus was not Mr. Popular. This was the sort of person who would have a reputation for being an extortioner, someone who did not live according to Torah and was therefore not only a sinner but impure. Everything about him was impure. You would not go into his house to eat because you would be tainted by impurity. He had become the equivalent of a gentile, an impure person, owing to his lifestyle. So he was trying to see who Jesus was. He's actually interested. This is going to turn out to be his saving grace. He's enough of a man of his town to actually want to see what the curiosity is about. His curiosity is piqued. He actually wants to see who Jesus was. He's heard, and he wants to see. But on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. And of course that does not only mean that in a crowd he would be too small to see who Jesus was — but if you were an unpopular rich tax collector, and you were short, and in a crowd you might very easily be trampled on — and oops, it would be accidental, but it wouldn't be so accidental. You were not popular, and it would be terrible if something happened to you, let us say. So he's got a very good reason to avoid the crowd. He knows that he's a potential scapegoat, he's much to blame, so he's not going to get in their way easily. So he ran ahead and climbed the sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. Sycamore tree. Very curious — why would we have the sort of tree mentioned? Well, it's the only time in the whole of the Bible this particular tree puts in an appearance. The sycamore tree was a member of the fig tree family, but it was what one might call a false fig, in that it was a member of the fig family but had very faded, rather poor leaves, and rancid and bitter and small fruit, unlike fig trees themselves, which can be very leafy. And it wouldn't be much good — he wouldn't have been able to see much out of a fig tree — and of course they have delicious fruit. So he's climbing a fake fig tree to see Jesus, because he was going to pass that way. Now, one of the things about the sycamore tree is that you could actually see out of it, and indeed be seen from it. And there's a little hint here that, whereas in the garden originally, once they became ashamed, Adam and Eve hid themselves with a fig leaf and the Lord came walking in the afternoon — here he hides himself with a fake fig leaf to hide his shame, but it's not going to protect him very well. So Jesus is passing through, and again the Aramaic word behind this is the same from which we get the word "Hebrew." It's what Abraham was, a wandering Aramean. So Jesus is passing through, and he was going to pass that way in front of this tree. So when Jesus came to the place, doing his Abrahamic thing, he looks up and says to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today." Now, we don't know whether he called him Zacchaeus giving him a new name, or whether he made a pun as to what he was going to do with him. But clearly the calling him, the seeing him — and this was a person, a short person who'd never been looked at from underneath. He always, because he was short, tended to be looked at from above, and usually with rather, let's say, unpleasant looks. And here suddenly he's looked at from beneath by someone who's giving him a name that sounds as though it's to do with righteousness. And he's being seen in a way he's never been seen before. He's being called into being by the person who is in fact not only the person who he's come to see, but the centre of the crowd's fascination — the centre of the crowd's fascination has fixed on him, and it's not fixed on him in a hostile way, it's fixed on him in a gentle but a bold way. And apparently the hurry… "and come down, for I must stay at your house today" – doesn't actually mean "I'm inviting myself to stay overnight." It means something much more like "I'm going to make a pit stop at your house today." It's part of the wandering-through imagery, so it's not necessarily "I'm going to stay for a long time," but at least "I need a break on this track, so I'll be making a pit stop at your house today." So Zacchaeus hurries down and was happy to welcome him, received him with joy. And the word for "receive" here – again, the Aramaic word – is how God receives people. It's the strongest possible term, and it's the important thing. It's how Abraham received God and the Lord and the Lord's two friends when the Lord was wandering along near Mamre in the book of Genesis. So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. Now here's the interesting thing. Here is Jesus about to go into the house of a man who was objectively a tainted person. The hamartolos – the sinner. We think of that in moralistic terms. That's not how people at the time would have thought of that. They would have thought of that in terms of: here is a person who objectively speaking is tainted. You become tainted – you would lose your purity, you become impure – by going into that person's house and eating. It's against Torah. In other words, Jesus is running the risk of becoming impure through going into this man's house. And either they think that's very odd – if Jesus is really the person we think he is, surely he would know better than to go into the house of a tainted person like this – because there's no question at all that a person in Zacchaeus's position would, whether deliberately or not, have enriched himself by extortion. And he wouldn't know how much he owed to other people because of his extortion: A, because such accounts are very difficult to keep track of; and B, as I say, as a chief tax collector he had lots of lesser tax collectors under him whose small extortions might have got bigger but would be unknown to him, and yet for which he would be responsible. In other words, he had accumulated a good deal of bad vibes from his employees as part of his enrichment. So they all begin to grumble and say, "He's gone in to be the guest of one who's a sinner." So in part they're jealous of him, in part they're surprised that someone like him shouldn't know to whose house he's going, and the other is that they're genuinely shocked because of the question of purity. So then is the answer. Zacchaeus, who has now been looked at from underneath, addressed with this name calling him to be something quite different, stands there and says very quickly to the Lord – he has to get it out fast, because this is a definite legal promise; he is effectively rendering himself pure again by what he's saying – "Lord, half of my possessions…" "I will give to the poor." There was no problem, incidentally, for the poor receiving tainted money. In fact, it was a good thing to give tainted money to the poor — that was a good thing to do. Having dealings with a tainted person, you would share the taint, but receiving — simply being a recipient of tainted money — that was a good thing. "And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Now, sometimes we imagine that this is, you know, a semi-plea for innocence, and it may have been merely that. But the point of it here is it's a legal promise that he is going to do, in as far as he possibly can, put right whatever defrauding — extortion is the term — and it's false accusations: the way in which someone accused someone falsely of how much they owed, so as to get money from them. This is: "If I have extorted anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much," which is a regular understanding in the Jewish scriptures and the Hebrew scriptures as to how much you should pay back in circumstances like this. So, in light of that, Jesus says to him: "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham." In other words, the wandering Aramean has wandered through, has been received into the house, like Abraham, by someone who has been prepared to recover his own purity at great cost to himself in order to receive Jesus. Jesus has, as it were, almost blackmailed him into getting rid of his badly gotten wealth. "For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." And so here you have the reference back to what happens in the beginning of the passage with Zacchaeus seeking out, but Jesus seeing him — and all along, the sensation that we may think that we're seeking out, but we are being sought out. And that is the way how grace works, how forgiveness works, and forgiveness reaches us and has as its fruit the breaking open of heart and the giving away of things. That's how forgiveness produces penitence in us and shows us to be sons and daughters of Abraham. Just a quick little note on quite a fun pun which there is in this Gospel, which we wouldn't get in English. Remember that Zacchaeus hides in the sycamore, which is a fake fig tree. When he comes down and apologizes, offers to pay back anything he has defrauded, the Greek word for "to defraud" or "to extort" is sycophanteo, from which we get our word "sycophant." But strangely, for us the word "sycophant" tends to mean someone who lords excessive and ridiculous praise on someone, and therefore is a sort of a fake appraiser, a sucker-up to them. The original word meant someone who accused people of false dealing in figs — that's the origin behind that. So we have Zacchaeus both hiding in a fake fig tree and… Putting right his fake fig accusations. There's certainly a pun which is at work there as part of the story of how Zacchaeus is restored to the family of Abraham. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.