Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
“Word Matter” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4/CEB)
Gospel Reading (Luke 19:1-10/NRSVUE)
My job as a pastor involves a awful lot of writing (reflections, letters for the monthly edition of Tidings, and a whole bunch of emails), so it might not surprise you to learn that I find words (and how we combine them in order to convey things) pretty fascinating.
One of the things by which I’ve always been intrigued is referred to as lexical ambiguity. That term makes it sound complicated but it’s really not; it’s simply what happens when sentences contain unclear referents. Consider this one: “I made her duck.” Now, does this mean that I made her lower her head so she didn’t hit it on something, or does it mean that I made her duck (you know: like “quack quack”) for dinner. Without more context to guide us, it’s impossible to say.
Perhaps the most famous example of lexical ambiguity comes to us from comedian Groucho Marx. In the 1930 movie classic Animal Crackers, Groucho says: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” My distaste for violence against pachyderms aside, I find this kind of amusing.
The Bible, which is, of course, made up of many words, is vulnerable to lexical ambiguity too. We run into an instance of it in today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, and caught on the wrong side of this lack of clarity for the better part of two thousand years now is poor Zaccheus.
As our story begins, Jesus is passing through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem — as we know, he’s been making his way there for quite a while at this point. Crowds have been gathering all along the way to catch a glimpse of him, to have a word with him, to be blessed by him, to be healed by him. And there amongst the crowd at this stop in Jericho is a man named Zaccheus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich — and this is the extent of the biographical information about Zaccheus that Luke shares with us.
Some of you from a particular generation might have in your head the song about him that you learned in Sunday School many years ago: “Zaccheus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he. He climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see.” So, Zaccheus wasn’t just a tax collector, he wasn’t just rich; apparently, he was also quite short — it says so right there in the lyrics! But is that what it actually says in the Bible?
As the crowd is growing and the people are clamoring to gander at Jesus, we learn what Zaccheus does in that moment; Luke writes, “He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.”
We’re told that Zaccheus climbs the tree to see Jesus because “he was short in stature,” but the text isn’t clear about who was “short in stature.” Was it Zaccheus, or was it Jesus? Have a look for yourself — it’s hard to say for sure. There’s some lexical ambiguity for you.
At the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter all that much. And yet, the fact that tradition has generally assumed Zaccheus was the short one says some interesting things about us.
For starters, us humans tend to expect the heroes of our stories to be superior beings in every sense — and Jesus, who is clearly the hero of this entire story, is supposed be the Son of God for crying out loud! So, how could he not be six foot four and strong, clad in a long white robe, with flowing locks and a halo of light surrounding him all the time? Sure, Jesus might be a poor carpenter from the wrong side of town but that’s okay because in Luke’s version of the Gospel, the rich aren’t really thought of too highly anyway.
Zaccheus, in contrast, ain’t exactly classic hero material. He’s rich (and we already know how Luke feels about rich people); he’s a tax collector (and we talked last week about how people positively adored tax collectors in Jesus’ world); and he’s not just any tax collector — he’s the chief tax collector. People in that place and time would have seen Zaccheus as the worst of the worst of the worst.
Zaccheus is so excited at the prospect of seeing Jesus that he runs ahead of the crowd and climbs a tree to get a look at him, and both of these actions would have been seen by Luke’s audience to be incredibly undignified things for a grown man with an ounce of class to do — confirming their already negative opinion of him.
Of course Zaccheus, this man of questionable moral integrity who unfairly profits off his neighbors, this desperate man who is willing to debase himself in front of everyone just to see Jesus, has to be the short one… Right? Once people have their minds made up about someone it can be pretty hard to change them.
Anyway, when Jesus notices Zaccheus up there in the sycamore tree, he calls him by name and tells him to come down; he then invites himself over to Zaccheus’ house (Jesus seems to know Zaccheus already, but we don’t ever find out how).
The crowd, suffice it to say, isn’t happy about this and they begin to grouse; “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner,” is their complaint. In their way of seeing things, someone like Jesus had no business hanging around with someone like that. Zaccheus then proceeds to defend himself to Jesus. Luke tells us that he “stood there” talking to the Lord, though I wonder whether he was looking up at Jesus, or whether was Jesus looking up at him.
Luke points out that Zaccheus actually stood in front of Jesus here, and this is a significant detail. There’s a whole bunch of times in Luke’s Gospel where repentant sinners come before Jesus asking for forgiveness and, down to a last, they fall upon their knees or lay down on the ground at Jesus’ feet when they do. But not Zaccheus; he chooses to stand there as he speaks. So, might we infer from this gesture that Zaccheus isn’t actually asking Jesus for forgiveness here?
The peoples’ beef with Zaccheus is that he is a sinner by virtue of what he does for a living — namely, being a tax collector who’s exploited the people. And the defense he presents to Jesus here focuses on that accusation. Listen to what he says in the text as I read it to you earlier: “Look, half my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”
Now this was actually a pretty generous offer on Zaccheus’ part. Jewish law only required him to give away ten percent of his possessions and he’s agreeing to give away five times that. The law also obligated him to pay two times damages to anyone he’d wronged and he declares that he’ll give double that. And for this generous gesture, this sincere promise of repentance, Jesus announces that, “Today salvation has come to [Zaccheus’] house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
But remember that Zaccheus is standing toe-to-toe with Jesus as he says all this — whether he’s looking up at him or down at him, we still don’t know. Sure, the words Zaccheus says sound repentant but his body language seems kind of defiant; and that’s a little tough to reconcile.
But a look inside the Bible might help to make some sense of all this (then again, it might not). In the New Revised Standard Version (which your pew bible is) verse eight is translated as follows: “Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”
But the Revised Standard Version (which your pew Bible would have been a few decades ago) says something else. There, verse eight is translated as follows: “And Zacchae′us stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.”
And this is a huge difference — in the second way of reading it, Zaccheus is not promising to make things right with those whom he’s wronged, he’s telling Jesus that he already make things right with those whom he’s wronged. And that could be the most incredible part of this story.
Way back at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, John the Baptist went into the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. When John was going about proclaiming all this, the crowds asked him what they actually needed to do; and here is what he told them:
“‘He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.’ Tax collectors also came to be baptized, and said to him, ‘Teacher, what shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Collect no more than is appointed you.’”
Zaccheus, it seems, might actually have been listening.
That’s right — this rich man, this tax collector, this desperate and unseemly person, this man from whom absolutely no one expected anything good, was listening. And he wasn’t just listening, he was actually putting these teachings about repentance into practice. Imagine that.
Well, apparently Jesus imagined it, but us, probably not so much. When we think of Zaccheus, is the first thing that comes to mind his willingness to try to live like God’s kingdom is already right here on earth? Or is it just that he was a wee little man who climbed a sycamore tree? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, but why?
Maybe its just too hard for people to accept the possibility that someone like Zaccheus, a rich chief tax collector, a social outcast, could ever truly repent;
or maybe its just too hard for us to believe that someone like Zaccheus could ever be loved by anyone, let alone God;
or maybe accepting the idea that even someone like Zaccheus could actually change would mean having to accept the idea that we could too — that we should too — and we don’t want to have to go through the trouble of doing that. It just easier for us to write-off Zaccheus, to make being short (and a tax collector) his lasting legacy.
And what about Jesus? In a church to which I used to belong it seemed like there were pictures of Jesus everywhere (not photographs, mind you, because the camera had yet to be invented in Jesus’s time, but rather paintings). To be more clear, I should have said “picture” or “painting” because it was just the same one over and over again in different sizes and different frames. It was like somebody got a discount for buying them in bulk at Costco (though these paintings were kind of old — not Jesus old, mind you, but old — and Costco didn’t even exist at that point).
In these renderings, Jesus was as white as white could be, with long, flowing brown hair and bright blue eyes and he was also probably six foot four (though, in fairness, you couldn’t tell that from the picture because it was only from the shoulders up). Archaeologists know that your typical man in first century Galilee sure didn’t look like that — and the average height of a man in that place and time was about five foot five. But I imagine some folks in our day and age might have a problem thinking about a dark skinned, dark haired, dark eyed, five foot tall Jesus. This is incredibly sad, but also not terribly surprising.
Like I said earlier, once people have their mind made up about someone, it can be pretty hard to convince them otherwise.
But we should be really thankful that Jesus would never treat us the same way.