The Courage to Change
November 07, 2010
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Corinthians 9:6-9; Luke 19:1-10
The story of Zacchaeus is one of the more familiar to those of us who grew up going to Sunday School, Vacation Bible School or church camp. I remember our son Jason as an 11-year-old playing Jesus in the church camp musical production of this, called “Hurry on Down”, and a cute Jesus he was in his tie-dyed t-shirt, bleached-blond summer hair, and boy soprano voice. But, in our continuing mission to learn what the Bible is really saying, we find (when we take a close look) that this story isn’t really as we have heard it most of our lives.
First let me tell you the traditional interpretation of this passage: Jesus is traveling through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem. When he arrives in Jericho, a crowd gathers and one of the crowd, a man named Zacchaeus, wants to see Jesus but can’t because he is so short, so little Zacchaeus climbs up into a sycamore tree to see Jesus. And aren’t he and everyone else surprised when Jesus stops at the foot of the tree and says, “Zacchaeus! Come on down, for I am going to eat at your house tonight.” This is particularly surprising because Zacchaeus is the chief tax collector, and as we remember from last week – tax collectors were evil, unjust men who were collaborators with Rome and built up their personal wealth by extorting it from their fellow Jews. So people begin muttering among themselves at the poor choice Jesus has made, and that he is going to eat with a sinner. And Zacchaeus, as the story is commonly interpreted, is so moved by Jesus accepting him that he is repents on the spot and says, “Look, I will give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I’ve cheated anyone, from now on I will pay them back four times as much.” And in response to this declaration, Jesus says “Today salvation has come to this house, for I have come to save the lost.”
A great story. It’s not the story that’s in the Bible, but it’s a great story.
I keep saying how important it is to understand the original context. And it’s equally important to be open to how the text might surprise us. Let me give you an example from a different story. Most of you are probably familiar with the parable of the prodigal son, which Jesus told to illustrate how much God loves us. In the story, a man has two sons and the younger comes to him and asks if he can have his inheritance early. The father gives it to him and off goes the son, to a far country, where he spent all his money on dissolute living. Now there was a famine in the land, and the son got a job feeding pigs, and eventually came to himself and said, “My father’s hired hands live better than I am living – I will go back home and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned before heaven and against you, I am no longer worthy to be called your son, but please let me work among your hired hands.’” And so off he went toward home. When he was still far off, his father saw him and ran to him and embraced him. And he called his servants and said “Go kill the fatted calf for my son who was dead is now alive again, he was lost but now is found! Let’s celebrate!” When the other son came in from the field, he heard the party and learned from the servants what had happened, and he was angry and refused to go in. So his father came looking for him and pleaded with him, but the son said, “Look, all these years I worked faithfully for you and you never even gave me a baby goat to have a party with my friends, but now this son of yours who wasted all your money on prostitutes comes home and you kill the fatted calf for him and throw a huge party!” And the father said, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours, but we had to rejoice because your brother was dead and is now alive, he was lost and is now found!”
I’ve told many of you that I came to understand this story differently when I learned that in the ancient Middle East it was considered inappropriate for a man to run. So when the father, who is the God-figure in this story, runs – we learn that God is like a man who is willing to throw aside all propriety, all his status in order to welcome home the lost and help such a one to know he is loved. That’s a wonderful picture – God throwing aside all dignity to shower us with love. I learned this from the writings of a wonderful Middle Eastern scholar named Kenneth Bailey – Deb Knippel and I saw him lead Bible Study when we were at a conference in Louisville three years ago. Bailey lived, studied, and taught in the Middle East for over 40 years and said that the prohibition against men running was so strong, that he couldn’t find an Arab translation of the Bible that described the father as running. It was so peculiar to them to think that God would abandon propriety, that they simply translated it differently. They were no more willing to be surprised by Jesus than people were in the time of Jesus. When I first heard that, I thought it was pretty amazing – that people even now would be so resistant to the way Jesus described God that they would just refuse to translate it as Jesus said it.
But it turns out that our tradition has its own hang-ups, and they surface in today’s story about Zacchaeus.
First of all, not that it’s all that important, but we don’t know that Zacchaeus was short. Sure we do, you’ll tell me, the story said he was short. Well, that’s half right – the story says that someone is short, but there is no way to tell from the text whether it is Jesus or Zacchaeus that is short. Verse 3 in the New Revised Standard Version that we customarily read from says, exactly, “He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.” Who was short in stature? It would certainly make sense if it were Jesus, who being short and surrounded by the crowd, couldn’t be seen. As I said, it doesn’t really make much difference who was short, but I think we probably each reacted with some resistance to the idea that it might have been Jesus. Why? Well, as my husband said last night, “We’ve always thought of him as taller.” Well, those of us who grew up with the classic Warner Salman painting of Jesus on our Sunday School wall also thought of him as blond, but being a Jew in the Middle East, he certainly wasn’t.
Moving on to the more interesting issues: Jesus does stop right under the tree and call Zacchaeus down, saying that he must eat with him. But when the grumblers start grumbling about Jesus eating with sinners, and Zacchaeus begins to speak, he does NOT say, “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.” He does not use the future tense. He uses the present, and the form of the present that speaks of ongoing action that began in the past and continues into the present. It would be appropriate to translate it as “Look, it is my practice, Lord, to give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I defraud someone, I return to them four times what I took.” He is not repenting and saying he won’t be a bad guy in the future – he is saying that he is already not a bad guy. So why does Jesus say “Today salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham.”
What’s going on here?? First we have to remember that Jesus was virtually never talking about salvation as being about heaven and hell in the future – he almost always was talking about our life in the present world. And the word for salvation meant something very concrete – like being saved from physical danger. Or in this case, being saved may well refer to having relationships reconciled. In Judaism at this time, the concept of shalom – peace – meant being in right relationship with God and with humans, in your health and in your wealth. The sense was that if the relationship with God was right, then relationships with others would be as well, and that your business and health conditions would also be well. The Hebrew model of the world was a holistic one. So perhaps Jesus was not so much pronouncing Zacchaeus saved as he was declaring salvation to those who were willing and able to see Zacchaeus differently. Change is hard, but changing your mind is really difficult. Or perhaps Jesus was also affirming that Zacchaeus gets it – after all, we are familiar with another story of another rich man who is told by Jesus to sell what he has and give it to the poor, but that man walks away. Zacchaeus, without being told to, is already giving away half of what he owns.
And yet, so much of the Bible, and the Gospels in particular, is about changing our minds. The parables almost always have a surprising twist to them. The surprise in this story is that the tax collector is not a bad guy. And Jesus doesn’t say that he is becoming a son of Abraham; he says that he is a son of Abraham. And if Jesus has come to seek out and save the lost…then perhaps in this story, all the onlookers (including us) are among the lost – because we are the ones who need to be changed in order to restore relationships. We have to let go of our prejudices and easy categories and be willing to see this man as a child of God.
No wonder people got mad at Jesus – if the tax collector is not the one with the problem but WE are??
So often the work of Jesus is in helping us to see differently. He helps us to see ourselves differently, saying “You are the light of the world.” He helps us to see each other differently: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.” He helps us to see relationships differently, “I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven….” He helps us to see the world differently, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
I think that the problem for the translators is that same problem that the Arab translators had – if you translate it exactly as it reads, then it says something different than what they think about God. And that’s why the translators describe this as the only instance of the “present future” tense in the gospels – present tense in form but intended as future tense in meaning. Uh-huh. Translating it as present tense means that in the case of this story, it turns out that it’s not a repent-and-then-be-saved story which is a problem for some in the Christian tradition who see salvation and Christianity as being all about sin. But, if we’re willing to see what the text actually says, we will see salvation differently too – this story isn’t about Zacchaeus repenting and then being saved. Salvation in this story is about what Jesus is doing in terms of breaking down walls and reconciling relationships, restoring our vision – helping us to see the world as it really is, instead of how we always thought it was. This story isn’t about somebody else repenting from their sin – it’s about us, you and I, learning to see differently, to see that Zacchaeus is one of us, that we are all connected. In this story, salvation is more about seeing the world differently than about sin and repentance.
And in this stewardship season, our theme passage has been about helping us to see the world, and our place in it differently – to see that instead of not having enough – not enough time, not enough money, not enough talent to make a difference – instead of not having enough, we each already have more than enough when we’re willing to give from what we have – when we’re willing to be part of God’s generous rhythm in the world. And when we give in this way – freely, joyously, as a matter of routine – we find that we really do have more than enough, and we really are more than enough, and we are more than we have been. We learn to see ourselves differently, and that is the beginning of real change.
William J. Bausch wrote in The Yellow Brick Road: A Storyteller’s Approach to the Spiritual Journey that, “Learning to see is the key, for you see what you are. The Talmud says: ‘We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.’ Robert Barron puts it another way:
“Origen of Alexandria once remarked that holiness is seeing with the eyes of Christ. Teilhard de Chardin said with great passion that his mission as a Christian thinker was to help people see, and Thomas Aquinas said that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is a ‘…vision,’ an act of seeing.
“As Rabbi Harold Kushner writes in his book, Who Needs God: ‘Religion is not primarily a set of beliefs, a collection of prayers or a series of rituals. Religion is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can't change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a difference.’”
Let us let go of whatever vision of ourselves and of God we have that creates limits and keeps us from seeing ourselves as we can be, and keeps us from becoming who we were created to be. Just as Zacchaeus surprises us with his generosity, let us surprise ourselves, and let us be surprised by all that God makes of us through our willingness to be open to others and to give of ourselves, of our money, and of our time. If we only give what we can easily afford to give, then we won’t give ourselves the opportunity to truly grow into the joy of giving. May God surprise us all by what we see, and by who we become together. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Corinthians 9:6-9; Luke 19:1-10
The story of Zacchaeus is one of the more familiar to those of us who grew up going to Sunday School, Vacation Bible School or church camp. I remember our son Jason as an 11-year-old playing Jesus in the church camp musical production of this, called “Hurry on Down”, and a cute Jesus he was in his tie-dyed t-shirt, bleached-blond summer hair, and boy soprano voice. But, in our continuing mission to learn what the Bible is really saying, we find (when we take a close look) that this story isn’t really as we have heard it most of our lives.
First let me tell you the traditional interpretation of this passage: Jesus is traveling through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem. When he arrives in Jericho, a crowd gathers and one of the crowd, a man named Zacchaeus, wants to see Jesus but can’t because he is so short, so little Zacchaeus climbs up into a sycamore tree to see Jesus. And aren’t he and everyone else surprised when Jesus stops at the foot of the tree and says, “Zacchaeus! Come on down, for I am going to eat at your house tonight.” This is particularly surprising because Zacchaeus is the chief tax collector, and as we remember from last week – tax collectors were evil, unjust men who were collaborators with Rome and built up their personal wealth by extorting it from their fellow Jews. So people begin muttering among themselves at the poor choice Jesus has made, and that he is going to eat with a sinner. And Zacchaeus, as the story is commonly interpreted, is so moved by Jesus accepting him that he is repents on the spot and says, “Look, I will give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I’ve cheated anyone, from now on I will pay them back four times as much.” And in response to this declaration, Jesus says “Today salvation has come to this house, for I have come to save the lost.”
A great story. It’s not the story that’s in the Bible, but it’s a great story.
I keep saying how important it is to understand the original context. And it’s equally important to be open to how the text might surprise us. Let me give you an example from a different story. Most of you are probably familiar with the parable of the prodigal son, which Jesus told to illustrate how much God loves us. In the story, a man has two sons and the younger comes to him and asks if he can have his inheritance early. The father gives it to him and off goes the son, to a far country, where he spent all his money on dissolute living. Now there was a famine in the land, and the son got a job feeding pigs, and eventually came to himself and said, “My father’s hired hands live better than I am living – I will go back home and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned before heaven and against you, I am no longer worthy to be called your son, but please let me work among your hired hands.’” And so off he went toward home. When he was still far off, his father saw him and ran to him and embraced him. And he called his servants and said “Go kill the fatted calf for my son who was dead is now alive again, he was lost but now is found! Let’s celebrate!” When the other son came in from the field, he heard the party and learned from the servants what had happened, and he was angry and refused to go in. So his father came looking for him and pleaded with him, but the son said, “Look, all these years I worked faithfully for you and you never even gave me a baby goat to have a party with my friends, but now this son of yours who wasted all your money on prostitutes comes home and you kill the fatted calf for him and throw a huge party!” And the father said, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours, but we had to rejoice because your brother was dead and is now alive, he was lost and is now found!”
I’ve told many of you that I came to understand this story differently when I learned that in the ancient Middle East it was considered inappropriate for a man to run. So when the father, who is the God-figure in this story, runs – we learn that God is like a man who is willing to throw aside all propriety, all his status in order to welcome home the lost and help such a one to know he is loved. That’s a wonderful picture – God throwing aside all dignity to shower us with love. I learned this from the writings of a wonderful Middle Eastern scholar named Kenneth Bailey – Deb Knippel and I saw him lead Bible Study when we were at a conference in Louisville three years ago. Bailey lived, studied, and taught in the Middle East for over 40 years and said that the prohibition against men running was so strong, that he couldn’t find an Arab translation of the Bible that described the father as running. It was so peculiar to them to think that God would abandon propriety, that they simply translated it differently. They were no more willing to be surprised by Jesus than people were in the time of Jesus. When I first heard that, I thought it was pretty amazing – that people even now would be so resistant to the way Jesus described God that they would just refuse to translate it as Jesus said it.
But it turns out that our tradition has its own hang-ups, and they surface in today’s story about Zacchaeus.
First of all, not that it’s all that important, but we don’t know that Zacchaeus was short. Sure we do, you’ll tell me, the story said he was short. Well, that’s half right – the story says that someone is short, but there is no way to tell from the text whether it is Jesus or Zacchaeus that is short. Verse 3 in the New Revised Standard Version that we customarily read from says, exactly, “He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.” Who was short in stature? It would certainly make sense if it were Jesus, who being short and surrounded by the crowd, couldn’t be seen. As I said, it doesn’t really make much difference who was short, but I think we probably each reacted with some resistance to the idea that it might have been Jesus. Why? Well, as my husband said last night, “We’ve always thought of him as taller.” Well, those of us who grew up with the classic Warner Salman painting of Jesus on our Sunday School wall also thought of him as blond, but being a Jew in the Middle East, he certainly wasn’t.
Moving on to the more interesting issues: Jesus does stop right under the tree and call Zacchaeus down, saying that he must eat with him. But when the grumblers start grumbling about Jesus eating with sinners, and Zacchaeus begins to speak, he does NOT say, “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.” He does not use the future tense. He uses the present, and the form of the present that speaks of ongoing action that began in the past and continues into the present. It would be appropriate to translate it as “Look, it is my practice, Lord, to give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I defraud someone, I return to them four times what I took.” He is not repenting and saying he won’t be a bad guy in the future – he is saying that he is already not a bad guy. So why does Jesus say “Today salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham.”
What’s going on here?? First we have to remember that Jesus was virtually never talking about salvation as being about heaven and hell in the future – he almost always was talking about our life in the present world. And the word for salvation meant something very concrete – like being saved from physical danger. Or in this case, being saved may well refer to having relationships reconciled. In Judaism at this time, the concept of shalom – peace – meant being in right relationship with God and with humans, in your health and in your wealth. The sense was that if the relationship with God was right, then relationships with others would be as well, and that your business and health conditions would also be well. The Hebrew model of the world was a holistic one. So perhaps Jesus was not so much pronouncing Zacchaeus saved as he was declaring salvation to those who were willing and able to see Zacchaeus differently. Change is hard, but changing your mind is really difficult. Or perhaps Jesus was also affirming that Zacchaeus gets it – after all, we are familiar with another story of another rich man who is told by Jesus to sell what he has and give it to the poor, but that man walks away. Zacchaeus, without being told to, is already giving away half of what he owns.
And yet, so much of the Bible, and the Gospels in particular, is about changing our minds. The parables almost always have a surprising twist to them. The surprise in this story is that the tax collector is not a bad guy. And Jesus doesn’t say that he is becoming a son of Abraham; he says that he is a son of Abraham. And if Jesus has come to seek out and save the lost…then perhaps in this story, all the onlookers (including us) are among the lost – because we are the ones who need to be changed in order to restore relationships. We have to let go of our prejudices and easy categories and be willing to see this man as a child of God.
No wonder people got mad at Jesus – if the tax collector is not the one with the problem but WE are??
So often the work of Jesus is in helping us to see differently. He helps us to see ourselves differently, saying “You are the light of the world.” He helps us to see each other differently: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.” He helps us to see relationships differently, “I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven….” He helps us to see the world differently, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
I think that the problem for the translators is that same problem that the Arab translators had – if you translate it exactly as it reads, then it says something different than what they think about God. And that’s why the translators describe this as the only instance of the “present future” tense in the gospels – present tense in form but intended as future tense in meaning. Uh-huh. Translating it as present tense means that in the case of this story, it turns out that it’s not a repent-and-then-be-saved story which is a problem for some in the Christian tradition who see salvation and Christianity as being all about sin. But, if we’re willing to see what the text actually says, we will see salvation differently too – this story isn’t about Zacchaeus repenting and then being saved. Salvation in this story is about what Jesus is doing in terms of breaking down walls and reconciling relationships, restoring our vision – helping us to see the world as it really is, instead of how we always thought it was. This story isn’t about somebody else repenting from their sin – it’s about us, you and I, learning to see differently, to see that Zacchaeus is one of us, that we are all connected. In this story, salvation is more about seeing the world differently than about sin and repentance.
And in this stewardship season, our theme passage has been about helping us to see the world, and our place in it differently – to see that instead of not having enough – not enough time, not enough money, not enough talent to make a difference – instead of not having enough, we each already have more than enough when we’re willing to give from what we have – when we’re willing to be part of God’s generous rhythm in the world. And when we give in this way – freely, joyously, as a matter of routine – we find that we really do have more than enough, and we really are more than enough, and we are more than we have been. We learn to see ourselves differently, and that is the beginning of real change.
William J. Bausch wrote in The Yellow Brick Road: A Storyteller’s Approach to the Spiritual Journey that, “Learning to see is the key, for you see what you are. The Talmud says: ‘We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.’ Robert Barron puts it another way:
Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christianlife flows from and circles around the transformation of vision. Christianssee differently, and that is why their prayer, their worship, the action,their whole way of being in the world, as a distinctive accent and flavor.What unites figures as diverse as James Joyce, Caravaggio, John Milton, thearchitect of Chartres, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the later BobDylan is a peculiar and distinctive take on things, a style, a way, whichflows finally from Jesus of Nazareth.
“Origen of Alexandria once remarked that holiness is seeing with the eyes of Christ. Teilhard de Chardin said with great passion that his mission as a Christian thinker was to help people see, and Thomas Aquinas said that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is a ‘…vision,’ an act of seeing.
“As Rabbi Harold Kushner writes in his book, Who Needs God: ‘Religion is not primarily a set of beliefs, a collection of prayers or a series of rituals. Religion is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can't change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a difference.’”
Let us let go of whatever vision of ourselves and of God we have that creates limits and keeps us from seeing ourselves as we can be, and keeps us from becoming who we were created to be. Just as Zacchaeus surprises us with his generosity, let us surprise ourselves, and let us be surprised by all that God makes of us through our willingness to be open to others and to give of ourselves, of our money, and of our time. If we only give what we can easily afford to give, then we won’t give ourselves the opportunity to truly grow into the joy of giving. May God surprise us all by what we see, and by who we become together. Amen.