Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost; 30 October 2022; Proper 26C (RCL); Habakkuk 1:14-, 2:1-4; Psalm 119:137-144; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12; Luke 19:1-10.
The story of Zaccheus is a story I remember from Sunday School (I suppose we sang the song about him), but it is a much more complicated story than I remember. It’s the last encounter with someone outside the circle of disciples before Jesus enters Jerusalem. It stands in the same place as the story of Blind Bartimaeus stands in Mark’s Gospel. In that Gospel, Bartimaeus is the only person who follows Jesus “on the way.” In Luke’s Gospel, Zaccheus is the one person who “gets it.”
Luke has been concerned throughout the Gospel to this point with wealth, more than the other Gospel writers. Can we presume from this that his community had its share of wealthy members, and He was concerned to show the proper use of wealth? Jesus told a parable of a rich man whose fields produced abundantly, and who built bigger barns for himself. Although he planned to relax, eat, drink, and be merry, but his soul was required of him that night, and God asked him whose would his good things be. Lazarus lay at the gate of a rich man, and Lazarus ended up in the bosom of Abraham (reclining next to him at a banquet) rather than the rich man. The rich young man goes away dispirited, because Jesus tells him he lacks one thing — to sell what he has and give to the poor.
Zaccheus, on the other hand, receives Jesus’ praise — “Today, salvation has come to this house.”
Zaccheus is a chief tax-collector; he has paid the Romans for the privilege of collecting taxes. Typically, such persons would then farm out the actual collection to others, and expect them to overcharge, so that they could make back the payment plus a little (or a lot). Hence, they were despised, especially if they came from the class of people conquered by the Romans. They were viewed as collaborators of the worst sort.
The difficulty in this story is that the translations put Zaccheus’ actions in the future tense; “I will give half of my possessions to the poor. If I have overcharged anyone, I will pay back four times as much.” In the Greek, these actions are in the present tense; “I do give half my possession to the poor; and if I overcharge someone (the word in Greek means to show figs – sychphaino), I do pay them back four times as much.” In other words, Zaccheus is an exemplar of the correct use of wealth. He is doing the very things with his wealth that Jesus has been teaching.
So, Jesus praises him, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” I wonder if “house” here takes in more than just Zaccheus’ immediate household. Jesus has been accused of fraternizing with tax-collectors, prostitutes, and sinners — people pushed by circumstance into ways of life that seem to compromise the righteousness of the community. But here, despite his collaboration with the Roman authorities, Zaccheus is apparently fulfilling the requirements of righteousness, welcoming guests into his house, and caring for the poor of his community. Outcasts can be of all sorts, but what really matters is not the dividing lines we draw, but their role in the life of the community.
Habakkuk writes at the same time as Jeremiah. We leave out a chunk of his complaint. God has replied in the first instance that God is sending the Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians) to clean house in Jerusalem. Habakkuk goes on to complain that they aren’t any better than the corrupt nobility of Jerusalem; how is this going to fix anything. At that point God replies that Habakkuk should write the vision. The prophet does not fill in the content of the vision, but we can safely assume it is the same as all the other prophets have seen, a vision of a just community, with all at peace and whole. Hard to hold such a vision in hard times. But Zaccheus can be an example of how to do that.