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Today, salvation has come to this house (Luke 19:9)

Ordinary Sunday 31, 4th November, 2001
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill

As Jesus' encounter with Zaccheus in this morning's gospel sees the tax farmer renounce the wealth that he has accumulated, possibly by adhering simply to the letter of the law in a system that allowed tax farming, those dissatisfied with present tax reforms might feel some sense of comfort. But whether we would receive generous bonus tax returns as a consequence of a personal encounter between Jesus and the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation can only be a matter of speculation – my observation of public servants in general does not lend much support for such a result.

The apparently personal details in St Luke's picture have often attracted the attention of preachers. The small man, climbing the tree so as not to miss out on seeing Jesus, spotted by Jesus in his progress through Jericho, and encouraged to come down from his perch, offering a warm personal invitation, or perhaps insisting on a kind of private fan's interview over a meal with his hero, all give a sense of liveliness and enable us to visualise a scene, or set of scenes.

A 16th century aid for preachers (Cornelius à Lapide's Commentary on the Gospels) took up the question of Zaccheus' size in a way that sounds slightly Monty Pythonesque, turning him into a model for the small man: 'Many of the heroes and saints were men of small stature, as I have shown in Zech 4:10 and Ecclus 11:3 on the words "The bee is small among flying things, but her fruit is the chief of sweetest things".'

But more seriously, at the heart of this gospel is something we take for granted, and often refrain from observing. It is centred in Zaccheus' response to Jesus. It is easy to take it for granted that Zaccheus is going to respond in the way he does. As a class, tax collectors owed their unpopularity not to any perception or assumption about dishonesty – in a system that collected taxes by commissioning individuals to collect a nominated amount, it was generally legitimate for the agent to retain anything above the set figure that he could extract in the process of doing the state's business. In Israel as a Roman puppet state, his unpopularity hinged on being perceived as an agent of the foreign oppressor. To make a living – and it might be a very comfortable one – in this way was unpatriotic. It helped the invader. So Zaccheus' offer to give away a large proportion of what he had already accumulated could also look like a patriotic act, as well as a recognition that his previous actions had involved putting pressure on those who might be, in our terms, in the lower income brackets.

The point remains that for Zaccheus, his meeting with Jesus is a moment in which there is what appears to be a radical departure from his normal behaviour. But while there are several points in the gospels in which emphasis is placed on the significance of spontaneity in our response to others and to God, I do not think that we need to understand this response of Zaccheus as a one-off spontaneous act, but as an indication of something else. It is of course in one sense a moment of conversion: Zaccheus encounters Jesus and responds as he does because there is something about Jesus which acts as an invitation to generosity as well as fair dealing. But I want to take this a little further again. Zaccheus' responses are an indication that he has been ready for this for some time; there has been a process going on inside him of which this is the climax, not the beginning. He is up the tree, not just because he is a short man, but because he is ready to look for something and find it in this visitor to Jericho.

And he changes. Because he has been prepared for change by some degree of honest self-examination. A moment of self acceptance of what he is and how he has been: recognition that he has been the agent of pressure on others, that in his people's history God has been an agent of freedom, not oppression. As he responds to God in Jesus, the change becomes possible. Zaccheus is able to accept God's presence, and take the different course that he now embraces, because he has already accepted himself. The presence of God comes at once as judgement and deliverance. A perceptive interpretation of this dimension of the whole incident is offered by St Ambrose at the end of the fourth century: 'Jesus had not heard the voice of Zaccheus inviting him, but He had seen his feeling'.

If the presence of God is a source of deliverance when combined with such self-awareness, what is it when such honesty is absent? The remarkable Russian bishop of London, Antony Bloom, pointed out that often when we lack a sense of God's presence, or, more definitely and pointedly, have a sense of His absence, it is because we have as yet been unable to be honest or accepting in our assessment of ourselves. He told the story of the man who came to him, puzzled by a sense of God's absence. Bloom asked him whether there was a particular passage of scripture that he considered to be specially meaningful. When he replied the parable of the woman caught in adultery, Bloom asked him to name the figure or group in the story with which he personally identified. His answer was that it was with no-one in the story as the gospel told it: he would be the one man who would not withdraw, but would stone the woman. Bloom suggested that this was the key to the man's sense of the absence of God. If God were present to him, up to now, it could only be as one who judged his lack of forgiveness, not as one who delivered. Bloom concluded that often what seems like the absence of God to us, is more like a remission in which we are given the space for honest self examination, so that we may have reached that degree of self-acceptance which is necessary if the presence of God is to be something positive and creative for us, rather than a moment of darkness.

For many people, the presence of God is not a permanent reality, but something intermittent, sporadically sensed; but, unlike Jesus' visit to Jericho, not something of which we have prior warning. Traditionally, Advent (fast approaching) is understood as a period of preparation for Christmas; the commercial world in the meantime forces it on our attention with only one form of preparation in mind – the emptying of pockets and the jingling of cash registers. If we read this morning's gospel as a part of our journey towards Advent and Christmas – an invitation to preparation – it can well recall us to the need to come to a greater honesty about ourselves in between those points of time in which God's presence seems immediate and real to us. In other words, it can invite us to the work of realistic self-acceptance, a work that is necessary if deeper levels of change are to be possible. A form of absolution in older Anglican Prayer Books spoke of 'time for the amendment of life', an approach to the whole process of living that is neither outdated nor irrelevant simply because we hear little, if anything, of such values in the pronouncements coming from the voices of mainstream culture.

The work of self-examination and honest recognition of ourselves and our need for change, and the very desire for change itself – this is all work that can help to deliver us from the situation of the man whom Anthony Bloom encountered, and help to make us more like Zaccheus, ready when the great visitor comes through Jericho. 'Jesus had not heard the voice of Zaccheus inviting him, but He had seen his feeling'.


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