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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