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It is a joy and a delight to be with you today, and I am grateful to this congregation and to all of its leaders and its people for the wonderful way in which you have so graciously received me over these last three days and given me a serious hearing as we try to understand the words of our Lord on as deep a level as we can.

 

The text before us is a grand text, well-known to all of us, and our task is to rescue truth from familiarity. Our reading this morning will be from Luke Chapter 18 starting in verse 35 and reading through Chapter 19 through to verse 10. You will quickly see that this comes out of two chapters in the New Testament and you may remember the fact that the chapter headings were put in by Byzantine monks four hundred years after this book was written, and sometimes they got them in very good places and sometimes in very peculiar places.

 

In this particular case, there are two stories that happen in Jericho side by side, and I am convinced that we should read them side by side and reflect on them side by side because in the first story Jesus is dealing with the oppressed and in the second story he’s dealing with the oppressor.

 

Hear then the word of the Lord:

 

As he drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging, and hearing a multitude going by, he inquired what this meant. They told him, “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.”

And he cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And those who were in front rebuked him telling him to be silent, but he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And Jesus stopped and commanded him to be brought to him and when he came near, he asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

He said, “Lord, let me receive my sight.”

Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight; your faith has saved you.” And immediately he received his sight and followed him and glorifying God.

and all the people when they saw it, gave praise to God.

He entered Jericho and was passing through.

And there was a man named Zacchaeus and he was chief tax collector and rich. And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not on account of the crowd because he was small of stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore-fig tree to see him, for he was to pass that way.

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down for I must stay at your house today.” So he made haste and came down and received him joyfully.

And when they saw it, they all murmured, “He has gone in to be the guest for the night of a man who is a ‘sinner.’”

And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord! The half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it four-fold.”

And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

 

May God add his understanding to our minds as we hear these sacred words.

 

The story of Zacchaeus itself, by way of a brief footnote, is put together with a great deal of artistry that is called ring composition. You start off with Jesus, and then you get Zacchaeus and his money, and then you’ve got the crowd, and then the tree, and then Jesus speaks a second time, and then we’ve got the tree again, and then the hostility of the crowd, and Zacchaeus decides to give his money away, and Jesus has the last word at the end.

 

Of course, the first time you read this story, you noticed this ring composition! It is so obvious that it is impossible to miss it!

 

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes that is a very strange and powerful verse which reads as follows:

 

And again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. And behold the tears of the oppressed. There was no one to comfort them. And on the side of their oppressors, there was power. And there was no one to comfort them.

 

This will, perhaps, help us as we look into the stories that we wish to examine today.

 

The story, as we just heard it, begins with Jesus coming by and a blind beggar beside the road and the beggar hears a crowd. It’s easy to imagine, well that, of course, could mean that a crowd has followed Jesus from Galilee on his journey to Jerusalem and that may be partly true, but in our Middle Eastern traditional society, any time an important guest comes to town, it is expected that the leading citizens of the town should go out some distance, greet the guest, and escort the guest in kind of a parade back into the town where, of course, a banquet is prepared.

 

While my family and I were living in the south of Egypt, the then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, of the country came to visit Asyut, where we lived. He’d not been there since he became president, and so the whole town made a big deal and a big fuss over the big man. He came with his entourage of cars and 10,000 people walked eight miles to greet the cars, insisted that the cars be turned off, and they put ropes around the bumpers, and the people pulled the cars back into Asyut to be sure that the big man knew that he was welcome. And I presume he got the message!

 

In a very simple village I have had villagers come out—usually the mayor and the preacher—to greet me. I am riding a donkey and they make a big fuss. The guards are there; they fire off a few rounds in salute. It makes you feel kind of special, and then you ride back into town and the meetings begin.

 

In the city of Aleppo in northern Syria this has been refined into modern times. When the patriarch comes to visit, all the leading Christians go out of the edge of town where there’s a parking lot and they wait for the patriarch. When he shows up, then there’s a parade of cars. He gets out and everybody greets the patriarch, and then a parade of cars goes to the cathedral to hear what the patriarch has to say.

 

Why is there a crowd coming out of Jericho? Well, Jesus is a messianic pretender. He is on his way to Jerusalem at the time of Passover. In the Jewish community, both then and now, the feast of Yom Kippur in the fall is a solemn recollection of sin, but Passover in the spring is a recollection of having gotten out of Egypt. And the mood of the celebration of Passover (I lived in Israel for ten years) is like the celebration of having won the Super Bowl! It’s, “Yippee! Hey, we got out of Egypt! Yeah!” This is the mood of Passover.

 

So, they expect to have a long discussion about religion and politics with Jesus late into the night—and, of course, in the Middle East, religion and politics is always a single package—and find out whether he’s going to make his move. Do we call out the sikkarim [violent types] or do we call out the other types of the zealots who are fighting for the liberation of the land? What does he have in mind?

 

The blind man beside the road hears the crowd and he calls out and says, “What’s happening?” They tell him Jesus of Nazareth is going by.” In a loud voice he calls out to Jesus using the messianic title, Son of David: a rare title. It occurs in the birth stories of Jesus and never again.

 

So the crowd tells him, “Shut up and sit down. He doesn’t have time for people like you.”

 

The man cries out all the more and Jesus hears him. Jesus stops. He doesn’t go to the man beside the road. He orders the crowd that has just told this poor fellow to shut up and sit down to be the courtiers to escort the guests to the king. It’s a nice touch.

 

And when he gets in front of him, then Jesus asks him and says, “What can I do for you?” Now, it’s obvious, isn’t it? The man’s blind. Aha! But being blind is his profession. In the Middle East beggars are considered one of the professions of the community and the beggars are understood to be offering services: namely, every person is supposed to be pious and give alms to the poor, but if the poor aren’t out there to receive the alms, how can you give your alms to the poor?

 

And so the man beside the road doesn’t say, “Hey, bud, ya’ got a buck for a cup of coffee?” He says, [speaks in Arabic and then translates] “Give to God. I’ve got nothin’ to do with it. I’m giving you a chance to fulfill your religious duties before God.” And, of course, he always sits in the marketplace or in some public road where lots of people will be walking by and if you give him something, he will stand up and in a very loud voice he will proclaim you as the most noble gentleman that he’s ever met in his life and ask prayers for God’s blessing on you and your family and your going out and your coming in and your business enterprises and the whole bit. And you may not be the kind of person about whom very nice things are being said in a loud voice in a pubic place, and it ought to be worth four bits!

 

But you have to have something wrong with you. Sore back like I have won’t do. One arm—Hmm?—might make it. Blind? Perfect: guaranteed lifetime income. And I do not in any way mean to demean the poor of the Middle East or anywhere else, but I do notice that, particularly, blind beggars generally are on the stout side: they manage. And their one ticket to lifetime income is their blindness.

 

A friend of mine who served the Lord in Bangladesh for some years saw occasionally beggars on the road with some medical problem like having been burned and their legs are all crippled up and offered to take them to the hospital where he would pay for whatever medicine and whatever operation is required that they might be able to walk again and live a normal life. And they always refused. My friend told me this just last week in California. He said he tried five different times and they all refused and he finally gave up. They knew what the deal was.

 

What is this beggar—if he is healed by Jesus—what’s he going to do tomorrow? He has no education, no skills, no track record of employment. He can’t do anything. And is he not better off to remain blind like the beggars of Bangladesh?

 

He responds to the exam because the exam is free, but it is not cheap. And if you accept the grace of God, you are accepting fresh responsibilities. Are you, Mr. Beggar, ready to accept the fresh responsibilities that come with the free grace of God? He passes the exam and does very well in it in that he says, “I want to see. Give me my sight back.”

 

Some of our medieval Arabic versions have added a little interpretative flourish and they translate [he speaks in Arabic and then he translates], “I want to see that I might be able to see you.” It’s not in the text, but I like it anyway.

 

It is, in fact, probably he does want to see Jesus. Jesus gives the same exam to the person who is sick beside the pool of Siloam in the fourth chapter of John. He asks the man what his problem is and he says, “Well, I can’t get down into the pool when the angel troubles it. I’ve been here thirty seven years.”

 

And Jesus says, “Do you want to be healed? Because if you don’t, I can’t do anything for you.”

 

The man responds, “Yes. He wants to be healed.” He is then healed by the Lord.

 

Jesus has by giving special grace to the person whom the crowd marginalized and verbally abused, Jesus has slapped the wrist of the crowd rather smartly. The crowd manages to absorb this public criticism and it says, “They went on into the town praising God.” They understood that the power of God was coming to them through the ministry of Jesus.

 

So then what happens is, of course, they proceed to the home where a great banquet has been prepared and they will discuss the matters of state and of the faith through the night. No. There is still time to get to Jerusalem before nightfall, and Jesus, we are told, was passing through. He keeps right on going. There is big disappointment on all sides.

 

While I was teaching at the Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem, we were privileged to have Ex-president Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, as our guests for the afternoon. We were told that there wasn’t time for a meal, but we could have tea in the afternoon about 4 o’clock. So everybody took to the dining room, which was about the size of your sanctuary: all the chairs were taken out, all the tables in a big “U” shape, and anybody who knew how to bake cookies spent the week building cookies and baklava and you can’t imagine the good stuff that was on those tables, heaped up.

 

The meetings ran late and the Carters walked to the dining room. Rosalynn was kind enough to pick up one cup of tea and take one sip and off they went to the next meeting, and there was no joy in Mudville that night! What are we going to do with this mountain of stuff that it took us a week to bake? This is what happens in Jericho: deep disappointment on all sides that he doesn’t have time to sit and talk to the leaders of this community about his plans when he gets to Jerusalem.

Aha. But there is one man there that very badly wants to see him and this is Zacchaeus. And we’re told that he is a tax collector. Especially this time of year tax collectors are not very popular, but in a situation of oppression and military occupation, the tax collectors are the collaborators of the community and they are gathering money to be sent off to Rome, not to fix the roads and build the hospitals and schools in the community. And especially the Roman system of taxing was called tax farming: they sold the right to collect taxes at an auction. You win the auction and the Romans say, “All right. It’s the end of the year. From this province we want ten million dollars. Go raise it.”

 

Nobody asked any sticky questions about how much money the tax collector raised. He wants to make up for the money he had to spend to get the right to do this. He wants to win the chance to do it again and he wants to make as much money as possible because he might not win the chance to be tax collector in the next round. It’s a system guaranteed to have oppression built into it. The tax collectors were profoundly hated and despised as the collaborators.

 

What do people under oppression do to collaborators? In South Africa they put tires over them and gasoline over them and burn them. And I can remember one occasion in which a collaborator was spotted in a Presbyterian congregation and Allan Boesak, who was preaching, noticed that they had spotted him and everybody started shouting, “Let’s necklace the man.” And Boesak had to stop preaching, go down into the congregation, get the man on his shoulders, carry him literally out the door and down the street and into a taxi to save his life.

 

During the first Palestinian uprising, the Palestinians started killing some of their collaborators. There was a great outcry across Israel and a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, a Jew obviously, stood up in public on the television and said, “Don’t you criticize these people. I was a teenager in the Warsaw ghetto and our men caught some of our collaborators and they killed them with butcher knives and we danced dances of joy around them as the blood was flowing out of their bodies.”

 

This man is the town collaborator. He doesn’t mix in crowds. Why? Especially, if he is short. I noticed on the West Bank that the collaborators always check their backs, always. And never mix in crowds. The stifled cry, the flash of the knife, nobody knows what has happened until the crowd is gone and the body is found in the street, and you can’t arrest five thousand people. No way he’s going to enter that crowd. He very badly wants to see Jesus and so he does two extremely extraordinary things. One is he runs (Middle Easterners with long robes don’t run anywhere), but he’s running down the back street somewhere because everybody’s watching the parade, and second he runs out of town. We know this because the rabbis said the sycamore-fig tree—the fruit of which is almost worthless—but it has big limbs that grow out straight: a large tree and the limbs were used, and still are, for the beams of the roofs of people’s houses.

 

But the rabbis had a very strict understanding of how you become ceremonially polluted, and so they said if somebody is under a tree and they become polluted—like they eat some fruit that’s not been tithed or something like that—and then they become defiled and the defilement goes up into the tree and anybody who walks under the shade of the tree also becomes defiled so you can’t grow this in town—some distance out of town, please.

 

So Zacchaeus is running out of town. He hopes the crowd’ll be gone and he picks the sycamore-fig because it’s the only tree we have in the Holy Land with large leaves. The others are usually olive trees with a very small leaf. You can see right through the tree. And then pine trees; you can see right through them. But the sycamore-fig you can hide in. You can get into it easily and you can hide. Why does he want to hide? Well, of course, he wants to hide; he’s a prominent person in the community. When did you see the mayor of your fair town climbing a tree at the Fourth of July parade? What about the rector of the university? Does he climb a tree at a parade? And what about the chief of police or the president of the First National Bank? These people do not climb trees at parades. They stand on viewing platforms. Little boys and little girls climb trees. He doesn’t want anybody to see him. He hides in the tree.

 

When Jesus comes opposite the tree, there is still a crowd. And if Jesus can spot him, so can the crowd. Jesus probably picks up his name from the shouting of the crowd. You can say, “Well, Jesus, Son of God, knows all things.” That’s fine, but wherever that occurs in the text, there’s usually a little note: “He knowing all things said.” We don’t have that here. Where did Jesus pick up Zacchaeus’ name? He got it from the crowd.

 

And what do you think the crowd has to say about good old Mr. Zack now that the polecat is treed? And all the things that they wanted to say in his office but couldn’t because there would be repercussions, can now be shouted anonymously from the crowd. All you have to do is kind of hide behind the person right in front of you and you can shout out any four letter word you like, and one attack triggers another and pretty soon the anger starts to come out louder and louder and pretty soon there is a whiff of violence in the air.

 

And Jesus is expected to respond to what’s going on in front of him. And he’s supposed to say, “Zacchaeus, the anger of this community against you is fully justified. You are the town collaborator. You have drained the economic lifeblood out of your own people and given it to their military occupiers. You are responsible for the suffering of a great many people in this community. You’ve robbed these people blind. You have violated your religion, the Laws of Moses, your community, your faith, and your duty before humankind, and you‘re lucky that they have not strung you up in the tree in which you’re trying to hide. Now what you have to do, Zacchaeus, is to quit your job, go up to Jerusalem, go through the weeklong ceremonial process with the ashes of the red heifer, get yourself purified, come back, go through a purification ceremony for your defiled house, get a job that’s within the jobs that are approved by our system of law, and start living your life as a law-abiding Jew. If you do this, the next time I come to town, I will drop in for a congratulatory cup of tea.”

 

Audience response: [Dr. Bailey gives prolonged applause.]

 

That’s not what happens. Jesus says, “Zacchaeus, I didn’t think I had any time to talk to anybody in your town. I’ve just changed my mind. I accept your gracious invitation to be your guest for the night.”

 

And the crowd murmurs, “So, he doesn’t have time for us who keep the law. He’s got time for the town collaborator and this gross political indiscretion will not be forgotten; and he’s on his way to Jerusalem to celebrate our political liberation and he does this? There’s plenty of time for word of this indiscretion to reach Jerusalem, and when it does, the big boys in Jerusalem will be prepared and they will know how to deal with him!”

 

Zacchaeus understands all of this and right before his eyes Zacchaeus sees Jesus taking the anger that is focused on Zacchaeus and transferring it to himself. By his stripes we are healed. Zacchaeus also knows this is round one and that his opponents will come back with a bigger stick and that Jesus is in process of getting hurt because of what he’s doing for Zacchaeus.

 

Zacchaeus becomes the recipient of a costly demonstration of unexpected love. All four words are critical. It is costly; we see that. It is a demonstration; the deepest things must be acted; they can’t just be spoken. It’s nature is love, and it is unexpected; Zacchaeus has not earned it. Of course, Zacchaeus comes down out of the tree and receives Jesus joyfully. When he comes down and accepts that costly love that is offered to him, this is his repentance, and the emotion of his repentance as recorded in the text is joy. He accepts to be found which is the new definition of repentance which Jesus gives to us in the parable of the lost sheep and the good shepherd which we examined yesterday morning.

 

Zacchaeus is a prime example of the good shepherd going after one of the lost.

 

They go into the house of Zacchaeus. One of the forms of ceremonial uncleanness is called midras and that means pressure uncleanness. So Jesus sitting on Zacchaeus’ chairs and reclining on his eating couches and sleeping on his beds and eating his food means that Jesus has now become ceremonially defiled, and when he walks out of Zacchaeus’ house the next morning, he will be unclean.

 

Nobody tells Zacchaeus what he has to do. Nobody says, “Now, that you have made a new start, here’s the list. Get to work on it.”

 

As the banquet proceeds (there is a banquet; they are reclining), Zacchaeus feels the inner pressure to what Jesus has done for him, and he does so by responding and pledging himself to clean up his financial dealings with the community. This is the deepest level of who Zacchaeus is.

 

I’ve spent my life with the academy, and I know that the disease of academy is the academic arrogance that goes with learning and that the average professor’s got dozens of ways of telling the student, “Your trouble is you’re stupid, and you should look at the long knives that the academy uses with each other when they review each other’s books.”

 

If intellectual arrogance is not healed in my soul, then the Lord has not spoken and entered my life. This is where it has to begin because of who I am.

 

Zacchaeus responds out of the depths of who he is.

 

And finally at the end of the story, Jesus has the final word. And the final word is that he tells the community, Jesus said, “Salvation has come (passive).” Who brought it? Jesus did. How? At great cost to this house since he also is a Son of Abraham. He’d been shut out by the community. He’s not a Son of Abraham because he’s born as a Jew; he’s a Son of Abraham, as Jesus affirms it, because he, like Abraham, goes out on a journey of faith not knowing where he is going.

 

The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost, and to set them on a fresh journey of faith going out in obedience not knowing where that obedience will take them.

 

May we too hear and be blessed as we observe and participate in the story of the one who receives the costly demonstration of unexpected love, takes it into himself and begins his new journey of faith.

 

Amen.