Saints and Sinners -010-30-22
Saints and Sinners
Is 1:10-18; Luke 19:1-10
Is 1:10-18
Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.
Luke 19:1-10
He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “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.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
Prayer – God of grace, we know there are two sides for every coin – we just need to look in our pockets or purses. We live in a world that focuses a lot on good and bad, right and wrong, pleasant and unpleasant, saints and sinners – this whole notion of two sides can be exhausting. Remind us that you see us as your beloved children, always and all ways, and perhaps we need to focus less on two sides and remember that love trumps evil, love trumps sin, love wins in the end – that is a lesson worthy of being the gospel – amen.
The story of Zacchaeus occurs only in Luke’s gospel. It comes at the end of Luke’s ‘travel narrative’ that begins in Luke 9 in Galilee, “When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ Luke repeats himself at least eight times in this narrative, saying that Jesus is heading toward Jerusalem and the cross. The journey ends when Jesus enters Jerusalem, where Luke says ‘that every day he was teaching at the temple,’ later in this 19th chapter of the gospel.
In our gospel passage this morning Jesus is passing through Jericho and Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector for that area is curious. He wants to see what all the excitement is about. The name Zacchaeus means righteous, which is pure irony in this story. Luke describes Zacchaeus as a sort of sleazeball person that we love to hate. He says that Zacchaeus was a ‘chief tax collector.’ That is, he was a Jew who collected taxes for the Roman oppressors. So he was a traitor to his people for a political cause.
Luke also tells us that Zacchaeus is wealthy. And surprise, surprise, how did a Roman tax collector get wealthy? By extortion and embezzlement. By taking advantage of the elderly, by exploiting the poor, and by taking care of his political cronies. There’s an unspoken assumption of corruption here. Zacchaeus is a man who deserves our disdain – a poster child for being a sinner.
Zacchaeus was not only corrupt and rich, he was short. When Jesus passed through Jericho, he was eager to get a look, so he did something totally undignified for someone of his stature in the community. He ran ahead of the crowd, climbed up into a tree, then waited for Jesus to pass by. Can you imagine a powerful lobbyist in Washington doing something similar during a presidential parade?
When Jesus reached that spot, Zacchaeus, rather than just seeing, is seen when Jesus gazed up into the tree, saw Zacchaeus and told him to come down out of the tree. He then invited himself to spend some time with Zacchaeus – “I must stay at your house today.” All in all, Zacchaeus is not a likely candidate for God’s grace, but Jesus is the master of seeing the unlikely. And so Zacchaeus climbed down and escorted Jesus to his palatial home and ‘welcomed Jesus gladly.’
Why Zacchaeus? Why pick out this tax hustler for special attention? Surely in the whole city of Jericho, there are many, many others more worthy of a visit from Jesus. So not surprisingly, the response of the crowd was pretty predictable as they began to mutter to themselves, ‘he has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’ They had heard that Jesus was blessed, that he was supposed to be special and why in the world would Jesus want to hang out with the town crook. What’s that all about?
One of the common themes of Luke’s gospel was just how much Jesus hung out with sinners and not the saints, or maybe they were in a different kind of way. This theme of hanging with sinners was reflected in his three earlier stories of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the prodigal son. Indeed, ‘the son of man has come to seek and to save that which is lost.’
And so Zacchaeus defends himself before the muttering, hostile crowd. He says that he will give half of his possessions to the poor, and that he will repay fourfold all the people that he has cheated. That would be a long list of angry tax payers. And read in this way, Zacchaeus is a sinner who repents and is converted on the spot. He promises future reparations.
But there’s a second way to read this story in which Zacchaeus isn’t a sinner who converts but a saint who surprises. He doesn’t make promises about the future, rather, he defends himself and shocks the crowd by appealing to his past. Both interpretations depend on how you translate verse 8 from our passage this morning and in particular the verbs that in the Greek text are in the present tense. It’s a good example of the interplay between translation and interpretation.
Even though the verbs are in the present tense, the typical way of reading this story follows scholars and translators who render the verbs as ‘futuristic present.’ That is, Zacchaeus the sinner repents and vows that henceforth he will make restitution. The second option of reading the present tense verbs follows other scholars and translators who render the verb as a ‘progressive present tense.’ From this interpretation, Zacchaeus is a hidden saint about whom people have made all sorts of false assumptions about his corruption and so he defends himself by saying, “Lord, I always give half of my wealth to the poor, and whenever I discover fraud or discrepancy, I always make a fourfold restitution.” The crowd had demonized Zacchaeus. Jesus praised him as a ‘son of Abraham.’ Sinner or saint???
I like the second option. It fits with the many times that Jesus calls out good people who are bad and commends perceived bad people who are good. Luke had already mentioned several unlikely heroes – the faith of a Roman soldier, a ‘good’ Samaritan, a shrewd manager who was commended for his dishonesty, a Samaritan leper who was the only person to give thanks for his healing, and a tax collector who was commended as more righteous than a sanctimonious Pharisee. So maybe the story isn’t about a sinner who shocks us by repenting, rather about a crowd that demonizes a person it doesn’t like with all sorts of false assumptions.
The Episcopal priest Elizabeth Kaeton notes the several ironies here. The despicable Zacchaeus is the generous one. The traditional interpretation that Zacchaeus is a sinner who’s converted ‘tricks us into committing the very sin that our story condemns. It presents Zacchaeus not as a righteous and generous man who is wrongly scorned by his prejudiced neighbors, but as the story of a penitent sinner.’ ‘Turns out,’ says Kaeton, that ‘Zacchaeus does live up to his name. He is, in fact, the righteous one. Turns out that Jesus knew that all along!’
Kaeton goes on to conclude ‘Jesus is once again turning our world upside down, confronting us with our assumptions about who is good and who is evil and demonstrating for us the tricks we play in our minds before we treat one another – saint or sinner. Like the crowd murmuring about Zacchaeus, it is easy to be blinded by our prejudice of ‘those people’ and find ourselves accusing the very person or people we should be emulating.’
We live in a world that loves to divide people into specific groups. I can remember growing up and it was are you a Cowboys fan or a Redskins fan? It was are you a Yankee fan or a Dodgers fan? It was are you a Tar Heel or a Wolfpack fan? And depending on how you answered those questions you were either a sinner of a saint – but we all know God is a Tar Heel since the sky is Carolina Blue.
Today, political pundits compare the parties as socialists or fascists. Today in the church you are evangelical or you are progressive. Today we focus on the 1% and the other 99% who make life difficult for the 1%. I don’t understand why we as people of faith have to differentiate ourselves as if you are a member of one group you are a saint and if you are a member of ‘that other group’, well then you are a sinner, considered evil and unrepentant.
Jesus saw the saintliness in every one he encountered, even those you and I would consider sinners. The Samaritan woman at the well who would never have been acknowledged in any way by a Jewish man was seen as a beloved daughter by Jesus. The woman caught in adultery where Jesus looked at the religious and civil leaders and said, whoever is without sin cast the first stone. The lepers, the blind, the prostitutes, the tax collectors – all who the community viewed as outsider, unworthy, not good enough – Jesus sat with them, ate with them, loved them even in their saintly brokenness.
And I’m left wondering, how have we, who supposedly want to emulate Jesus, have gotten so far off the mark? What has led us to miss that which is so precious in each human being only to murmur and grumble when we imagine them being included and loved by the man called Jesus. Jesus has a way of revealing just who is a saint and who is a sinner – and to be quite honest – that feels a whole lot uncomfortable because I’m pretty quick with the community labels just as much as anyone. So perhaps the lesson is for me, for you, for the community as a whole, stop judging books by their covers, stop dividing folks by labels and assumptions, stop trying to exclude those that Jesus calls beloved whether they are saints or sinners. Maybe that lesson can transform our world – may it be so – thanks be to God – amen.