November 3, 2013             David Timbs (Melbourne)     

    (Comments welcome here)            David's previous articles

Two Marginals up a tree:
Zacchaeus and God watching out for Jesus

A reflection on Luke 19: 1-10

One of the great spiritual insights of St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, was that, in order to understand better the mind of Jesus, it is essential that people appreciate the way Jesus treated people. Jesus always put his feet into the sandals of the people he met. He wanted to identify with people, to understand exactly what they were feeling, thinking, in other words, where they stood. It was not always easy for Jesus to do that. He, like most people, had to determine who was genuine and who was not. But he dealt with that too.

It is the same challenge all Christians face. It involves a fundamental shift away from oneself, self-importance and self-interest and self-absorbtion into the unchartered territory of a world of others and their needs. Jesus did this all the time; this is what drove him to preach to those who were on the margins, those who were just clinging to life, those who lived on the outer rim of social belonging and respectability. No surprise then that Jesus told stories about God’s love for humanity which were considered to be so outrageous, so beyond the powers of human imagination that those who heard him were scandalised, angered, spiritually and psychologically paralysed by resentment.

Jesus’ stories affronted the world of establishment with its coded norms of respectability. They also assaulted the boundaries of rationality. They were and remain, impertinent. The Gospel today gives more than a gentle hint of all this.

After the painful rejection he experienced in Galilee, even by his own family and clan, Jesus set himself towards Jerusalem and decisive confrontation with the Temple authorities. He was treading on dangerous ground as he had abandoned the Torah and Temple Sacrifice as the key means of right relationship with God. He had also come to realise that both of these had become so fundamentally corrupted by a scrupulous need for rules and regulations – there were thousands of them. Along with his rejection of the nagging insistence of the Pharisees on rigid compliance with regulations, Jesus was also convinced that the obsessive compulsive behaviour associated with blood sacrifice was not the way to God. He taught that the great moral criteria of the Kingdom of God are to be found in and realised through Mercy, Justice and Truth. All of these came through Jesus, God’s Son who lived and related to his Father both in life and death in freedom founded on love not compulsion or some kind of debt owing to the honour of God.

On his fateful journey to Jerusalem Jesus taught much about the real Kingdom of God – the loving presence and action of God in the world. He met many people along that road to Jerusalem and he told many parables: the lost sheep, the woman (a widow?) who lost the safety net of future financial security, the story of the selfish, self- absorbed, spendthrift prodigal son and then, the blind man lying beside the road and begging. That man just kept shouting to attract the attention of Jesus. They all did. The blind man and perhaps others were told to shut up but Jesus didn’t mind at all. Humans often shout when they are in pain. Jesus had an ear for that. He also had an eye for those who didn’t shout for attention much at all but who had other ways of signalling their presence.

Jesus showed the same kind of compassion and understanding towards them all as he did with Zacchaeus. This character, a prominent, corrupt and wealthy local tax or toll collector, becomes the centre of Jesus attention. Zacchaeus not only collected tax for the government, he did what many of his fellows did and that was to take an extra-generous ‘commission’. Zacchaeus, having heard of the news that the preacher from Galilee was approaching his home town decided to observe Jesus and maybe get some sort of an angle on him. Jesus, in Luke’s story, spotted Zacchaeus and called him down from his tree and requested his hospitality, a request met with joy, enthusiasm and anticipation. All this was met immediately with low level hostility towards Jesus for accepting the hospitality of a servant of the oppressive government. This kind of critical reaction to Jesus was nothing new (Lk 15: 12 which occasioned the parables of loss).We have already heard the response of Jesus to his kind of rage, resentment and parochial small mindedness. Jesus insisted that this man, Zacchaeus, who had promised to make good on God’s demands of restorative and distributive justice, should be accepted as a child of Abraham, an heir to God’s promise for Israel. The message of Jesus in this story, like in his others, often shocked, challenged and scandalised his listeners. He invited them to think outside of what they imagined possible in God’s plan.

John Dominic Collins, an Irish American Scripture scholar, pushes our boundaries of thought and imagination even further by suggesting that Zacchaeus up the tree and searching for Jesus might actually be, in Luke’s story, a symbol of God. Within that perspective, God is depicted as the seeker, the one who waits and observes from a safe distance. God then becomes, in that parabolic mind-twister, the one who joins the despised, the rejected, the outcast, the little person up a proverbial tree. This searcher and seeker is ever on the lookout for Jesus the teacher and prophet to whether he will repeat his practice of enjoying table fellowship with the despised. Would Jesus request hospitality in the house of the outcast Zacchaeus?

Collins dares his readers to imagine the very same scenarios in other parables: God is the half dead Jew at the side of the road in the Good Samaritan story; God is the woman taken in adultery; God is the lost sheep, the coin, the prodigal son. Confronted with images like that, the followers of Jesus are challenged repeatedly to keep thinking about and imagining God in the stories the evangelist tells. The narrative does not inform the community of anything new or of things they had not heard before. The retelling is meant to confirm them in their established identity and to challenge them not to stray from it. The Gospel was never meant to allow self-satisfaction, complacency or cheap grace.

Jesus, true to character, responds generously to Zacchaeus by accepting the welcome and generous hospitality of this prominent and much despised social and religious outcast. Jesus is like that. And that’s what God is like too. God never ceases being most comfortably at home with the widow, the orphan, the poor, the stranger. God values the ones so despised and rejected that they have to climb a tree for refuge, for a sense of personal dignity, worth and ultimately, salvation. They were and are God’s People.

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.