Seeing and Being Seen

Seeing and Being Seen

Luke 19:1-10

Our text this morning is the classic example of a story that we learned as children but ought to revisit as adults. As a child, anyone growing up in the church learned the song: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he.” This permanently embedded the thought: Zacchaeus = short guy. There was nothing wrong with learning a fun song. However, at some point we ought to at least open ourselves to the rest of the story.

To understand the rest of the story, we need to understand the context of the story first. This is true not because everyone needs to be a Bible scholar. The fact is that there are simply just things that a person in Jesus’ day would have known.

Let’s start with Jericho. Oops…there’s another childhood Biblical song: “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down.” If you haven’t spent time with that story, it is the tale of great triumph in the quest to seize the Promised Land. Jericho is a place full of sin and corruption. Joshua is given a huge assist by a local prostitute, Rachel, whose life is spared because of her spying. Ultimately, Joshua prevails and declares a curse on Jericho and anyone who would rebuild it. So, Jesus is walking into “sin city.” This story is set in “Vegas!”

We should put this story in context in Luke’s Gospel, too. A chapter earlier, the story is told of the rich, young ruler who has totally followed the law but cannot take the last step and let go of his property. He is convinced of his own righteousness but is “owned” by his own stuff. He can’t throw caution to the wind and let go.

Just before our text, Luke tells the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee follows the letter of the law. He prays. He tithes. He fasts. However, he’s hardly the picture of a gracious, loving, faithful person. Everything he does is to check the next thing off the list of reasons why he is a righteous person. The tax collector, on the other hand, throws himself on God’s mercy and grace alone. The only chance he has to be loved is if God is a loving God. He knows that he’s a piece of work. Jesus declares that the tax collector is the faithful man.

Now, we have another story about a tax collector, not just any tax collector but the chief tax collector. People hated tax collectors for two reasons. First, they weren’t collecting local taxes or even national taxes. They were collecting the tribute that was being levied by Rome, their occupiers. The tax collectors were working for the enemy. In truth, so were the temple authorities and the governmental authorities and just about everyone else in power because that’s what it took to hold power when the Romans were in charge. You can keep your power but it will cost you your soul. (Sadly, this remains a popular trade to make)

The second reason to hate the tax collectors was that their deal with Rome was that anything they could collect beyond what was going to Rome was their’s to keep. Who wouldn’t resent that right? Except again, what we know about people is that an awful lot of us, given the chance to increase our profit margins will take full advantage of our neighbor. Why does insulin cost so much? Why does my car salesmen need to go “check one more time with his manager?” Human nature seems to be tuned to taking advantage of other people for our personal gain. Again, the tax collector was guilty of this but, honestly, he was just doing what an awful lot of other people were doing or would have done in their own work if they had been given the chance.

So, what I’m suggesting here is that the tax collectors are a scapegoats. It’s not that they aren’t doing some things that are wrong. That’s what makes them good candidates for scapegoating. However, the issue is that they are not doing anything all that different than anyone else in power was doing. They were just good targets to point at and ridicule and scorn. If we can point to the tax collector as the worst, then we will all look a little less bad ourselves.

So, we have Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector who is quite rich. He learns that Jesus is coming to town and he desperately wants to see Jesus. Let’s pause there. That would have been quite a striking moment. The last thing that anyone would have expected the corrupt and hated chief tax collector to do is to dream of catching a glimpse of the traveling preacher who was stirring up the town. Why would someone with that much power and wealth want to see a homeless, powerless, penniless preacher and healer?

There’s a problem. Our text says, Zacchaeus wants to see Jesus but “the crowd was in his way.” I bet they were! Imagine the hate in that crowd for Zacchaeus. It’s not like if he whispered, “Excuse me…Pardon me” folks were going to make room for him. No one was going to do him any favors. The barrier that blocked Zacchaeus was the consequence of his own actions. I wonder, what stands between us and catching a glimpse of Christ?

For a lot of us, what blocks us from approaching Christ is the fear of losing our own dignity. According to the song we learned as children, Zacchaeus was a wee little man. Our translation goes with that understanding. However, the Greek is ambiguous. The text may actually be saying in Greek that Jesus was short and hard to spot in the crowd. In any event, in order to catch a glimpse, Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree.

In climbing this tree, Zacchaeus puts his desperation to see Jesus in full public view. What the public would have seen would have been full comedy, pure and simple. What could bring a smile to the face of any resident of Jericho faster than the chief tax collector completely losing any pretense of dignity and launching himself up a tree? “Check this out! The tax collector has lost his mind!”

So, Zacchaeus runs ahead of Jesus, climbs the tree and finds his perch, ready for when Jesus comes by. Now, the tree that he climbs is a sycamore tree but not the sycamore that we know. This was more like a kind of cross between a mulberry tree and a fig tree. What we should know as an aside was that there was a hand gesture that was popular in Jesus day that was the ultimate insult from one man to another that involved using your fingers to simulate a fig and pointing them in that other man’s direction. I’ll let you fill in the blanks but the implication was that the other man was less than a man. (Again, thankfully, we no longer have hand gestures to convey our insults, right?) So, essentially, you have this totally despised man hanging like a fig from the tree…and don’t think that wouldn’t have absolutely ramped up the roars of the crowd.

Jesus comes along and pauses and looks up into the tree. Now, the word that is used in Greek, “anablepo,” is the word for the way that someone looks up just before making a profound statement. If you were here last week and remember Jesus statement about what happens when someone walks through life with their nose up in the air, this is that kind of looking up, the kind that says, “Pay attention…I’m about to say something deep!”

What Jesus does instead is he calls Zacchaeus by name. This is the heart of this text! From the moment Jesus sees Zacchaeus, things are personal. Does Jesus know Zacchaeus’ name because everyone knew who the chief tax collector was? That seems unlikely. After all, Jesus was just passing through. Does Jesus know Zacchaeus’ name because the crowd has been calling it out as they ridiculed the man they loved to hate as he hung from the tree? That seems like a real possibility to me and I’m drawn to the notion that Jesus could take words of ridicule and transform them into real personal connection. Perhaps most mind-blowingly, though, we should ask ourselves, what if Jesus just knows our names? What if he walked past you in a crowd, looked up and called you by name.

We see the cheap, knock off version of this connection in political events. The candidate looks half way out into the crowd and points and smiles and everyone within thirty rows thinks they are pointing at them. No candidate is above a little kowtowing, right? However, Jesus has nothing to gain in this connection. In fact, everything that follows just angers the crowd that he’s presumably there to recruit—although we may have to concede that he’s really there to teach that crowd and that’s, in fact, exactly what he’s doing. Jesus calls out to Zacchaeus to hurry down from the tree. Tonight he’s going to be a guest in Zacchaeus’ house.

At this point, the crowd is angry. Jesus is being Jesus, again: caring about all the wrong people, dining with the kind of people whose presence would leave anyone else feeling nauseous and soiled. Here’s the final interesting thing, though. Zacchaeus makes a declaration that he gives half his income to the poor and he pays those he’s cheated back four fold (if he’s caught—okay, he’s not perfect!) Lot’s of people translate this as if this is going to be Zacchaeus’ new, changed behavior. That’s not what Zacchaeus says in the Greek, though. This isn’t what he’s going to do. This is what he’s been doing all along. What if such goodness, mixed in with all the bad, is why Jesus knew Zacchaeus name, after all?

Some people, theoretically, know exactly what they’re doing but have no clue what to do—like a Pharisee who knows the law but doesn’t have an ounce of grace inside. Some people, really don’t know exactly what they’re doing but they know exactly what to do. What if Zacchaeus had been that guy all along? What if Jesus could see the face of God in everyone, even a secretly gracious, occasionally generous, tax collector?

It is possible to know what we are doing and not know what to do. It is possible to allow all sorts of things to come between us and Christ. However, it is also possible to throw dignity out the window and do whatever it takes to catch a glimpse of the presence of God. If we are willing to risk living our faith, we might just encounter the risen Christ and discover that he has known our name all along.