Climbing the Heights of Humility

“Climbing the Heights of Humility”

Luke 19:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/20/13

          Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he...

          Isn't that just like us human beings – to take one of the most subversive spiritual texts in what may be the world's most subversive religion, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and reduce it to a nursery rhyme?  But you have to hand it to us; our saccharine reduction does make this story far more palatable than it is.

          Let's get real with this story.  Zacchaeus is a chief tax collector.  That means that for the large community of Jericho, he is one of the head pimps among tax collectors.  It is he who helps to hire and train rank-and-file tax collectors on the ground.  And theirs is a lucrative but predatory business.  First-century tax collectors make their fortunes by knowingly and willingly collecting excessively more than the tax rate set by Rome.  Common folk and poor folk lose big in this system.

          It's a scam, of course.  Everyone knows it.  And those Jews who become part of the scam are reviled as heretics and traitors.  Not unlike prostitutes and mercenaries, tax collectors offer themselves to power for money.  That's why I used that most un-worshipy word a few moments ago to describe the chief tax collectors.

          Now, the broad context is always crucial, so let's back up and remember a very important story from much earlier in Luke's telling of the Gospel.  Indeed, this happens before Jesus even appears on the public scene.  John the Baptist is out by the Jordan River.  He’s preparing the way.  And he’s using a sharp bottom plow to cut deep into the crusty soil.

          “You brood of vipers!” he hisses.  “Bear fruit worthy of repentance...Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees...”

          And a stunned crowd asks, “What should we do?”

          John’s answer probably makes the crowd drop its collective jaw and say, “What?  That's it?  If that's all we have to do, then what's got your camel hair in such wad?”

          Remember John's answer: “Share,” he says.  “If you have two coats, give one to someone who has none.  Same with food.  Share.”

          Tax collectors ask what they should do.

          “Collect no more than the amount prescribed to you,” says John.

          Soldiers ask the same question.

          “No extortion,” says John.  “The fact that you wield tools of violence doesn't give you the privilege of special treatment.  And it certainly doesn't give you the right to intimidate your neighbors for material gain.”

          John lays some incredibly simple, but profoundly difficult expectations before the people.  So, the problem is not the fact that tax collectors collect taxes.  The problem is that they have, like virtually everyone else, blindly accepted as inevitable – or worse, as God-ordained – a system that abuses the poorest and most vulnerable in the community.

          In his commentary on this passage, Fred Craddock strips it down for us when he writes: “The fact is, one is not privately righteous while participating in a corrupt system that robs and crushes other persons.”¹

          Zacchaeus owes his wealth to a corrupt system.  And while he may have worked long, diligent hours, and while he may have worked within the bounds of Roman law, his wealth is, nonetheless, ill-gotten gain.  Any gain that does not respect and care for “the least of these,” or any other part of creation – animate or inanimate – is ill-gotten gain.  But trying to convince those who enjoy legally-earned excess that they may be vipers and predators – that's dangerous, prophetic work.  Jesus' own death reveals just how far humankind will go when confronted with the uncomfortable truth of our penchant for greedy consumption and violent control.

          Zacchaeus seems to have already begun figuring this out.  When the rebel Jesus passes through Jericho, that “wee little man” of song

does something that no self-respecting, first-century adult male would do – he runs.  Then to make things worse, he climbs a tree like some child, or maybe some drunkard.  And it's significant that he scurries up a sycamore tree.  The sycamore to which Luke refers is a variety of evergreen that bears a low-quality fig that only the poor would deign to eat.²  Only in Jesus’ eyes do Zacchaeus’ actions become “fruit worthy of repentance.”

          Everything about this scene screams out in desperation.  Even Jesus' own words ooze with emotional urgency: “Zacchaeus,” he shouts into the tree, ‘Get down here, quick!  I’m coming home with you.  Now!’

          And a hateful grumble surges through the crowd like the roll of distant thunder.  The people already detest Zacchaeus; and now they begin to fume at Jesus for choosing to show grace for the tax collector rather than solidarity with them.

          There's something remarkable about humility, isn’t there?  Humility is frightfully empowering.  Humility can make even the greediest, the most fearful, and the most selfish tax-collecting demons inside us become aware of other human beings in ways we never experienced before.  Humility transforms strangers into neighbors, enemies into friends, competitors into colleagues, and all manner of sinners into saints.

          Here's the delicious irony of the situation: When Zacchaeus climbs up that sycamore tree, his physical ascent becomes a most needed and healthful spiritual fall into humility.  In scrambling upward, he tumbles down and finds himself eye-to-eye with the people he has fleeced as he made his way to wealth and privilege.  And out there, on that skinny limb, with the new perspective of both height and depth, Zacchaeus sees the world and the people in it with a newly balanced heart – a resurrection heart.

          Jesus looks up and sees in Zacchaeus some low-hanging fruit.  The tax collector's repentance is real, and thorough.  Father forgive him, says Jesus.  He’s figuring this out.  He knows what he’s doing.

          Jesus possesses grace in an abundance that the crowd considers excess.  And this first cousin to John the Baptist knows that sharing his scandalously abundant grace with Zacchaeus will reveal the demanding salvation he wants people to recognize, to receive, and then to bear witness to by sharing it with others.

          In addition, I think that Jesus, who is about to enter Jerusalem for the last time, also sees himself.  He sees a prefiguring of his own humbling exaltation when others will lift him up into a very different tree.  Surrounded by hateful grumbling and blinding dismay, he sees what people expect in a Messiah – someone who exacts their own seething revenge against the beneficiaries an unjust system.

          A very different kind of Messiah, though, Jesus does not deliver Israel from Rome's oppression.  He delivers the people themselves.  He delivers them from their judgments and their hate.  He saves them by delivering them from the futility of trying to be their own saviors.  He humbles them to new heights of awareness, and to new depths of relationship with God and neighbor.

          The Gospel speaks somewhat differently to the Zacchaeus's and the impoverished crowds of the world, doesn't it?  To those who live beneath the burdens of injustice, to those who do not have enough to live healthfully, much less comfortably, the Gospel offers the assurance of deliverance.  It promises that God will rearrange things in more just and equitable ways.  God will, as Mary sings in her magnificat, “[scatter] the proud in the thoughts of their hearts...[ and bring] down the powerful from their thrones... and [send] the rich away empty.”  And at the same time God will lift the lowly, fill the hungry, and care for the sick.

          Those who have more than they need usually prefer a rather spiritualized rendering of the Gospel.  In this version, Jesus comes only to save us from our sins so we go to heaven after we die.  When self-interest serves as the primary motive for faith, however, we who are called to be followers and witnesses are reduced to “believers” who have said the magic words.  At that point, sharing with those who are cold, hungry, lonely and voiceless in the world becomes an optional, and thus a rather hollow and condescending philanthropy.

          But the Gospel of Jesus is a subversive affair.  It calls all humankind into transforming awareness of both our excesses and our limitations.

          Richard Rohr observes that: “The developing world faces its limitation through a breakdown in the socioeconomic system, and any access to basic justice.  But we, in the so-called developed world,” says Rohr, “have to face our limitations, it seems, on the inside...We must recognize our own poor man, our own abused woman, the oppressed part of ourselves that we hate, that we deny, that we’re afraid of.”³

          I would add that we must also recognize our inner Zacchaeus.  So even now, “today” as he says to Zacchaeus, Jesus is inviting us into the sycamore tree of humility.  He invites us to go out on a limb of self-emptying vulnerability where we may see that – unless we share them and use them to help address the injustices of hunger, poverty, and violence – the excesses of our economic wealth, political power and military might are greater liabilities than assets.  And attributing excess to God as a sign of God's unique preference for us only hamstrings our ability to become spiritually awake and aware.  These things tell us, in ways subtle and blatant, that we must have them in order to be safe, happy and even to be able to love.

          The crowds pose the question to John the Baptist.  Zacchaeus answers it.  It’s our question to ask and to answer now: “What are we to do?  What are you and I, here in Jonesborough, TN in the early years of the 21^st Century to do?  How are we to live so that our lives and our community of faith leave a legacy of fearless humility and transforming love – a legacy that shares God’s abundant grace with as-yet-unborn generations and invites them to climb out on their own limbs in order to experience and share God's enlivening presence?

          How do we do more than just “believe?”  How do we practice the redeeming gift of resurrection?

          These are the questions of this and every stewardship season.  And according to Jesus, and to Zacchaeus, all valid answers begin with humility.  When we allow grace to humble us, when we allow it to lead us in ways of healing peace and renewing justice, when, as John the Baptist says, we commit ourselves to sacrificial sharing and to compassionate community, then will we recognize the blessings of blessedness.

          Then will our own “house” truly experience and know the demanding salvation Jesus comes to reveal and share.

          May the question remain ever before us.  What is the Holy Spirit of God calling you, and calling me, to be, to do, and to become?

¹Fred Craddock, Preaching Through the Christian Year, Year C.1994, Trinity Press International,  Valley Forge, PA, p. 460.

²R. Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. XI, Luke/John.  Abingdon Press, Nashville, p. 357.

³ Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 66, day 71.