2022 Sun Oct 30

From the Bishop’s Blog

“You know the story. Zacchaeus, “chief tax collector and rich”, hears Jesus is coming to town. He goes to see if he can get a glimpse of him but the crowd is dense and he is short. He climbs a sycamore tree to see above the crowd. Jesus sees him, goes to the tree and tells Zacchaeus that he wants to have dinner with him. At dinner Zacchaeus appears to have a great conversion and promises to give half his wealth to the poor and if any are defrauded he will repay them back four times as much. But, and here’s the key, some linguists say the text should not be, “I will do this” but, “I already do this.” Zacchaeus is telling Jesus he already gives half his possessions to the poor. He already repays defrauded people four times what they are owed. In other words, he is a good man. But he is still unhappy. There is still something missing. There is an emptiness in the middle of his soul.

And that is true for all of us. We are built with an inner emptiness and we try to fill it in so many ways. Some of those ways might be self-destructive. Some of those ways might be good – like giving half of what we have to the poor. But nothing will ever fill that hole except a relationship with the Living God. That is why Jesus can say to Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house.” Now Zacchaeus is connected to the source of all life.

Theologians have expressed this in many ways through the years. St. Augustine wrote, “my heart is restless until it rests in You.

We are saved by relationship with the Living God. Forever. The emptiness is addressed when we find our sycamore tree, that place that allows us to see and meet God. For some of us that place might be our local church.

“While writing Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks, I reread Luke’s account of Zacchaeus. Like many Christians, I knew the story from Sunday school — the “wee little man” who climbed a tree to see Jesus. I thought of it as a charming tale that taught us to go to any length to catch a vision of God. But researching Grateful convinced me that gratitude was at the center of an important political tension in the Roman world regarding debts and obligation. The story of Zacchaeus transformed from a children’s story to a powerful encounter between Jesus and an unjust system of quid pro quo. Corrupted gratitude can snare us, or, as Jesus taught, a renewed vision of gratefulness can liberate us. The Zacchaeus story shows us how.

“Zacchaeus thought that gratitude was a political structure of benefactors and beneficiaries that he could manipulate for his own benefit. Then Jesus called him down from that tree and invited him to a table. “Stop climbing, Zacchaeus. Come and sit.” Whereas Rome practiced gratitude as a hierarchy of political and economic obligation, of debt and duty, Jesus envisioned gratitude as hospitality of mutuality and relationship, of gift and response. Jesus opened the door for Zacchaeus to “come down” from his old life, to stop participating in a corrupt system of gratitude that oppressed his own people. In a moment, Jesus turned his world upside down: Who was the guest and who was the host? The Roman structure of gratitude collapsed when assigned roles disappeared and the conventional gifts of hospitality could not be repaid. Instead, Jesus imagined a place where oppressed and oppressor leave their “stations” and meet as friends, where forgiveness is practiced and gratitude expresses itself not in debt payment but in passing on generous gifts to others.

“At the end of the story, Jesus explains that he did this because “the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). Jesus came to deliver those ensnared in the punishment and privilege of gratitude and to set them free from quid pro quo patronage. In its place, he established a table of hospitality where all are guests and no one owes anything to anyone else. Around this table, gifts pass without regard to payback or debt. Everyone sits. Everyone eats. And, recognizing that everything is a gift, all are grateful. Tree or table? Climbing to get ahead or reclining with friends? Choose. What you choose results in either slavery or abundance.

“This is the ancient wisdom of gratitude, told in a Jewish political context by early Christian writers. But we can see beyond its unique religious frame to the story’s larger relevance for today. Who wants to be part of a system of gratitude based on hierarchy?

“To be obligated to repay every favor done? Who wants to perpetuate a system that rewards privilege and is held together by indebtedness? A structure where we are pretty sure that the people above us cheated us to get there? Think of how we depict Thanksgiving — people around a table eating a meal.

“In the United States, it is the romanticized image of our most primal gratitude myth: Europeans and Natives sharing around a table. Of course, it did not happen that way. But that is what myths are — stories that express something we desire, what we hope will be, and how we dream of happiness and peace. There is something in our hearts that longs to banish quid pro quo to the pages of dusty history books forever and instead create a common table where we pass gifts to one another without regard for station or status, where boundaries dissolve around plenty. That is the way of salvation. We know this, and, like Zacchaeus, many of us long for it. We just do not know how to come down from the tree.”

Diana Butler Bass is the author of eight books on American religion, including “Christianity After Religion,” “Christianity for the Rest of Us,” and “A People’s History of Christianity.” This is excerpted from “Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks.” Copyright © 2018 by Diana Butler Bass. Published by HarperOne.

Zacchaeus the tax collector is not the ancient equivalent of modern day IRS or Canada Revenue Agency employees. He was not a civil servant. Ancient Roman tax collectors were individuals who bid for the right to collect taxes in a certain geographic area. This bid represented the tax Rome expected from a given geographic area. The tax collector would then collect funds to pay himself back. Any amount collected above that amount was pure profit, with few limitations. So they not only represented the Roman occupation, but they also profited through abusing and defrauding others.

But Jesus came to bring salvation to all, even the hated tax collector. Through Jesus, this one tax collector, Zacchaeus, experiences a remarkable moment of redemption. Jesus calls him out of the tree he had climbed. Jesus invites himself to Zacchaeus’s home, and Zacchaeus is transformed. He immediately offers to give away half of what he has to the poor, and to repay anyone he has defrauded by a factor of four. 

To me, the story of Zacchaeus is a story of learning to live generously. He had far more than he needed. He had much he could share with others. And he recognized that much of that had been earned through fraudulent means.

I believe this story challenges us to consider how we live in our capitalist society. Capitalism isn’t bad. The free market has allowed for much good. But how do we exist within it? Do we hoard all we earn? Are we driven solely by the motivation for our own profit? Or do we seek that balance where we maximize profits, make the world a better place, and share what we have with others?

Stewardship isn’t a euphemism for fundraising in the Church, nor is it restricted to six to eight weeks each fall in the Church year. Stewardship is how we live our lives as Christians, recognizing that this life isn’t ours, but rather God’s. To be a steward is to use this life for the building up of God’s kingdom, one brick at a time. How and what we give to God through the Church is a part of this, but really merely the beginning. How we live our lives is the real heart of stewardship. That might be in a for-profit industry, or not. It might be as a government employee, or a contractor. That might be a soldier, or as an officer. Whatever the setting, let us seek a motivation that isn’t about personal gain and wealth, but rather about making the world a better place.