Tuesday, 3/28He 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.’ Who is “the lost”? If years of church-going have taught us anything, it’s that Jesus ate with “tax collectors and sinners” (Matt 9:1; Luke 15:1; Mark 2:2:15-17). These were the marginalized people of their time, the untouchables, the outcasts. Now, as a tax collector, Zacchaeus may have been an outcast, but he may also have deserved to be an outcast! His Jewish neighbors and friends would have viewed his enriching himself by a little “honest graft” to have been dishonest theft. He had violated both the Law and had trespassed the trust of his neighbors. Vis-à-vis Jewish custom, he had mislaid his moral compass. But what about Zacchaeus’ spiritual compass? We may rightly imagine that he had abandoned himself to his work, to defrauding his neighbors and friends, to his focus on self-enrichment. Zacchaeus probably just wanted a fair shake, to get what was coming to him. This can happen to any of us, surely. Where are we when our lives become beholden to ambition, to achievement, to our own glorification? As our Lord’s brother put it: “one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it” (James 1:14). Such poverty and distance from the loving purposes of the Lord make any one of us “the lost.” What we know from the Gospel is that Jesus is calling each of us to repentance, just as he called Zacchaeus to come down from his tree. We may not see Jesus walking in the square, but we he speaks to us as directly as he did to the old tax collector. We hear Jesus in our reading this passage today, in the niggling sense that maybe our lives have become impoverished, in the examples and inescapable witness of the saints, from Peter and Paul to Mother Teresa. Are you ready to let Jesus find you? Because the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost. - Andrew Kryzak
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