Sermon Tone Analysis

If I were to ask you what you know of Zacchaeus, I bet I know what you would say first.

The thing most people associate with Zacchaeus is his size.

He was a very little man, a very little man was he.

Our gospel story today is the story of an unlikely conversion, the story of Zacchaeus.

It’s a nice story about a little man who is sad because he doesn’t have any friends, and he runs and climbs a tree, and Jesus says hello to him and has tea with him.

And then he’s happy.

And presumably people are now nice to him because Jesus has been nice to him.

And Zacchaeus says sorry for the bad things he’s done, which is always nice.

It’s the story we tell children, in fact I remember Barry and I did it with the children over the road at the Queen Vic during assembly last year, and the children looked up at us with big eyes and it was all very sweet.

But I want to suggest now that the story of Zacchaeus is one of the most profound stories not just in Luke, but in the whole of scripture, and that if we don’t really understand it properly then we don’t really understand the gospel, we don’t really understand what we are here as a church to do and we possibly don’t even understand our own salvation.

So, let’s go back to the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector, the collaborator, the unclean man who happened, coincidentally to be quite short; a rich man but an absolute social outcast, and look again at this story to see what it has to tell us here today.

Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector and he was rich, which means he was a good chief tax collector.

Good in the sense of being highly efficient rather than being morally upright.

He was probably a thoroughly nasty man.

It’s significant that he was a ‘chief’ tax collector, because a chief tax collector was more than just the boss of the tax collectors.

The chief tax collector, the publicanus, worked for the occupying Roman government.

Publicanus is where we get the word ‘publican’ which was how the word was translated in the old bibles.

The chief tax collector had a contract with Rome to collect a specific amount of tax on Rome’s behalf, and Rome wasn’t overly bothered by how they collected it.

It was far more important to get the tax than quibble over the means of getting it.

The contract was to collect a specific amount of tax.

The tax collector wasn’t working on a percentage; anything over and above what he was contracted to collect, he got to keep.

Just as, in the same way, the chief tax collector was responsible for making up the shortfall if he didn’t collect enough to meet the target the Romans had given him.

It was a tricky job to have a contract to be a tax collector.

You could become rich, as Zacchaeus here had done, but if you collect too much you might cause riots and get into trouble with the Romans.

Too little and you end up owing the Romans money yourself.

Either way, if you get it wrong you can end up dead or as a slave.

It’s a job for hard men.

The system of tax collectors was used all over the empire, and tax collectors were universally hated by the locals and despised by the Roman authorities.

No one likes a tax collector, but they are hated at the more if they’re working for an occupying power.

So hated were they that chief tax collectors, as opposed to the ordinary tax collectors, the local enforcers who worked for them, often came from other parts of the empire, so they weren’t exploiting their own people.

This wasn’t true of Zacchaeus.

Zacchaeus was Jewish.

Zacchaeus is a Jewish name.

Zacchaeus knew the law.

Because he was a tax collector, because he was a traitor working for the Romans, because he was a profiteer, benefitting from the exploitation of his own people Zacchaeus would have been hated.

But because he was a Jew but worked every day with non-Jews, because he worked on the sabbath Zacchaeus would also have been considered unclean.

He wasn’t a sad little man with no friends, he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work and he was someone you really wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.

He had the power to destroy lives.

And this is the man who runs and climbs a tree so he can see Jesus.

In a way, the important part of this story has happened before Jesus has got there, because we don’t know why he runs towards the tree, but something big has made him run.

When I was a young student nurse, I must have been about 19, I was told off by one of the sisters for running in the corridor.

It was quite a friendly telling off, but I was told that nurses only ran when there was an emergency.

If nurses saw another nurse running, they would assume there was an emergency and would run to help.

No one would be impressed if you all ended up in the canteen because you’d been late for lunch.

But there was a second reason nurses didn’t run; it looked unprofessional.

It was important to maintain professional dignity.

People wouldn’t take you seriously if you didn’t maintain your dignity.

And yet Zacchaeus, who’s reputation as an enforcer of taxes must have been maintained at least in part based on a façade of power and dignity, if not fear, runs ahead of Jesus because he wants to see him.

What has led to this man throwing away his dignity like that?

Rich men don’t run, at least not in public.

Men whose livelihood is maintained through other peoples’ fear don’t climb trees in public, unless it’s really important.

This isn’t curiosity that brings Zacchaeus running, this is hunger, this is need.

Seeing Jesus is so important to Zacchaeus that he’s willing to look ridiculous in public to see Jesus.

What had led to Zacchaeus feeling like this…?

Well..? Well we simply don’t know exactly, but I think that whatever it was, God himself had touched Zacchaeus.

Zacchaeus was experiencing what recovering alcoholics sometimes call ‘a moment of clarity’, a moment when suddenly they see themselves for what they are, when they see through the façade they have built around themselves, when they see themselves for the broken people they are, when they see their need to change, their need for healing.

We don’t know the events that led Zacchaeus to this.

Luke doesn’t tell us.

But Zacchaeus has recognised his own spiritual emptiness, and where does his spiritual emptiness take him?

It takes him to Jesus, the only place the spiritually empty can go.

I wonder what Zacchaeus expected to happen?

What was the best Zacchaeus could probably have hoped for?

A glance from Jesus?

A five-minute chat with him, with no one looking, so as not to embarrass Jesus.

There’s no evidence in the story that Zacchaeus even planned to come down from the tree.

He might well never have known what he planned, because Jesus acted before Zacchaeus did.

What did Jesus do?

Before Zacchaeus speaks, Before Zacchaeus does anything.

Jesus looks up at him and says; “Zacchaeus, come down now.

I must stay at your house today.”

What must Zacchaeus have thought?

for Jesus to dine in Zacchaeus’ house is an enormous act of acceptance of Zacchaeus by Jesus, which would have come at great cost to Jesus socially, if Jesus had cared one bit about respectability.

For Jesus to eat in the house of a tax collector, the house of a traitor, the house of someone ritually unclean, some one who themselves ate and drank with gentiles, was scandalous.

It would make Jesus unclean.

Of course it was scandalous, that’s why the people who saw it began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

Jesus didn’t care about that.

“Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Do you see the parallels here, with a story Luke told us a few chapters earlier?

A story of a son who has done a dreadful thing and got horribly lost, a son who has a moment of clarity as he comes to his senses, and a vague hope that he might be given a grudging acceptance, though not an actual welcome.

A son who is instead met with a love and acceptance and welcome that far exceeds his expectations.

It’s the story of the prodigal son.

The story of Zacchaeus is the story of the prodigal son.

But whereas the parable of the prodigal son is a story Jesus tells to illustrate Gods love, the story of Zacchaeus, is that love in action.

In Jesus we see God and in Jesus we see God’s reckless joy in the returning sinner, the lost sheep.

We are in danger of seeing the story of Zacchaeus as the story of the funny little man who climbs a tree and then has tea with Jesus.

Actually, the story of Zacchaeus is the whole gospel in one encounter.

Zacchaeus knows the law.

He knows the rule about returning fourfold what you have stolen.

And that what he promises to do.

It’s a sign of two things; firstly, that Zacchaeus understands what many don’t; that forgiveness isn’t just a warm fuzzy feeling, it’s about trying to make right some we have done wrong.

It’s about restitution, and taking responsibility, not just apology, and it’s a sign absolutely of the genuineness of Zacchaeus’ conversion.

This is a new life for Zacchaeus.

What does this say to us today?

This story reminds us that the only way we can come to God is by recognizing our brokenness and turning to Jesus, the only place the spiritually broken can turn.

God has no time for the spiritually proud, who think they can use God.

Are you spiritually broken.? Do you live life feeling a failure and conscious of how you would be judged if only people know what you are really like?

Do you feel God judging you?

God sees you as Jesus saw Zacchaeus.

It is only when we recognise that’s who we are and turn to Jesus that God can forgive us and begin to rebuild us.