This is one of those stories that end up in children’s bibles and Sunday school lessons all the time because the visual images are so vivid. In order to see Jesus, Zacchaeus has to climb a tree. He was that eager and determined to see Jesus as he really was.
Jesus seems equally determined to see Zacchaeus, insisting that he have dinner at Zacchaeus’s house. Eating with a tax collector is, as always, an unpopular choice and the usual mumbling and complaining go on.
It’s a successful meal full of good and fruitful conversation.
Zacchaeus—whose name is related to notions of being upright or innocent—declares his intention to return wealth to those he has unjustly stolen from and defrauded. Salvation, Jesus says, has come into the house.
Scholars don’t seem clear about whether Zacchaeus was already giving unjustly gained wealth back to people or not. Given the verb tense of the Greek here, either meaning is possible, I guess. Zacchaeus could have been giving money back all along. Or he could be just starting to, and will continue.
Either way, his declaration indicates that he knows the Torah: in Exodus, someone who steals a sheep is told to pay back with four, so he returns money four-fold (Exodus 22: 1). He wants to uphold the spirit of the law. A law that also includes the mandates of Jubilee.
The visit has been so splendid that Jesus declares that salvation entered Zacchaeus’s house on that day. A whole bunch of traditional scholars take this to mean that Jesus is talking about himself as the source of salvation, but I tend to think that “salvation” here is more about Zacchaeus’s actions and transformation. Realigning his relationship with wealth and returning ill-gotten gains is part of Zacchaeus’s salvation—his coming to wholeness and healing. Now. Today.
This isn’t just a story we can make good pictures for children from.
It’s a story about changing life and returning wealth to those it came from.
And because of his position in an unjust system, Zacchaeus has accumulated a lot of wealth. He has enough cash on hand to return four times as much as he took. I guess he made money with money, in various ways. He has acquired a lot over time.
After genuinely seeing Jesus, Zacchaeus seeks to return wealth to its rightful owners.
After genuinely seeing Jesus, the Jesus whose ministry in Luke begins with a declaration of jubilee, Zacchaeus seeks to practice Jubilee in his own life. He seeks to give property back and to relevel the playing field so that others can have security and enough to live on.
Zacchaeus saw Jesus and did what he could to correct corruption and injustice and inequity perpetuated by the system he was part of. Call it repentance. Call it restitution. He was making amends to a group of folks he had wronged. We could call it reparations.
Zacchaeus saw Jesus, and began to practice reparation.
Reparations is kind of a hot-button term in the American political landscape, and I suppose it has been for a while. Within my memory, there was a great deal of controversy over federal legislation that resulted in giving $1.5 billion to the Japanese people who had been placed in camps during WW 2. In recent years, a few educational institutions—like Georgetown and Princeton—have sought out the descendants of people they once enslaved and sought to find ways to pay them back. The state of California has begun to study how to make reparations to the descendants of enslaved people. But the vast majority of white Americans and our economic, political, and educational institutions continue to resist and disparage the idea.
The March 2024 issue of Messenger has a short piece about reparations written by Dana Cassell. She points out, mostly, that if we looked honestly at our history that we would learn to acknowledge the need for reparations. We would see the need for economic restitution for past wrongs. And see that the economic advantages that white folk have, collectively and overall in the United States, has its roots in slavery and theft of land and genocide and the structural racism those actions embedded among us.
Among other things, Cassell references a long list of banks and companies in the United States that still prosper largely because of foundations in a slave-based economy. Then she points toward her own family’s benefits from using one of those banks.
In my own life, I’m aware that my father went to college on the GI Bill after WW2, while those benefits were denied to many black and brown veterans. I’m aware that my paternal grandmother’s family settled in the Dakotas during a time the federal government was giving stolen land away, cheap.
I’m aware that in this country anyone who has ever taken advantage of the federal mortgage interest tax deduction has benefited from a policy intended to help white folks move into the middle class. At the same time, brown and black people were barred from home ownership and still face discrimination in home and small business loans.
I’m aware that this congregation has our property because in the 1960’s developers still set aside land for churches to acquire at little or no cost. And that those developers were putting up homes to accommodate white flight from the city core.
When we look closely, says Cassell, we “have the ability to question the economic and racial disparities of our communities, our neighborhoods, and our congregations. We do have the capacity to remember differently, reckon with our complicity and our privilege, and begin, in whatever way, small or large, to repair harm.” (March 2024 Messenger)
When we look closely, we see what we have benefited from in our part of a larger system. We are not tax collectors, or thieves or, generally speaking, dishonest people. Like Zacchaeus, our names are associated with innocence and uprightness.
But the white folks here benefit from generations of injustice and murderous practices. Just as Zacchaeus benefited from a system he inherited.
Then Zacchaeus met Jesus just a few days before Jesus entered Jerusalem. He not only met Jesus, but saw who Jesus really was. Zacchaeus changed the way he handled money and sought to repair past fraud and thievery and injustice.
This raises the question of what we do, how we seek to examine and amend—how we make reparations and support reparation for a past we did not create but which we benefit from. When we see Jesus on his way to Jerusalem, what do we change or alter….because surely we would all like to know that salvation has entered our lives. We would like to welcome salvation into this place…
Scripture: Luke 19:1-10
-Rev. Ruth Moerdyk