For some reason which I fail entirely to understand, every few years I rewatch an old TV series from start to finish. After the presidential inauguration in 2017 I felt compelled to view again The Sopranos in its entirety; something about Tony Soprano and his family helped me understand the newly installed occupants of the White House. And just this year I decided to rewatch all five seasons of Breaking Bad, a series that presented the travails of Walter White, a terminally-ill high school chemistry teacher who starts cooking and distributing methamphetamine as a way to leave his family some money. While I didn’t note any presidential similarities this time, something about the anti-hero’s moral confusion seemed to encapsulate our current national moment.
Both of those shows became famous because they featured protagonists whom some thought “lovable rogues”, but their surface attractiveness masked deeply flawed interior lives. That these characters could elicit both our admiration and our scorn told us something about the complications of our affections. As I find myself liking Tony Soprano or Walter White in spite of myself, I may need to rethink how I understand my own morality.
I bring up my complicated response to these two disreputable TV malefactors because they help me understand my feelings about Zacchaeus, the guest star in our gospel for this morning [Luke 19: 1-10]. If you’ve been around the church for a while, you’ll know that Zacchaeus has long been a favorite of Sunday Schools. We routinely make kids sing songs and act out plays about the little guy up there in the branches. He’s a compelling figure: he’s short! He climbs a tree to see Jesus! Surely, we think, someone with whom the kids can identify.
The problem with the way we use Zacchaeus, though, is that he is actually a lot more like Tony Soprano than he is like the Mayor of Munchkinland. Zacchaeus was short, it is true. But he was also the chief tax collector of Jericho, and you might know that the tax collectors of Jesus’s day were not like today’s IRS bureaucrats. First century Jewish Palestine was occupied by a Roman standing army, and the Romans taxed the population outrageously to feed and house them. Jewish tax collectors were recruited by the Romans to exact these taxes from the already strapped Israelites. As a result, tax collectors were seen more as mob bag men (like Mr. Soprano) than as cuddly little tree climbers. And for Zacchaeus to be the chief tax collector only exaggerated the problems.
Which is not to say that Zacchaeus doesn’t become a hero. It is to say that he does undergo a transformative journey to get to a good place. You might even say he goes through something like a conversion experience.
In order to get Zacchaeus to this new good place, both he and Jesus have to take some action. Clearly intrigued by Jesus and what he has heard about him, Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree in order to get a view of this mysterious figure. Just as Zacchaeus moves towards Jesus, so Jesus moves towards him, and says "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today."
When Jesus accompanies Zacchaeus to his house, the crowd murmurs, "He has gone to be the guest of . . . a sinner." And they’re right. Zacchaeus is a sinner, if by “sinner” we mean one who publicly defies Jewish law. The people of Jericho are scandalized: they clearly had thought of Jesus as a healer and teacher who would do his good works for respectable people. But here he is accepting the hospitality of the town’s biggest gangster.
No one is prepared for what happens next. Something about his encounter with Jesus changes Zacchaeus. Luke doesn’t tell us what it was—perhaps just being seen and acknowledged by Jesus, perhaps Jesus’s willingness to risk disgrace by entering his house—this moment with Jesus changes Zacchaeus dramatically, and he blurts out,
"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."
This certainly is a remarkable turnaround. It’s as if Al Capone had suddenly turned into Mackenzie Scott, going from gangster to philanthropist in a zero to sixty turnaround. The biblical standard of generosity is 10%. Nobody gives away 50. And the scriptures call only for one eye for one eye, not four for one. What is going on here?
In the story of Zacchaeus and his conversion, Luke is telling us something about the nature of repentance. It is clear that this Jesus moment has made Zacchaeus renounce his former life, and he instantly vows to make amends by giving away his ill-gotten gains and paying oversized reparations to those he has injured. This, says Luke, is what true repentance looks like.
In our everyday parlance, we tend to think of repentance as akin to “feeling bad about” something. “Gosh, I repent hurting your feelings, drinking so much last night, investing in Enron.” For you and me today, repentance is regret. But it wasn’t that way for the Jews of Jesus’s day.
The Greek word the gospels use for repentance is μετάνοια, a word which literally means “turning around”, and figuratively suggests “a transformative change of mind”. Μετάνοια means a lot more than what we would call “repentance”. It means entirely changing your thought, and as a result, changing your action. When Zacchaeus repents, he experiences μετάνοια. He doesn’t say, “Gee, I feel bad about my ill-gotten gains.” He says, “I’ll give away half of what I’ve got.” He doesn’t say, “Sorry if I’ve offended you.” He says, “Here is four times what I illegally took from you.” His encounter with Jesus has totally converted and transformed Zacchaeus, and he honors that change not only in language but in action.
What can we learn from this interaction between Jesus and the repentant chief tax collector? Here are two quick thoughts.
First, Zacchaeus’s repentance is one of action, not words. Perhaps it’s the influence of social media, but we 21st century people seem to think that saying something is the same as doing something. “Of course I work against climate change. I tweeted about it just yesterday!” Not only do we confuse tweets and Facebook posts with doing something; we also spend a lot of our time saying things that we don’t then back up with action. I regularly receive emails from institutions (including universities and churches) that say, in their signature line, “We acknowledge that we occupy unceded Chumash, or other Native American, land.” I have yet to receive an email which adds, “therefore we’re giving it back.” True repentance needs action to be complete.
Thought two is tied up with what Jesus says at the end of our passage:
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."
We tend to think of sin as a personal matter, something we do in private. The nature of Zacchaeus’s sin was public. In his role as chief tax collector he had violated other people and the norms of his community. Over the centuries, the church has asked us to focus on our personal, private actions. But the Bible is more concerned with our social behavior. Zacchaeus may have had impure thoughts or eaten meat on Fridays, but that’s not why he’s a sinner. He’s a sinner because he defrauded and abused people. And in his repentance, his μετάνοια, his complete change of mind and behavior, he is restored through his reparations to his community. “He too is a son of Abraham.” He will remain in Jericho and work it out. His new life will be hard, but it will also be joyous.
Jesus concludes by saying, “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." This is true not only for Zacchaeus and the people of Jericho. It is true for you and me. Jesus has come to be the guest of us sinners, and the result is that salvation has come to his house. In the same way, Jesus has come to be our guest, and his presence within and among us at first will expose whatever we need to repent. Are our relationships, both personal and social, unjust? Are we behaving in our family or our community in ways that betray our deepest values? If so, we need not to feel bad but to repent, to change, to turn around and live new lives where we are. That’s never very easy to do, but it is the only way to personal and social wholeness.
“For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." Jesus is not only talking about Zacchaeus here he’s talking about you and me. He has come today to be the guest of all us sinners. Our best response, as always, is not to feel bad about our pasts but instead to be open to the forgiven future he offers, and so to change, to turn around, to follow him, and always to give thanks that we have been seen, known, and loved. Amen.
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