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Advent 1
27/11/2022

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Psalm 122
Matthew 24:36-44

In a sentence:
Time is what passes between persons; love is time.

On the first Sunday of Advent each year, our readings touch on time and the coming judgement of God. Yet these themes are set in an apocalyptic key far from modern thinking about the nature of time. While these old texts answer a question about the kind of time we live in, we would need to share the apocalyptic sense of the times for the answer to make sense to us.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is impossible. We can’t unthink what modern culture has taught us about the nature of time, and become first-century apocalypticists. What we can do, is get a clearer sense of how time and life are connected for us today, and ask what someone like St Paul might say into that.

For us today, time is a “forever” thing: it rolls on and on. We might calculate that one day the universe will end with the heat-death of all things (everything ending up at the same cool temperature) but this is not a limit on our experience of time. Time is close enough to infinite that we can think it to be stable and ourselves to be placed in it to fill it up. This time is like a jar into which we pour what we do. The “bucket list” method of living our lives is perhaps the quintessential symbol of this for our time. The bucket list names those “experiences” with which we hope to fill our few moments in infinite time. The great time-bucket, of course, is indifferent as to whether there’s anything in it or not. It remains a bucket if we never get around to doing anything. But even a life rich in experiences is but a drop in the enormity of the infinite time-bucket. And so, when our actions in time’s ever-flowing stream are merely “in” time, they finally amount to nothing. It matters not what we do; time rolls on and sweeps everything away. Infinite time is finally empty time. (Consider a thought from a few weeks ago, that eternal life might be boring). The old Greeks had it right when they imagined that the god Chronos consumes all his children.

If we hear St Paul this morning through this notion of time and our place in it, he can make little sense. For him, time is not infinite but has an end, and soon. But the “end”-thing is distracting. If we don’t expect time ever to end, why not simply dismiss what Paul says about life in time? If you’re never going to get to the end which is the judgement, why bother how to get there? How could our unending time finally come to something, come to some meaning, to some sensible summing-up? And so Paul’s exhortation that we live a certain kind of life makes little sense to many today not because his morals are out of step with ours but because his idea of time looks wrong. What we do cannot matter for the reasons Paul seems to propose.

And yet, for all this, it is not an end to time which concerns Paul; he anticipates less that time will end than that a judgement will be made. This judgement reveals the nature of time: what time is for. Paul’s call to the sleepers to awaken looks at first to be about keeping ourselves safe in the coming judgement. Yet his concern is not the threat of judgement but the nature of our time here and now. What is the purpose of our being, and how does what we do embody that purpose (or not). “Live this way”, Paul says, not because the final judgement is coming but because this is what time properly requires.

This, then, is the difference between our sense of time and Paul’s sense: our unbounded time finally swallows us up and sweeps us away, while Paul’s time is waiting for us. The time in which we live is for him not empty and indifferent about whether or not we pour anything into it. God’s time waits for us. God’s time expects something, looks for something, demands something. And it is not yet God’s time until this demand is met.

And this brings us to the surprise in the gospel’s proposal about time. To wake from sleep (as Paul commands), to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, to live into the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control Galatians 5.22f) – all this is to make time. This “making” of time is not what we usually mean – finding time for some good work, making time “for” something. It is the making of time into God’s own time: the creation of a true timeliness in our lives. What Paul criticises – drunkenness, debauchery, jealousy, the “fruits of the flesh” – these are empty time, time within which meaning is eroded as mutually responsible relationships are broken down. Election season in a democracy like ours is empty time in this way.  Time is what passes between persons, and properly to “make time” is live toward an interpersonal human being made from love and gentleness and patience.

Do this, Paul says, and time – the substance of your lives – comes into being.

But also, “Do this”, Jesus says, for the remembrance of me – also a creating of a certain kind of timeliness. Do this, take and taste bad time – broken body and spilt blood – and hear the promise: This is my body given for you, that you might have bodies, my blood that you might have blood. Or, this is my time, given for you, that you might have time. If we’re paying attention, we might marvel that God can make time for us from the nothingness of broken time: from our choices for sin and death.

This is no mere wish or other-worldly thing. The word the sacrament acts is that, gathering as we do around the one table, all the time we need is standing next to us, the (only) time which matters.

Making time is now not about “finding” time but creating it through lives of love and care. The time of our lives has a face which turns towards ours and asks, Do you love me?

Sleepers, awake. Paul says. Open your eyes and see. Live love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And you will have time enough.

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Reign of Christ
20/11/2022

Colossians 1:11-20
Psalm 46
Luke 23:33-43

In a sentence:
Patience is finding life in the midst of life

Conventional wisdom has it that “patience is a virtue”. As often as not, this is declared by the person on whom we are waiting, and so the saying generally serves as a way of trying to keep us at a distance until our time, or turn, comes.

In our reading from Colossians this morning, Paul prays for two things for the Colossian believers: that they might be made strong with the strength that comes from God’s own power, and that they might be “prepared to endure everything in patience”. These are really not two things but one, and we’ll look at them together by focussing on patience.

Patience is a certain kind of waiting, the bearing of suffering or some other deprivation or difficulty. We don’t have to be patient. Despair is a way of enduring which knows no hope – no end to whatever afflicts us. Despair anticipates no resolution and the ethic of despair is sheer endurance. But few people can live this way; we’re more likely to opt for the less debilitating resignation, which is marginally happier. Resignation tolerates suffering and deprivation as a strategy of least resistance. At best, it will be a brave acceptance of what cannot be changed, a stoic keeping-at-a-distance of loss or suffering. A third response to suffering or deprivation is impatience – a refusal to accept suffering by exercising power to bring about a change. Impatience powers-through, if it has the resources, either in a DIY way or by haranguing others.

Why, of the various responses to difficulty, does Paul propose patience?

The key here is in recognising that patience is not simply endurance, and so not really like despair or resignation at all. Patience is a reconciliation with the timeliness (the temporality) of our lives. This is more than accepting that we need to wait out whatever is wrong. The timeliness of our lives is not in counting the ticking of clocks but rather in the fact that our lives are not “immediate”.

In our common talk, when something is immediate, it happens now: I want it done, and done immediately! The modern world is increasingly immediate in the sense that things happen faster: faster calculations, faster travel, faster service delivery, and so on. There is the more trivial sense of immediacy – quickness, without intervening time.

Broken down to its roots, however, the word “immediate” means, “without mediation”. Something is immediate in this sense when neither time nor anything else stands between us and what we desire. The “middle” drops out. We no longer order a book from a local store, which store then orders it from overseas; we can go direct to the supplier ourselves. We can – if we’re lucky! – find a life companion directly online without the hard work of lurking in this or that place, joining a social group, discovering who might be nearby and interested and available. We can find a spare part or the next piece in our collection without driving across the city or the country looking for it. Impatiently desiring Faster and Easier is not only about the immediate as instantaneous. It is also about the immediate as “without a middle”, without someone or something between us and our goal, perhaps even standing in the way.

By contrast, patience has discovered something which matters in the “not-immediate” (to put it clumsily) or, more positively, in what is mediated. After Paul speaks of patience in our passage this morning, he moves straight on to an account of God’s work in Christ: “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Most importantly, this healing work does not take place “immediately” – instantly or without something between the origin and the goal. This is a mediating kingdom, a mediated relationship to God, and to everything. Christ stands in the middle between God and us. There is no immediate, direct link between us and God; time, space, and spaced-timed bodies are part of what it means to connect to this God.

Impatience is about immediacy; patience has come to terms with the mediated nature of our existence as creatures of this particular God. There is an unavoidable middle between us and what we truly need. But being unavoidable, it is necessary. And so patience experiences time and all that is in it as itself the stuff of life. “What we truly need”, then, is not just where patience might lead us but also the messy middle between here and there. Time and the persons and things which seem to be in the way between us and our desires are just what God uses to make us, to redefine and fulfil those desires. What God finally makes is the Body of Christ – a community of people learning to be patient with each other.

Patience is a virtue not because it is convenient for the person we are waiting on but because we too easily experience time as quite other than filled with divine possibilities between us and where we think we are going. In fact, having to wait seems increasingly to be creating a hatred of time and those who fill it, whether it be sitting in traffic, waiting 10 extra seconds for a slow internet download, standing in a supermarket queue or “having” to pause to eat in the midst of a busy day. We struggle with the passage of time and what fills it because it seems to be empty time: wasted time simply to be endured, time for resenting others because they are holding us up and, of course, time for being resented by them in return. Patience is not waiting; it is allowing that God takes time. God takes time, and makes of it life for the time‑d.

Patience is not a dry agonising endurance of time or of each other. True patience reflects God’s patience with the world – God’s making use of our time. Patience does not simply endure but takes what fills our time to be a rich field sown with the stuff of life.

Patience is then not an emergency plan for a situation in which something has gone awry. It is about the simple, God-blessed fact that we are situated – “sited” – in time, in relation to others.

Patience is being reconciled to being the kind of embodied, time-set creatures we actually are. We are not to be patient because the circumstances might require it; patience is all there is. To be reconciled to God and to each other is to be patient.

Paul prays for patience so that we might discover that even time which looks empty is God’s own time. God has been patient, has “endured” time, has become broken flesh in Christ, and so made time God’s own, the place God is content to be. If God is content to be here, to be patient is to claim this time as be truly our own, the place where we are content to be.

To be patient is, then, to be conformed to God’s own way of being and doing. To be patient is to be our true selves: the “image” of God.

By the grace of God, then, may the virtue of patience, with the strength it gives to redeem our time, be ever more fully ours, to our fuller humanity and (what is the same thing) to God’s greater glory. Amen.

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Pentecost 23
13/11/2022

Isaiah 65:17-25
Psalm 126
Luke 21:5-9

In a sentence:
The heaven we need and live towards is our here and now

When the question is heard in our house, “Can you tell me a story?”, the following little tale is sometimes told:

Once upon a time, there was a spider who wanted to spin a web.
But she couldn’t. So she died frustrated.

(End of story).

These days that story is re-told either to be annoying or in mockery of my story-composing skills. But it wasn’t until I read closely our text this morning from Isaiah that I realised the theological significance of that frustrated spider.

Isaiah 65 tells of the coming creation of new heavens and a new earth. It’s difficult to hear this without hearing its much later echo in the book of Revelation 21, but we must try to filter that out for at least a moment. Revelation is a thoroughgoing apocalyptic text, but even late Isaiah is too early for apocalyptic ideas. In particular, unlike in Revelation, Isaiah’s vision has no promise of resurrection.

Isaiah’s vision of heaven, then, has no “eternal life”:

No more shall there be … an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. (65.20)

What is promised is not eternal life but enough life. This is because, for the Hebrew mind, the problem is not death but dying frustrated. In the restored creation,

[t]hey shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD – and their descendants as well. (65.21-23)

The new heavens and earth signify, “They shall not labour in vain”. The problem to which Isaiah’s vision is an answer is vanity of purpose, thwarted intentions, not enjoying the fruits of our labour. Heaven is the opposite of this, Isaiah says: no more “dying frustrated”. The death which remains in this vision of restoration is now a “good” death after a life that proved to be worthwhile. Un‑fulfilment is the problem; fulfilment is the correction. Isaiah’s heaven needs no eternal life because one fulfilled life is life enough.

A heaven without eternity is a confronting thought for those of us accustomed to speaking of never-ending life. In truth, we don’t think much about eternity. But what do we imagine we would do in a “forever” heaven? “Forever” is what we usually associate with boredom; to say that the sermon went on “forever” is to say that it was not, in even the remotest sense, an experience of heaven! Heaven-as-forever might be somewhat less than we hope for.

But it gets worse. In Isaiah’s vision, not everyone gets to heaven, even the worthy! “I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy”, declares God, meaning that it’s not here yet. It will be the case that some listening will not see it, perhaps even all of them, because Isaiah has no resurrection to carry them there.

And so a surprising thing emerges: Isaiah’s first hearers both rejoice that this restoration of the heavens and the earth is coming, and know that they will not see it. They look forward to the coming of what they will not see. For Isaiah and those who first hear him, it is heaven enough to know that Jerusalem will be restored, without having to be part of that restoration. Faith here is not that I will experience the good thing but that someone will. For Isaiah, not I but the Jerusalem-to-come will know the new heavens and new earth – a new Jerusalem in which I may not get to live.

This is about as un-individualistic an idea of faith and salvation as we could imagine – that the promise of heaven could be for me a life-giving promise even when I don’t expect to experience it. I rejoice and take heart that God’s salvation will be experienced by someone else.

If we are surprised by this, we will also be surprised to hear that precisely this understanding of the promise of heaven is at the heart of Christian confession and life. Christian faith begins not with the idea that I might get to heaven – something often mocked by non-believers. Christian faith begins with the idea that Jesus “gets to” heaven. Christian confession simply displaces Isaiah’s Jerusalem with the crucified Jesus. It is Jesus’ life which is frustrated by being cut short. He doesn’t see the fruit of his work but dies too early, and all he built is thrown to the wind. Good Friday is what Isaiah describes: houses built, vineyards planted, children born – but all in vain. In the death of Jesus is caught up all frustration of human work and intention. The cross is exactly non-heaven, exactly the frustrated, disordered world. But to speak of the resurrection of Jesus is to say of him what Isaiah said of Jerusalem. It doesn’t overturn pointlessness and thwarted goodness in happy consolation for Jesus but rather says that his thwarted life was enough, that the frustrated life he lived from his vision of heaven was enough.

This is more than a clever theological trick, tying Isaiah’s earthy salvation to what we’ve learned to be the “more” heavenly Christian salvation with its overtones of resurrection and eternity. But the point is that faith doesn’t leave the earthiness behind with a dose of resurrection and comforting notions of eternal life for everyone. If Jesus is Lord now – is now the sign of God’s kingdom – he was also the presence of God’s kingdom before the crucifixion, in his seemingly frustrated life and work.

Consider what it is like for us to believe here and now. We live not in the glorious heights of heaven but on the plain of frustration. Perhaps we “believe” in heaven, but all this can really mean is that we believe that Jesus is restored, that he is in heaven. This is the only angle on heaven we have, apart from sentimental and wishful thinking which proposes a heaven as some kind of retirement payout. We might hope that we join Jesus in heaven but this is precisely the point: we hope. And what do we hope? We hope first and foremost not that we might get to heaven, but that Jesus is there. Because if he is not there – if someone is not saved – then no one is, and we have no idea what we hope for. Our hope is that Jesus’ thwarted life was enough, because then our thwarted lives might be enough, too.

This is to say that an overgrown hope in heaven to come threatens to deny the real possibility of life here and now. There are some who expect heaven to come as a consolation for a frustrated life. And there are some who find solace in that, though they might not see heaven, it is nonetheless real and they will live here and now in view of that reality. There is a world of difference – even a heaven of difference! – between these two mindsets. Heaven as reward or consolation makes what I do and experience here and now less important than the coming life of heaven itself. I live now for the coming heaven in which I’ll really live, rather than living to live here and now. This is because the heaven I look forward to makes me think that this present world is not the real thing. I’ll be good for heaven’s sake rather than for goodness’ own sake. I’ll “wait” for heaven, and get on with things when it comes. This is not just a frustrated life but a procrastinated one.

But, against this, the real heaven I might not see requires me to start living here and now, because there is no other life to which I can put things off. I must live as if there were no heaven to come, as if the promise of heaven were as close as I’ll ever get to experiencing it, apart from getting on with a heaven-shaped life here and now.

This is to say that we might need to set aside our infatuation with a heaven to come – for our own sake, for our neighbour’s sake and for God’s sake. We pray, of course, for the coming of God’s kingdom, “on earth, as in heaven”. But we do this knowing that the coming of God’s kingdom is the gift in the Incarnation, and the gift in the Eucharist, and the gift in the promised presence to us of Christ in our neighbour. It is into our Now that the kingdom comes, and heaven is possible.

Lift up your hearts, Isaiah says to his people. God will come.

Lift up your hearts, we hear each week: God has come, and made dwelling among us, and comes and comes and comes again in glimpses of heaven in the lives of the saints and those who don’t yet know they are saints.

We gather as those learning what the kingdom looks like, learning that we might be saints, and so learning how to become God’s kingdom here and now.

So, Sleepers, awake.

Lift up your hearts.

Live.

Become the coming of God.

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All Saints
6/11/2022

Ephesians 1:11-19
Psalm 149
Luke 6:20-31

In a sentence:
The one crisis (judgement) in faith is the cross of Christ, by which God judges all human judgement to make straight our way to him

To speak of “All Saints” is to speak of an identity – of knowing who we are or, at least, who the saints are! But this is more than a label. Who we are has to do with where we are, who we are with, and what we do. Identity has to do with a situation, a condition. What, then, is the human situation and the condition of the saints?

In the last week, the little owner of the sweetest singing voice in our house was heard to chime the following chorus,

“you’ve got to get yourself together,
you’ve got stuck in a moment,
and now you can’t get out it” (U2, “Stuck in a moment”).

(Mine is not the sweetest singing voice in the house!).

“Stuck in a moment”. This week the lexicologists at the Collins Dictionary announced their word of the year: permacrisis. I hadn’t heard that word until I read the announcement. Yet I knew straightaway what it meant – “an extended period of instability and insecurity – and I felt how appropriate a choice it was. The crises to which permacrisis points are, of course, very close to us all. Any one of the pandemic, Ukraine, #MeToo, inflation, floods, and heat waves would be crisis enough on top of the usual crises of family, work, and health. But laid one over the other, things are feeling fever-pitched. We might hope it’s a passing phase, except that I was struck by a comment in something else I read during the week, which remarked upon “the complex of modernity in which life knows itself to be at the mercy of a continuum of crisis” (Peter Sloterdijk). While that also seems to characterise today’s experience well, it was written 40 years ago. If the commentator is correct, the problem is not the world in the early 2020s but a deeply rooted cultural experience: being stuck in a milieu that we “can’t get out of”.

In all of this, the crisis of permacrisis is an instability to which we must constantly respond – “perma” wars and rumours of wars. The world is continually upset as things refuse to stay where we put them, and we want desperately to put them back again if we can.

What does faith say here? The Bible knows crisis, yet it differs from the crises we know. Our word “crisis” comes, letter-for-letter, from a Greek word which, in the New Testament, is typically translated as “judgement”:

And this is the judgment [crisis], that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil (John 3.19)

The Father judges [crisis-es] no one but has given all judgment [crisis] to the Son (John 5.22)

The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment [crisis]with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here! (Luke 11.32)

This is evidence of the righteous judgment [crisis] of God, and is intended to make you worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering (2 Thessalonians 1.5)

That is, a biblical “crisis” is not accidental but something intended, something God brings. The crises taking place around us are occasional – natural disasters or things we have done to each other that cause the world to go to smash. Biblical crises are deliberate interpretations of natural and historical conditions and crises; it is God who is smashing stuff. By themselves, natural and historical crises are things to be “coped with” and managed – occasions for getting ourselves together. Biblical crises reveal: “this is the crisis, this is the judgement, this is the setting right”. We don’t “cope with” crises like this; we live with them as a given condition.

Such a crisis is folded into our Gospel reading today – Luke 6.20-31. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those reviled for Jesus’ sake. Woe to the rich, the full, the comfortable, and the well-reputed. This crisis-inducing judgement upsets the world, for now, we might wonder anxiously, Am we among the blessed or the cursed? The crisis is not, “How can we hold it all together?” but “When it all finally falls apart, where will we be found?” Luke, of course, is too simplistic here, in the way of the old prophets. God doesn’t do nuance, and so we can’t let ourselves off the hook too easily. To come to church and hear such a text is to have yet another extra crisis to “cope with” if we are to make ourselves safe, now from God.

This reveals the depth of the human situation, what we are really stuck in – not just our engrossing crises but the requirement for constant decision and assertion of ourselves in the face of the world, of other people and of God. This is our permacrisis: we are required to be the sufferers, the judges and the setters-right of ourselves in the world.

In our reading from Ephesians this morning, we heard of another crisis, much less explicit but real nonetheless. Here the crisis (the judgement) is, “I, God, know who you are…You are mine.” You – the saints of God – are “destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will” (1.11). This, in a wholly (and holy) new way, is the permacrisis of the gospel, the permanent judgement of the gospel. There is only one judgement, one moment of decision – that moment in which all judgements are collapsed into Jesus, and we are collapsed into him with them. This judgement is given that we might “hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory” (1.12). The “praise of this glory” is not an orientation out of this crisis-plagued world, for the glory of Jesus is the cross, which God makes the crisis of crises, the judgement of judgement. In the cross, the rich one is made poor so that the poor might be made rich through judged judgement. Luke, with his inversion of the status of the rich and the poor, says to us that we don’t know ourselves: we judge each other wrongly, anxiously, exclusively and violently: crisis leading to crisis, judgement to judgement.

Against this, the gospel is that there is one judgement which matters – the judgement of all judgement which makes human life once more a gift and no longer an anxious work of self-justification. While we are so accustomed to self-knowledge and self-determination through self-judgement, we have in God a new witness to who we are. If, distracted by the crises, we forget God, God does not forget us. In the crisis of crises is found the life of the people of God. This is the moment we want to get stuck in: the permacrisis which is the gift of life, and which sets all other crises in perspective.

This is the crisis which would make saints of us and not just of us, but of the whole world.

To be such saints as this is to live as though all deathly judgement is behind us, and before us is only life.

Let us, then, live as saints: bearers of crisis-dissolving grace from God to each other and the world. And then we might see that the moment we are stuck in is nothing less than the coming of God’s kingdom.

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Pentecost 21
30/10/2022

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

This story must be one of the most vivid, and memorable stories in the Gospels.  Children love it and remember it, Sunday School plays used to be made of it and we could all happily believe it is just a tale, a diversion from the serious stuff in the Gospel. The reality is that it is a meticulously formed story in Luke’s carefully constructed two-volume proclamation of God’s plan for humankind in Jesus.

So I thought we’d examine the text in a bible study this morning and perhaps discover more than we did when we were young. The verses are all set out in your service sheet.

The trouble with lectionaries is that they chop a biblical book into small chunks, and place them alongside three others which may well also have the gospel we need to hear for the day. We regularly lose our place in the stories. So let’s begin by stepping back and seeing where today’s chunk fits.

Today’s story has its beginning back as far as chapter 9, when, after the transfiguration, Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. Jericho is the last stop on that line, 20 km to go. But Luke has been theologically leading his readers on this journey too. At the end of the last chapter (18), he gives us (v.31-) the third prediction of Jesus’s passion, three sounding gongs in his narrative about what will happen in Jerusalem, and how it will be the fulfilment of prophecy regarding Jesus.

Jesus is not just walking by himself; he is part of a great crowd ‘going up’ to the Holy City for the Passover festival.  As they approached Jericho, he meets a blind beggar who calls out to ‘Jesus, Son of David’ and when asked what he wants he says, ‘I want my sight back’ and he receives it, instantly. And all present praise God for it.

So, let’s now follow the text in my favourite translation, from the Revised English Bible, which replaced the NEB in 1989.

1 Entering Jericho Jesus made his way through the city.

2 There was a man there named Zacchaeus; he was superintendent of taxes and very rich.

All we need to know about Zacchaeus in one line! Older translations say he was a ‘Chief Tax Collector’, the only such one mentioned in the NT. He is in charge of other tax collectors (‘superintendent’) and will have added to his income from them. In short, he belonged to the most despised section of Jewish society.

3 He was eager to see what Jesus looked like; but, being a little man, he could not see him for the crowd.

‘See’ in the sense of wanting to observe this man, not to consult him.  But there is one more fact: Zacchaeus was ‘of small stature’ [helikia mikros] and couldn’t see for all the regular-sized folk in front.

4 So he ran on ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see him, for he was to pass that way.

Sycamore trees are good for climbing: they have a sturdy trunk and spreading branches, but they also have abundant foliage. Peter’s graphic looks right!

5 When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said, ‘Zacchaeus, be quick and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’

Leafy or not, Jesus spied him, almost as if he expected to see him. Jesus already knew his name. Notice that Jesus says he ‘must’ stay with him – not just for a meal, but for a B&B on the journey to Jerusalem too. There is a sense that the Abba God compels him to stay.

The crowd would have spotted him. He will have been conspicuously well-dressed, and the sight of him shimmying up a tree invited sniggers. He may have hoped to ‘see’ Jesus, slither down and vanish unseen. Not likely.

6 He climbed down as quickly as he could and welcomed him gladly.

Both verses 5 and 6 speak of ‘hurry’, ’quickly’, which is intended to highlight the urgency of Jesus’ summons and of Zacchaeus’s obedience. (We might remember the haste of another rich man in robes, running to greet his prodigal son. That too was undignified and unexpected.) Zacchaeus’ welcome of Jesus hardly suggests reluctance.

7 At this there was a general murmur of disapproval. ‘He has gone in to be a guest of a sinner,’ they said.

Suddenly the mood changes and the fickle crowd turns on Jesus and this is not the only time we hear this criticism. Jesus (in Luke) is often in the company of ‘tax collectors and sinners.’  It is part of Jesus’ divine mandate to sit with sinners.  Such actions belong in the kingdom which is breaking in.

8 But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Here and now, sir, I give half my possessions to charity; and if I have defrauded anyone, I will repay him four times over.’

However successfully he descended from the tree, Zacchaeus doesn’t care. He ‘stood there’, calm and composed before his critics. And his first words are what the NT calls ‘fruits worthy of repentance’ – though there is no other sign of his penitence. He is, from that moment, giving half of all his goods to the poor and a four-fold restoration to those he has defrauded. Now, the degrees of compensation are laid down in Jewish law (it’s all there in Leviticus 6: 1-5): Zacchaeus’ offer exceeds the legal requirement. He chooses to relinquish his very profession and embraces a considerable drop in economic status. By contrast, in the previous chapter (Lk 18: 22-24), we have just heard of a rich young ruler who sadly turned away from the kingdom because of his great wealth.

9 Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house – for this man too is a son of Abraham.

It would be possible to describe Luke’s Gospel as dedicated to showing the restoration of all the children of Abraham to their rightful relationships. Abraham’s children have been scattered, exiled, lost in biblical history; in Luke they are being gathered in once again, not least women and children – and even Gentiles. Compassion marks Luke’s Gospel.

Included are include the blind beggar (19:35f), the tax collector (!) praying alongside the Pharisee (18:8f) and earlier, the crippled woman in the synagogue who is healed on the sabbath day, who is called ‘a daughter of Abraham’ (13:10f). Zacchaeus has demonstrated that he has come home.

Two notes to end on.

Jesus says ‘salvation has come to this house’ and it’s worth remembering that Zacchaeus’ ‘house’ now includes all those who have suffered by him, but also his family and his slaves. Zacchaeus continues to be their guardian and benefactor, in a very different spirit – as kin under the God of Abraham, through Jesus.

And ‘salvation’ may begin here with one man’s conversion, but it has personal, domestic, social and economic dimensions. The biblical word can be translated as ‘made well’ or ‘healed’. The whole of life is embraced by Jesus’ ministry, and all who follow him have a foretaste of the coming reign of God.

The meeting of this little man with the very Word of God incarnate is not a diverting tale in a larger story: it is the larger story.

10 The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what is lost.’