Text: Luke 19:1-10
Speaker: Joel Miller
Unlike the previous Sundays of Lent, today’s reading is not a parable. It’s a story that follows the flow of Luke’s gospel. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and now he’s almost there. He’s passing through the last town, Jericho, before that final, winding, uphill road to the holy city. Jesus had mentioned this path in a parable, way back at the beginning of his journey. A hated Samaritan, who had no business being on that road in the first place, saved the life of a Jewish pilgrim coming back from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jesus lifts up this Samaritan as an example of neighborliness. “Go, and do likewise” Jesus had said.
That was a parable, but this is really happening. Jesus really is passing through Jericho, about to go on that pilgrim road to Jerusalem. And on his way through Jericho, he has an encounter that only Luke tells us about – with a wealthy executive tax collector named Zacchaeus.
This is not a parable, but it reads kind of like one:
Once there was man – rich, yet despised – who so badly wanted to see the wise teacher coming through his village that he climbed a tree, like a child, to get a good view. The wise teacher saw the man and, much to everyone’s surprise, asked to come to his house. Overjoyed, the man hurried down and welcomed the teacher. The crowds grumbled against the man and the teacher. And then, another surprise: The wealthy man declared we would give half his possessions to the poor, and pay back four times over anyone he had cheated.
If the parable of the Good Samaritan was about neighborliness, the story of Jesus in the home of Zacchaeus is about salvation. At least that’s what Jesus says it’s about. At the end of the story Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house.” And just in case we didn’t get it, he continues, “For the Human One came to seek out and to save the lost.”
For those of us encountering this story all these years later, maybe this is the biggest surprise of all. This is a story about salvation? Isn’t salvation after you die? But Jesus says salvation has come “Today.” Isn’t salvation connected to belief? But Zacchaeus doesn’t say anything about belief, and Jesus doesn’t ask him. And isn’t salvation for individuals? But Jesus says it has come to Zacchaeus’s household.
Like any good parable, this story leaves us with more questions than when we started.
When Jesus says “Today, salvation has come to this house,” what does he mean? When salvation came to the house of Zacchaeas, what came?
Before going any further down that path, here’s another story that reads kind of like a parable. It was featured in a February article in the UK publication, The Guardian.
Back in 2015, an Australian woman named Jo Nemeth was working a good job in community development, but was, in her own words, “deeply unhappy.” She came across a book about a man who lived without money for three years and felt compelled to try it herself. She made a list, shorter than she expected, of things she absolutely needed, many of which she already had. She closed her bank account and gave all of her money to her 18 year old daughter.
Initially, she expected to do a lot of dumpster diving, which she did a bit, but mostly her friends gave her things out of their cupboards they didn’t want. She started tapping into what some call the gift economy. She would do chores for people without asking for anything in return, which led to being on the receiving end of other’s gifts.
Today, ten years later, at 56 years old, Jo is still money-free and, as the article says, happier than ever. She lives in a multi-generational household with a close friend who has a partner and son. Jo’s daughter and her husband, and their three young children also live with them. In place of rent, Jo cooks and cleans for the household, gardens and preserves food, and makes as many things by hand as she can.
The house has wifi, which Jo uses. She has a bike but no car.
She’s clear that she’s not anti-money. Others in her household earn money, and when she needed dental work this past year, she did raise some money in exchange for lessons she taught. Overall, she prefers living without it, and her friends say she gives way more than she receives.
The quote from the article that most caught my attention was this. “I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money.” Jo Nemeth says, “I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money, because all through human history, true security has always come from living in community and I have time now to build social currency. To help people out, care for sick friends or their children, help in their gardens. That’s one of the big benefits of living without money.”
So here’s a question: Could the story of Jo’s decade of living without money perhaps be a salvation story? And if perhaps it could be, how does the salvation of Jo Nemeth, the middle-aged, contemporary first-worlder relate with the salvation of Zacchaeus, the wealthy tax-collector from first century Jericho? And, because we all wonder at times, what does salvation look like in our own lives? How would today look if today, salvation came to your house?
If you stick around 10 more minutes, you’ll have a 100% clear answer on that one. That’s not true, but hopefully it will be greater than 0%. I can assure you it’s going to fall somewhere between entirely relinquishing the money economy, like Jo, and using available funds to uplift the poor and repair harm, while remaining relatively wealthy, like Zacchaeus.
Not to reduce salvation to economics, although of all the Gospels, Luke is the most economically-minded in its vision of salvation. When Mary is pregnant with Jesus she proclaims that God has “filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Jesus’ first order of business in his public ministry is to go back to his hometown of Nazareth and proclaim that God has anointed him to preach good news to poor and proclaim Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor.
Jesus challenges his followers to become dependent on the gift economy when he sends them out to preach to different villages without even a purse or sandals, completely dependent on the hospitality of strangers. Last week Sarah talked about the parable unique to Luke of the rich man in hell and the poor Lazaurus in paradise. It’s the first century equivalent of a political cartoon about the wealth gap. Lest the reader overly glorify poverty, Luke does slip in a note about Jesus’ ministry being financed by a group of women – among them Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, and Susanna. These financiers are the same women who show up at the empty tomb Easter morning. More on that in two weeks.
Economics is so central to the vision of the kingdom of God because it has to do with relationships. Economics is relationships. Salvation economics is not so much about doing without money as it is about participating in exchanges that affirm the inherent dignity and worth of every person and the integrity of the earth. We are inherently relational beings, embedded in a relational world of giving and receiving, as simple as breathing in the gift of oxygen and breathing out the gift of carbon dioxide, as complex as global trade networks that impact billions of people and ecological health.
Our word for this, economy, comes from the Greek oikos, which means household, the same word Jesus used with Zacchaeus when he said salvation had come to his household. The same interdependent web of relationships that Jo Nemeth’s choice of a moneyless life has impacted so directly. The household. The oikos. An interconnected life in which one feels more secure than ever. Or, an extended household throughout Jericho and beyond in which the injustices of the Roman taxation system are cushioned by reparative actions of people like Zacchaeus who both benefits from his position and actively commits to redistribute resources to those who most need them. Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this household, this oikos.” Today, salvation has come to this economy.
And here we thought salvation is about dead individuals, rather than living communities.
One of the ways our congregation tries to live out this vision is through what we call reparative debt payments. This is currently set at $20,000, divided evenly between a Native-led organization and Black-led organization, both working to restore land stolen from their communities. Zacchaeus pledged to pay back four times anyone he had defrauded, and while it’s impossible to quantify what is owed for the history of stolen land and stolen labor in our country, that number 4 happens to be right around the percentage of our annual budget dedicated to these reparative debt payments. Maybe as our budget increases each year, we raise those payments so they stay at 4% – consider it a Zacchaeus-inspired “go and do likewise” project. It’s a small but greater than 0% way of joining in salvation economics. It could be its own kind of parable we gladly tell others.
According to the gospel vision, salvation has these outer manifestations. But there’s an inner life as well. In the Guardian article, it’s referred to simply as happiness, security, and connection, but I imagine words like joy, freedom, purposefulness, meaning, and love also apply. These are words of a rich inner life, too rich to put a price tag on.
We don’t get a lot of commentary for Zacchaeus’s inner life, but we do get words from Jesus that would have meant everything to him. When Jesus says, “Today, salvation has come to this house,” he continues, “because he too is a son of Abraham.” What Jesus is saying is that Zacchaeus, who for whatever reason had made himself an outsider to his people by working for Rome to collect their tolls which kept his people poor….What Jesus is saying is that deeper than Zacchaeus’ status as a hated tax collector, is his status as a son of Abraham, which is another way of saying that Zacchaeus is a beloved child of God. He is, like each of us, an insider in God’s household. Part of that interconnected web of the Divine oikos. He belongs, even if the crowds can’t see it yet.
And it is out of this grace of belonging and inherent dignity, assured by Jesus, that Zacchaeus will recognize dignity in others, which will continue to shape how he lives within the economy of relationships around him. If you don’t have a sense of belonging to one another and to the ultimate unifying reality we call God, it’s hard for today to be a day of salvation. If you know you belong to one another and to God, today could be a day of salvation.
To celebrate, let’s sing together, with gusto, VT 611, Lift Every Voice and Sing, mindful that this is the African American National Anthem, a tradition from which we have much to learn about salvation and liberation.
