Sermons
April 6, 2025 (5th Sunday in Lent)
Who is really poor here?
Luke 18:31—19:10
When I planned out my sermon topics for April, I noted that today’s reading is about “two healings.” The first one is obvious: as he goes into Jerusalem, Jesus encounters a blind beggar and restores his sight to him. This passage is pretty clearly borrowed from Mark, but Luke makes a couple changes to it.
For one thing, Luke has this healing happen as Jesus goes into Jericho, not as he leaves, which is how Mark tells the story.
A more important difference is that in Mark we learn this blind man’s name: Bartimaeus. Why did Mark include the name but Luke didn’t? It could be because Mark’s community knew Bartimaeus by name. Mark does say that as soon as Bartimaeus receives his sight, he gets up and follows Jesus “on the way”—and we learn from Acts 9 that “the Way” was one early name for the Christian movement. But Luke doesn’t give us his name; presumably this is because he wasn’t as familiar to Luke’s original readers as he was to Mark’s.
He wants to see again, which tells us that he hadn’t been born blind, like the man in John 9. He had been born sighted but lost his sight at some point, and we don’t know what that point was.
Jesus heals him—actually, Luke phrases it as an order: “See again!” Then Jesus goes on into Jericho, and Luke tells us—only Luke has this story—that as he’s passing through he encounters a man named Zacchaeus.[1]
We who grew up going to Sunday school and VBS probably remember learning a little song about Zacchaeus, complete with motions: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he…”[2]
It doesn’t take very long reading Luke’s Gospel before you get to where you can almost predict what he’s trying to get across in any given story. Clear back in the first couple chapters Luke tells us the point of his whole Gospel, when he has an angel say to a bunch of shepherds, “I am bringing you good news of great joy…for all the people.” Good news—great joy—for all the people. Throughout the Gospel of Luke, and continued into volume 2, which is the book of Acts, we find people getting included who aren’t very often included. Rich and poor, able-bodied and disabled, insiders and outcast, Pharisees and tax collectors, righteous and sinners, Jews and Gentiles, those who’d be wearing white hats in the old westerns and those in black hats,[3] respectable wealthy women and women of questionable repute, people whose minds worked normally and people with mental illnesses—you name it. And so, here we are toward the end of the story, just a little ways from Jerusalem, and he’s doing it again. The blind man, just as in Mark, gets up and follows Jesus, so he’s there to witness the encounter with Zacchaeus.
I wonder what went through Zacchaeus’ mind as he tried to get to where he could see Jesus. I wonder if he thought, “Wow, this is the guy people have been saying is a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Maybe he had lots of friends, the kinds of friends who you’re never sure whether they like you for you or for your money. But maybe he didn’t have a lot of true friends, the kind who knew all about him and loved him anyway, the kind he knew wouldn’t melt away like frost on a chilly spring morning if the wheels fell off the gravy train.
Not too many people in the city of Jericho had any interest in being that kind of friend to Zacchaeus—a man who, it was assumed (probably correctly) cheated his own people to line his pockets as he collected the hated tribute taxes for Rome. Not only was he a tax collector, but he was a chief tax collector—and the farther up the hierarchy you are in a system like that, the more guilt you are assumed to have for the corruption of the system.
Maybe he felt like he needed a true friend at that moment, so he went to see this fellow people had tried to insult by calling him a sinner-lover. Or maybe he was just curious, didn’t really think he needed anything at all, but people had been talking about Jesus, so he wanted to get a good look, just to find out what all the fuss was about.
Whatever the reason, Zacchaeus went out that day wanting to see Jesus, but the crowds prevented it. Zacchaeus couldn’t get to where he could see Jesus any other way, so he abandoned all dignity and climbed up a tree.
When Jesus came by, he called out to the little guy in the tree. Some people wonder how he knew who he was, or how he knew he was up the tree. Others say, well, he’s Jesus, he knows everything. Fair enough. Or maybe he could hear the crowd whispering, maybe even laughing and pointing at the self-important little crook perched on a branch of a sycamore tree.
However it happened that he knew, Jesus called Zacchaeus by name, and said, “I need to stay with you tonight.” Our translation of this text doesn’t quite capture what was going through Zacchaeus’ mind as he came down out of the tree. It just says he “was happy to welcome him.” But in Greek, what it says is that Zacchaeus “rejoiced.” It’s not like, “Sure, Jesus, we would be happy to have you come for a visit.” It’s more like, “Hooray! Jesus is coming over!”
We know Luke’s Gospel well enough to know what made Zacchaeus rejoice like that. It was grace.
Zacchaeus knew perfectly well that he was considered unclean by many of the religious leaders of his people. He knew most rabbis wouldn’t dream of coming to his house. But here was Jesus saying, essentially, “I know who you are; I know what you do for a living, and I want to have supper with you.” And he didn’t even ask anything from him. He never said, “Clean up your act, find a new line of work, and then you’ll be good enough to welcome me.”
The Methodists call this prevenient grace. That’s the grace we are shown before we even know we need it—the grace that makes it possible for us to repent. And Zacchaeus, having been shown this grace, does repent.
How do we know? Well, repentance isn’t just a feeling; it’s not like you can feel bad about something you’re doing wrong but not go any further than that—maybe you even continue doing it even if you do feel bad.
Zacchaeus doesn’t say, “Oh, Lord, I’m so sorry that I have collaborated with Rome and gotten rich by taking more than I had to from my fellow Jews.” No, repentance is demonstrated by concrete actions. Right then and there he gave away half of his presumably ill-gotten wealth. Right then and there he made a promise he would repay anyone he cheated—not one for one, but four times what he had improperly taken from them.
And Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house,” using the same word he used when he told the blind man, “Your faith has saved you.” The Greek word sōzō means “save,” but it also means “heal” or even “rescue.” That’s why I say there were two healings in today’s reading. First a blind man receives his sight, and then a crook goes legit. Both of these make them whole and restore them to their places in the family of Abraham—
the family of God.
Unfortunately, not everyone rejoiced when Zacchaeus was shown grace.
Just like in so many of Luke’s stories, others who considered themselves to be righteous—or at least better than a dirty tax collector—were offended by what Jesus did. They grumbled.
“I can’t believe Jesus is going to his house!”
“So many good people here in Jericho, and he chooses to spend time with that?!”
“Just turns my stomach!”
“Guess those folks up the road were right—he is just a sinner-lover.”
Jesus responds to their grumbles. “This is what I’m here for, guys.” I’m not here to make folks like you feel good about yourselves because you’re righteous—I’m sure not here to let you feel better about yourselves by shaming someone else. I came to seek out and save people who’ve lost their way. And so I have called Zacchaeus, and restored him to his rightful place in Abraham’s family, just as I did with my formerly-blind friend here.
Here today, we who are in church, especially we who have been in church all our lives, we hear this story in which Jesus bypasses us to offer grace to a known sinner. Some of us may well be offended, just like the people of Jericho were.
But Jesus answers our grumbling just like he answered theirs: This is what I came for.
We say we’re Disciples of Christ. We’re followers of the one who was called a friend of sinners. That means we need to get over being offended when grace is offered to sinners. Jesus said his purpose was to seek out and save the lost, not simply to be chaplain to the found; if we are to be his disciples, his students, his imitators—little Christs—that probably ought to be our purpose too.
We seek out the “lost” when we step outside our circle of Christian friends. A colleague of mine years ago used to tell his church folks—in a tradition where high priority is placed on witnessing and bringing people to Christ—that if they only had friends who already belonged to churches, where were they going to find someone to proclaim the good news to?
We save the “lost” when we offer someone friendship even if we don’t approve of the way they live their lives. Love first, judge last—or, better yet, love and let God be in charge of any judging that needs to happen. (And trust me when I say God doesn’t need us to tell him who needs judging or why; God knows a whole lot more about what’s going on in a given person’s heart and life than we ever will.) Grace means we don’t wait until someone repents, until they show remorse, until they change, before we share the good news they might be dying to hear.
And how will we know when we’ve succeeded? How will we know when we’re following Jesus and carrying on his work of seeking out and saving the lost? Is it when we can show a scorecard full of the names of people we’ve heard say the “Sinner’s Prayer”?[4]
Nope. It will be when we start hearing people grumbling behind our backs: “Sinner-lover.”
Yeah.
[1] If Luke includes Zacchaeus’ name but not the blind man’s, it could be that his community didn’t know the blind man, as Mark’s community may have, but they did know Zacchaeus.
[2] Fred Craddock says it’s not clear whom the descriptor in the text, “…he was short in stature,” refers to. We assume it was Zacchaeus who was short, because we don’t like to imagine that Jesus was. But Fred, who was himself short in stature, said he found it rather comforting to think Jesus might not have been a tall man.
[3] This is a stereotype that doesn’t always ring true: Hopalong Cassidy, for example, wore a black hat.
[4] I’m not sure I even know what the “Sinner’s Prayer” is, quite honestly. I had a man once ask for it to be part of a funeral service for his mother. I politely declined because I don’t think a funeral is the place for that; I could tell from the relief on the faces of the man’s siblings that I’d made the right call.