Gospel [Luke 19:1-10 (§94)

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Dear Father, brothers and sisters: Happy Feast!

At last we hear the reading from St Luke’s Gospel of Zacchaeus climbing the Sycamore Tree to see Christ and we know that Great Lent will soon be upon us once again. No sooner have we left those Great Feasts of January of the Nativity and Theophany of Christ and the time of the Lenten Triodion comes round again. As we come to this Feast of Zacchaeus Sunday which heralds the dawning of the Pre-Lenten period, let us turn to our holy Father, the Venerable Bede of Monkswearmouth and Jarrow to help us understand our Gospel story.

And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. And, behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycomore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way.

This image of Zacchaeus, chief amongst the corrupt tax collectors, leaving all concern for the world, what people might think of him, and in his zeal and desire to see the Saviour climbing up a tree, is I think one of the most beautiful and endearing of the whole Gospel. St Bede starts his commentary on our Gospel reading, with an allusion to Zacchaeus as that camel which made the impossible possible and actually passes through the eye of the needle.

Behold a camel passes through the eye of a needle when it lays down the burden of the hump

The ‘burden of the hump’, St Bede adds, should be understood as the burden of wealth, or more accurately in Zacchaeus’ case, the burden of ill-gained wealth.

St Bede then compares Zacchaeus struggling amidst the press of the crowd to see Christ with another Gospel image, this time of the blind man silenced by the crowds who then began to cry out even louder to the Saviour.

So the short man must overcome the obstacle of the obstructing crowd, abandon earthly things, and climb the tree of the cross.

This notion of the oppressive crowd, as an a hostile, worldly obstacle to Christ, an obstacle to the Saviour, is a powerful and maybe relatable image. It reminds me of those powerful lines from T.S. Eliot’s extraordinary poem The Wasteland –

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

In our modern secular, pagan world, we too can often feel that we are at surrounded and outnumbered by a powerful wordly force which is always pitted against us and against our spiritual progress. It takes strength, great strength, to push against this tide of popular and worldly opinion, habit and thought. As Saint Philaret of Moscow reminds us –

A fish that is alive swims against the flow of water. One that is dead floats down with the water. A true Christian goes against the current of a sinful age. A false one is swept away by its swiftness.

But, as St Bede notes, Zacchaeus shows the depth of his desire and determination to see Christ –

By climbing the tree to see the Saviour, he supplies what he lacked by nature with the wonderful devotion of faith, and therefore justly received, although he dares not ask for it, the blessings he hoped for, to welcome the Lord.

We should also see here, not only the strength and determination of Zacchaeus but also his humility, his willingness to appear foolish in the eyes of the world. It is so easy, I think for these images of the Gospel to become rather worn and over familiar that they can lose something of their freshness and shock. Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh, in his sermon on Zaccheus Sunday helped his flock understand something of the shock and scandal of this Chief Publican climbing a tree to see a poor, itinerant Preacher. Zaccheus climbing the Sycamore is as shocking as some vertically challenged city slicker business man, perhaps one of the Bankers on the London Stock Market, in an expensive pin-stipe suit, getting out of his Ferrari and, because of the throngs of tourists and other business men, obscuring his view, suddenly climbing up a lamp post in order to see a Christian procession. If we saw a millionaire acting this way, it would indeed be quite a sight. We can well imagine how people would laugh and stare at such a peculiar and rather undignified performance and the rather comic and ridiculous spectacle he makes of himself.

St Bede followed some of the Latin Fathers in understanding the word Sycamore to mean a foolish or false fig tree, as St Augustine says a tree of ‘silly or foolish fruit.’  They call it this because, at its root, the word sycamore comes from two Greek words: syko, meaning fig tree, and moros, meaning foolish. St Bede thus sees Zaccheus’ ascent up the Sycamore tree to be an affirmation and taking up of the folly of the wood of the Cross –

And after climbing the sycamore he sees the Lord passing close by, because of his praiseworthy foolishness he directs his attention to the light of heavenly wisdom.

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him,

And in that moment, the eyes of the Saviour met with the eyes of this small and very rich and rather corrupt man. Of course the Saviour had seen Zacchaeus and loved Zacchaeus long before he made his curious ascent up the Sycamore tree.

Therefore, Jesus saw the one who saw him, because he chose the one who chose him, and loved the one who loved him.

and [Jesus] said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house. And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully.

There is an urgency to the spiritual life. When the Lord calls us to Himself, we must not delay. We must not remain where we are, and put off the invitation for another day. No we must make haste and receive Christ, receive the Grace whilst it is offered. We can think of those stark words from St Matthew’s Gospel –

And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house. And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.

And so Jesus leaves the Jews who had condemned him and comes to the house of Zacchaeus who for St Bede ‘signifies the Gentile believers’.

Today it is fitting for him to abide in the house of little Zacchaeus, that is, to rest with the grace of the new light gleaming in the humble heart of Gentile believers.

And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, That he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.

Of course, the crowd, and the world will never understand this love, this yearning and this foolish humility of Zacchaeus. Even the Jewish religious leaders, the Scribes, the Pharisees and Saducees, could only condemn Zacchaeus for being an irredeemable sinner and condemn the Saviour of the world for loving one so sinful and for lowering himself to associate with one like him.

But then something extraordinary happens, something again which went against the dull wisdom, the financial prudence of this world –

And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.  

St Bede draws attention to the fact that Zacchaeus, the small man, “stood” he stood up for the Truth of the Transformation of Christ, the Transformation of the Gospel, the miracle that can make Camels pass through the eyes of needles. He stood up for the miracle of the Resurrection for the Life of the world to come.

While others are falsely reproaching him for being a sinful man, Zacchaeus himself, standing, that is, remaining steadfast in that truth of faith which he had taken up demonstrates that he has himself been converted from being a sinner … This is that wise foolishness, which the tax collector had plucked as if it were the fruit of life from the sycamore – namely, to repay what was stolen, to give up his own things, to scorn the visitble world, to wish even to die for the sake of the invisible world, to deny himself, and to desire to follow the footsteps of the Lord.

And so we come to those final words of today’s Gospel –

And Jesus said unto him, This day is salvation come to this house, forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.

In this season after the Feast of Theophany, this is traditionally when we should all ask the priest to come and bless our homes with the holy Theophany water. In the service for the blessing of homes we specially remember Zacchaeus who found salvation, not in the Temple, not in a hospital nor in the town, but in his own home. It is a salutary reminder that our homes are the places where each one of us is called to work out our salvation in fear and in trembling. Whilst understood as a representative of the Gentiles, Zacchaeus became like unto Abraham, for, as St Bede says –

Just as Abraham, at the Lord’s command, deserted his land, his kindred, and his paternal house in hope of future inheritance, so Zacchaeus, in order to gain treasure in heaven, abandoned his goods to be shared among the poor.

My dear Father, brothers and sisters: today Zacchaeus, that Morning Star of Great Lent the Watchman of the distant Pascha of Christ goes on ahead of us and climbs up his Sycamore tree to be the first to see the Risen Christ. Will we also, like him, push against the seductive pull of this world with all its contempt, its easy judgment, its pride and vanity? Will our houses this Lententide be blessed for spiritual struggle and become the site of salvation or will they remain temples of sin and sloth? Christ our Saviour, dear ones, is come in the Flesh, He has been baptized in the Jordan and now is seeking each one of us. Let us not be drawn down into the tide of this world, the tide of the passions, but let us eagerly climb up the wood of the Cross and so be seen by our Saviour. Let us all stand up for Christ and the Reality of the Gospel, the Reality of the Resurrection.    

For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.

Amen.