IF last Sunday we saw a tax collector pleasing in the sight of God because of his truthfulness and humility, now we encounter a chief of tax-collectors doing the right thing and receiving salvation as he came to know Jesus (Luke 19:1-10), the divine mercy that seeks out the lost and the condemned.
The chief tax collector and the good shepherd
The Jericho chief tax collector Zacchaeus must have been a very wealthy man. First of all he won the bidding for the taxes in the area, which means he paid the Romans in advance all the taxes due. Then he set out his agents to collect actual taxes from the citizenry, bloated to make him recoup his initial investment and literally to make a killing. Much resented by the public, Zacchaeus was ostracized as unclean due to his occupation and despised as in breach of the law. He was not counted as a son of Abraham; he may have many riches, but very few neighbors. And somehow he was drawn to Jesus. He wanted to know more and get closer to the carpenter from Nazareth. A man of action, he ran ahead of the crowd and climbed up a tree to observe Jesus more clearly from his vantage point. He would allow neither his short stature nor the people to prevent him from seeing Jesus.
Like a shepherd in search of his lost sheep, Jesus unerringly stopped at the spot where Zacchaeus was perched on a limb of a sycamore tree. Jesus also was drawn to Zacchaeus. Looking up he saw a man segregated from the rest and fenced off by the bars of the tree branches. Jesus summoned him out of that isolation with a self-invitation to Zacchaeus’s house. This was beyond anything Zacchaeus could have imagined happening to him when he set out to have a look at Jesus. Getting close to Jesus, he discovered divine compassion and mercy. His home had been shunned by every decent person in society, and now this man of God volunteered to be his guest and sat at his table!
The conversion
The experience of Zacchaeus with Jesus was radicalizing. He felt genuinely loved. But that was not what mattered to the on-lookers: to see Jesus giving some attention to this public sinner was shocking enough, to observe them in friendship was just too much. The audible disapproval of the public now made a difference to Zacchaeus who earlier in his life did not bother about their angry murmurings. As if awakened by the protest, he realized that his new bonding with Jesus could not be separated from his relationship with his countrymen. Moreover, he saw that his accountability for the past could not now be glossed over.
To be included within the circle of the loved ones of Jesus was literally a new life for Zacchaeus. The encounter was a turning point; the chief tax collector unhesitatingly undertook what would do justice to the new centering of his life on Jesus and his turning away from his old values and priorities. Half of his possessions he was decided to give to the poor. He was immediately adopting the gospel teaching with his “elusive wealth” to make friends with the poor who would welcome him in heaven; he could not serve both God and mammon (Luke 16:9.13). And he was ready to make restitutions to those he wronged, willingly “four times over,” the full extent of the penalty for the theft of what meant life for someone robbed.
Alalaong baga, Zacchaeus made a quick leap not only down from a sycamore tree, but up and out of his old life of greedy materialism. His faith and sincere transformation elicited from Jesus the glad confirmation of salvation promised to Abraham and His descendants now coming upon Zacchaeus’s house. The reconciliation extended to him by Jesus shows that indeed the Lord has come “to seek and to save what was lost.” But also that no one is to be excluded a priori from salvation, because even the lost can be rescued and even the worst of sinners can be converted. If only we can also do a Zacchaeus! For grafters and extortionists, tax-cheaters and smugglers, worshippers of mammon and betrayers of their people, Zacchaeus is a saint waiting to be imitated.
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