Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The story before us in Luke today is, like so many stories in the Gospels, extraordinary. In it, a wealthy man of some years and a “chief tax collector” runs through a crowd to get a glimpse of Jesus. Because he is a short man, that is not enough. He still can’t see Jesus. So, he climbs up a tree.
What a completely ridiculous thing for him to do. The crowd must have thought he had lost his marbles. Even more incredible, when he does see Jesus he not only offers up half of everything he owns to the poor but also promises to pay four times whatever taxes and profit he has wrongfully collected.
In today’s terms, that would be something like seeing a crooked hedge fund manager in his Armani suit hanging from a limb of a tree on Wall Street as he hands out his account passcodes to the homeless and promises to pay fourfold all the profits he made through sketchy means without so much as the whiff of a lawsuit. That’s nuts!
And that’s not the half of it.
When Jesus spots Zacchaeus in the tree, he knows very well who is. He is not just a garden variety tax collector. He is a chief tax collector and that likely meant that in addition to collecting taxes (on behalf of the Roman Empire that persecuted Jews and followers of Jesus alike) he also collected a profit. Jesus also knew that the crowd, or at least a good number of people in the crowd, was aware of that, especially given the spectacle that Zacchaeus had made of himself up in that tree.
By this point in his ministry, Jesus had a reputation as a teacher, a healer, even one who could raise people from the dead. His ministry was very well known, as evidenced by the crowd that was so big that Zacchaeus had to climb a tree in the hopes of getting even a glimpse of Jesus. Jesus had a reputation. The stakes were big that day.
When Jesus looks up into that tree and sees a ridiculous man that most people in the crowd probably abhorred, what did he do?
He announced that he would be having lunch with that man in that man’s home.
Jesus—the son of God, the sinless man, the most righteous man ever—was going to break bread with that man. More than that, he made sure that the crowd knew it.
Spectacle, indeed. A spectacle of the excessive grace, mercy, and love of our Lord.
This extraordinary story raises important questions for those who seek to follow Jesus. Just one is, who will we break bread with? Who among those that “the crowd” abhors will we sit at table with? Who will we break bread with?
As Thanksgiving approaches, this seems a particularly poignant question to ask.
- Sue Trollinger