A Saint in the
Sycamore
Luke 19:1-10
November 3, 2013[1]
Where
do you look to find a saint?
On
a day almost 2,000 years ago, while traveling through Jericho, Jesus found a
saint (or at least a saint-in-progress) perched in a sycamore tree.
To
most people, Zacchaeus hardly seemed like saint material. Physically, he was unimpressive. He was short.
He did not command much of a physical presence. Socially, he was an outcast. He was a tax collector, but not just an
ordinary tax collector. He was the chief
tax collector in a very wealthy district.
It’s possible that Zacchaeus compensated for his short stature by
overachieving in his work. He rose to
success, and his success put him in league with Rome. He may have been successful financially, but
spiritually, he was lost. His financial
success was earned at the expense of his Jewish brothers and sisters.
Luke
describes Zacchaeus as being so desperate to see Jesus—desperate to see just
who this Man was that was stirring up so much excitement—that he ran ahead of
the crowd so he could find a place to get a good view—a place where no one
would be able to crowd him out of the way.
The best place he could find was overhead, in a sycamore tree. No one would be able to block his view there.
Zacchaeus
didn’t care what everyone thought about him.
He didn’t care that running to get ahead of the crowd, and climbing up a
tree were both beneath a man of his station.[2] He was used to that. Nobody liked him; but he didn’t care as long
as they paid their taxes.
So
who did Jesus see when he raised his eyes into the treetops? Did Jesus see the local agent of the Roman
Empire, who cheated his fellow Jews and lined his own pockets? Did Jesus see a desperate man who broke all
the rules of decorum? Did Jesus see who Zacchaeus
was or who Zacchaeus could become? Did
Jesus see a sinner in the sycamore tree, or did He see someone who was a
beloved child of God and who could be transformed into a saint, a holy man of
God?
Perhaps
Jesus saw both sides of Zacchaeus. Clearly,
Jesus saw the promise of sainthood in Zacchaeus, for Jesus invited himself to
Zacchaeus’s home for the evening. Jesus
could have stayed with any of the rich and famous of Jericho, with any of the
religious community, or with any of the devoted throng who followed him. Yet Jesus sought out this sinner who had the
promise of becoming a saint. This is
another example of God’s prevenient grace—grace that seeks us out even before
we know we are lost.
When
Jesus’ words begin to sink into Zacchaeus’s psyche, Zacchaeus undergoes a
remarkable conversion. Life will never
be the same for him. He offers to give
away half of his goods to the poor, and to make restitution four-fold to anyone
he had cheated. In doing so, Zacchaeus
proves the genuine nature of his repentance; he goes above and beyond the duty
of restitution required by the Law of Moses.[3] As a result, Jesus is able to proclaim that
“salvation has come to this house” and he confirms that Zacchaeus also is a “Son
of Abraham” (Luke 19:9). By affirming that salvation has come to the
house of Zacchaeus, Jesus also affirms that Zacchaeus has been restored to the
community. He is no longer the
outcast. Zacchaeus has been made whole,
just as surely and just as miraculously as the lepers who were cleansed. Jesus uses this incident to reaffirm his
purpose in ministry: “to seek out and to
save the lost” (Luke 19:10).
But
does Zacchaeus’s repentance make him a saint?
Just what is a saint, anyway?
Sometimes we tend to put saints on such a high pedestal that no one ever
could attain that status. At other
times, we dilute the meaning of sainthood so that anyone who is not evil
incarnate makes the cut.
To
my knowledge, the Bible never really defines the word “saint.” In fact, when our English translations use the
word “saint” as a noun, the original text actually is an adjective, hagios, that would be better translated
as “holy one.”—someone who has been set apart for a sacred purpose, someone who
has been made holy by our holy God.[4] The Bible makes it clear that are called to
repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Luke
5:32), that God calls people to be saints (Romans 1:7), and that God calls us to transformation through the
renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).
I’m
not sure that God cares so much about the label of sainthood; I think that He
cares much more about the underlying reality.
To be a saint, you don’t necessarily have to pass a theology exam, work
for the church or become a martyr. The two
keys to sainthood that I see in the story of Zacchaeus were that (1) he
desperately wanted to see Jesus; and (2) he committed to turning his life
around. Jesus was able to see those two
qualities in Zacchaeus even while Zacchaeus was hiding in the sycamore.
Can
it really be that each of us is called to become a saint? I feel as though I have a long way to
go. We can see our own sin, our own
failures, our own brokenness and, like the Psalmist, confess that our “sin is
ever before” us (Psalm 51:3). The Good News is that Jesus sees beyond our
sins and sees that we are children of God.
He sees that we, too, can become saints.
He may not find you in the sycamore tree, but He finds you wherever you
are and just as you are. He can find you
where you are right now.
But
even that is not the end of the story.
The key to realizing our identity as children of God comes, not because
of what we do, but because of what God through Jesus Christ has done. In a very real way, we can celebrate “All
Saints’ Sunday” not because of the towering achievements of holy women or holy
men; rather, we celebrate the transforming work of the Resurrected Christ in
the lives of ordinary women and ordinary men.
Because we have seen the work of Christ in their lives, we too can live
in the hope that Christ can transform our lives. We celebrate this hope every time we
celebrate Holy Communion, as we look forward to the day that Christ comes in
final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet.
It
is our custom on All Saints’ Sunday to take a few moments to remember the
saints in our lives. We do not remember
them just because we love them or just because we miss them. We do not remember them in order to gloss
over their human frailties and make them more perfect than they were. We remember them, instead, as a powerful
testimony of the power of the Resurrected Christ to change lives. Just as He did it for them, He can do it for
us today.
Where do you find a saint? Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. Look in the mirror. Jesus may not find you in a sycamore tree, but he is calling to you now, right where you are. All
of us are called to become saints! May it be
so, today!
Copyright
© 2013 by Thomas E. Frost. All rights
reserved.
[1] Preached at Cunningham
United Methodist Church on November 3, 2013 (All Saints’ Sunday).
[2] See M. Eugene Boring &
Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New
Testament Commentary (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) 240 (re: Luke
15:20) and 253 (re: Luke 19:5).
[3] See M. Eugene Boring &
Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New
Testament Commentary (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) 254 (re: Luke
19:8).
[4] Michael J. Gorman, “Saint”
in Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, gen. ed., The
New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 5 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), 41.
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