If you are short, the taller people will stand in front of you. First come, first served, I guess, or maybe the taller people actively shove their way to the front of the crowd. What’s clear—rule number one—is that no one will volunteer to let you stand in front, even if they would still be able to see right over your head.
Rule number two: never ask for help. If you are too short to see, don’t acknowledge that. Just sneak up a tree. Of course you are shockingly visible once you climb that tree. You will stand out like a sore thumb. You’ll be hidden in plain sight, over-compensating for what you can’t acknowledge, and everyone will know what you are doing. But no one will talk about it, because that conversation will expose them as much as it exposes you. You will bear not only the pain of exclusion but the pain of being a visible sign of the community’s rejection of you. Which no one wants to face. Not you, not them.
The third rule is that it’s ok to gawk at Jesus but you should never engage him directly. Don’t follow him. Just watch as he goes by. Don’t look around the crowd, either, or you’ll see the people who climb trees because no one will help them see. Jesus might want you to do something about that. Resist that inclination. It would require you to break ranks with the tall people and expose yourself to the same kind of stigma as the man in the tree. That’s too awkward.
Another rule: whatever you have done wrong in this community will stay with you forever. If you are a tax collector who is in the process of undergoing conversion, there will be no encouragement provided. On the contrary, each new stage of your relationship with Jesus will be met with gossip and frank disbelief. Who do you think you are?
We are up to rule five, now. If you are Jesus himself and you move among the people to heal and reconcile, you will be rejected outright for associating with people who need healing and reconciliation. Who does he think he is?
Rule six is that Jesus too must be hidden in plain sight. He is a big spectacle, but he should be kept at arm’s length. Whatever disturbance he creates in the crowd, the crowd needs to get ahead of him and neutralize him somehow. If you wonder why he is going to eat dinner in the home of an outcast, for example, just act as though you know it’s a sign of weakness on his part. Always have a cynical explanation for the actions of God, especially in the life of someone else.
Rule without a number: this community will never help you see Jesus. Spend any time at all in this crowd and you will know that. You can’t get close to Jesus playing by these rules. You can’t get there from here.
But look, that’s the exact rule that Jesus breaks, that rule behind all the rules. There is Zacchaeus up in the tree, and Jesus sees him. Jesus speaks his name. It turns out that the tax collector doesn’t have to get to Jesus or prop himself up to see Jesus. He doesn’t have to climb a tree. Jesus sees him. Jesus is coming to him. Jesus is the hungry one, the one in need of hospitality.
And Zacchaeus, the one perched awkwardly on the edge of the community, is going to become the host.
Let’s think about the gathering Zacchaeus hosts in this story, at the instigation of Jesus. You exist in that group, people look at you and listen to you while you sit together and share food. Zacchaeus tells the story of his own transformation in that room. He talks about how he was a cheater, and about how he held back money he knew others needed. We are way past worrying about being short, here. Zacchaeus breaks the rules energetically, just like Jesus did.
Sharing food at this dinner party, and sharing stories of encounters with God—look, that’s what we do here at our best. We gather for word and sacrament, set free because Jesus told us he just had to be with us. Somehow, out of that ugly crowd, Jesus makes the church.
There isn’t a one of us who understands how Jesus works. We have no advantage over the crowd that shunned Zacchaeus, except that through his own urgency Jesus has seen us and let us know that he needs us to host a different kind of gathering. He has seen us up in our perches on the margins, overcompensating for what we can’t admit. I think he has been watching the news in this election cycle. He has seen our contortions and our scheming. He knows that when he calls to Zacchaeus he is reaching everyone in that crowd, everyone pretending there is no problem. All of us who reject others because of our own shame and fear. All of us. All of us staring at Jesus from a distance. All of us hungry.
Inexplicably, Jesus looks at that stifling, anxious crowd and just has to have dinner with them. “Hurry down,” he tells Zacchaeus, “I’ve got to come to your house.” I’d want to get as far from those people as I possibly could. Wouldn’t you?
Are you new here today? Is this your first time in church in a long while, or ever? Are you tuning in online? Do you have questions about who we are? Because I think I can promise you: we’re lost. All we know is that somehow Jesus wants to gather us together as the lost ones. He wants to honor us with his presence. We are just the ones he wants to host.
Mostly, we are less dramatic than Zacchaeus, less visible as lost and less public about being found. We don’t change all in one day. We go back and forth, sometimes staring at Jesus from a distance and sometimes sitting joyfully with him in word and sacrament. Sometimes we crowd you out. Sometimes we are just too busy contorting ourselves, climbing way out on a limb in the futile hope that no one will notice our pain.
But somehow Jesus breaks the rules that distort our community, breaks them joyfully and turns us around. Somehow we, hapless and in the throes of a true global crisis, are finding in Jesus the reason to do it differently. Don’t believe that we are different? Join us any Saturday morning for hospitality with our hungry neighbors. We don’t understand fully, but we feel it: Jesus is among the hungry and he has given us bread to share.
Join us at 9:30 any Saturday for the Sacrament of Confession, in which we joyfully recite our sins and ask for the courage to change. Join us next Sunday, where, improbably, in an event we call “Commitment Sunday,” we celebrate giving our money away. We don’t understand it but we feel it: Jesus is among us and he has made it possible for us to let go.
We don’t stop being lost all in one day. We don’t forget the rules of the world we live in just like that. But day after day, week after week, Jesus tells us that he longs for us to host that cosmic banquet in which the bread of life gets shared and the word of God gets spoken. He wants that bread to be in our hands, held out to others. He wants that word to be spoken on our lips. We want that too, more than anything.
It may not be easy for us, but I promise you, bit by bit, person by person, timidly and boldly, we are climbing down from our trees. If you are here, you are climbing down. And we say to you, with Jesus, “Hurry.”
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
October 20, 2022
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia