Yesterday, I read a Richard Rohr “Daily Meditation” that had a devotional thought by Diana Butler Ross, who gave a reflection on the story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1 – 10). She observed that if Zacchaeus had invited Jesus to his house, then a tax collector would have been honoring Jesus. Instead, Jesus turned customs upside down and honored Zacchaeus when he invited himself to abide/remain in Zacchaeus’s house. Of course, even associating himself with Zacchaeus caused the crowd to complain (see Lk 5:30; 15:2). What struck me, though, was some of the repeated words/threads in this episode, particularly in Jesus’ words.
Here are the threads: First, Zacchaeus was “seeking” (zateo) to see Jesus. That seems innocuous enough, except that “seeking” God is a loaded theological motif in the OT and, for example, in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Then Jesus told Zacchaeus to come down quickly, because: “today (sameron) it is necessary (dei) for me to abide in your house (oikos).” What exactly was Jesus saying? Dei can be used with a range of nuances for urgency, necessity, internal or external compulsion, appropriateness, etc. We know that Zacchaeus became a changed man, but what was Jesus’ compulsion? The episode ends with Jesus repeating some of these terms, saying, “Today (sameron) salvation has come to this house (oikos), since he too is son of Abraham, because the Son of Man came to seek (zateo) and to save the one perishing.”
Pulling the threads together: “Today” (sameron) may be used in a general way, but there are places in Luke where it has theological weight (2:11; 4:21; 5:26; maybe 13:32 – 33: 23:43). For example, the angels announce to the shepherds, “Today (sameron) a Savior has been born” (2:11); and, when Jesus inaugurated his preaching ministry, he read from a messianic text in Isaiah (61:1 – 2) and said, “Today (sameron) this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21). The significance of “today” in these texts and Luke 19:5 and 9 is that it is eschatological (about the end time): the end of time has irrupted into the present time. That is to say, the future era of God’s salvation engulfs the present time in the Person of Jesus. As a result, the Zacchaeus story illustrates salvation history. Jesus has come with the “compulsion”/mission to bring future salvation into a present reality in the lives of people as he did in the radical, life-changing experience of Zacchaeus.
Back to Zacchaeus: Zacchaeus was a despised tax collector, and that is a key part of the story. In this very social-stratified, honor-shame culture, Jesus gave equal offense to everyone; that is, Jesus associated himself not just with a tax collector, but with every people group that some other group detested. It seems to me that this, too, is what it means to live in the eschatological age today – to cross all dividing lines as Jesus did.
Lord, help me, like Zacchaeus, to seek to see you so that today, and each and every day, I might participate in your time-collapsing salvation and live today as in the age to come; and help me, like Jesus, that I might be willing to cross all human barriers to reach out to others. Amen.
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