Assuming sin or assuming justice?

 Sermon for Pentecost XXI,2022, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Text: Luke 19:1-10

This morning, we find ourselves in Jericho with Jesus. Jericho is mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible, starting with Moses. The area across the Jordan river from Jericho, called Moab, was where Moses and the nation of Israel camped as they were led by God in conquering the area. Later, Joshua circled the walled city of Jericho for 6 days with his army, and on the 7th, blew horns that made the walls fall down. The people of Jericho were killed by Joshua’s army, except for the prostitute Rahab, because she had helped Joshua’s spies hide in the city when they first discovered it. Joshua then spoke an oath that anyone who tried to rebuild Jericho would be cursed. After Joshua’s curse, Elijah is taken up in a whirlwind before Elisha’s eyes, near Jericho, presumably having been rebuilt. Clearly, it is an important place in the Hebrew bible, and not having the best reputation. Yet here was Jesus, in Jericho, calling one of its residents out of a tree and volunteering him to host Jesus for dinner. The people hearing this complain that Jesus is eating with a sinner, who is not just a tax collector, but the chief tax collector from Jericho. And despite his loathed job and position, Zacchaeus tells Jesus over dinner that he will make restitution for those whom he has defrauded. It seems that Zacchaeus stood before the Son of God and repented, and received a blessing of sorts when Jesus proclaims that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house.

When we hear this story in Luke’s Gospel, we tend to side with the complaining crowd and see Zacchaeus as they do, a sinner, but we also see him through Jesus’ eyes as a repentant sinner. In reality, though, do we fully accept his confession and promise of restitution? After all, he is from Jericho, which could stand in for that part of town, where those people live, the ones who commit crimes and live immoral lives. Like the crowd complaining about Jesus, we have made assumptions about immoral people, and the criminals who we know and who we think we know about.

But what do we really know?

In the NRSV and the NIV English versions of the gospel reading, Zacchaeus says that he will pay back those he’s defrauded, that he will give half of his possessions to the poor. However, if we go to the ancient Greek that Luke wrote his gospel in, Zacchaeus says he is paying back those he has defrauded, and he is giving away half of his possessions. In Luke’s version using the present tense, Jesus hears something different than we do in our own time and language, making his proclamation of salvation different. Instead of proclaiming salvation because of what Zacchaeus promises to do, he proclaims that salvation has already come to Zacchaeus and his house because of what he is already doing. In the middle of a notorious city, Jesus finds a righteous person who was assumed to be a sinner, someone for whom the kingdom of God has already come near. It exposes the crowd's link of Zacchaeus’ job with his morality and righteousness, and it exposes our assumptions, based on this one reading. The crowd couldn’t see past the fact that he was a tax collector, and we are misled by an erroneous translation. There is much more to know about Zacchaeus than is apparent at a first glance, but too often we decide who he is, or who others are based on that first impression, that first reading. Rahab wouldn’t have survived the destruction of Jericho had she been known only as a prostitute, but she too was saved because Joshua’s spies took the time to learn about her as much more than what her reputation suggested.

The idea of getting to know someone beyond their job or history reminds me of Mike, who worked part time at a music store with me years ago. Mike was gregarious, full of stories surrounding his life, which most recently included prison time for armed robbery. He made the people around him very aware of his efforts to make amends for his felony conviction. He talked to high schoolers about the straight and narrow path, he was taking classes at law school, and he was applying for a pardon from the governor. But all through this time, he was buying, storing, and selling guns, which was illegal on its own and illegal because he was a felon. A couple of years after I left the music store job, I saw in the local paper that he had been arrested and sent back to prison. Now, I don’t know how much of what he said was true, or how much were manipulative lies, or how much of it was what he desperately wanted to believe was true.

And then there is Robert Lee Wood, arrested in Florida in late August of this year for voter fraud. He was convicted of murder in 1991 and served time in prison. A recently passed Florida state law prevents him from voting, but he was told by someone in a government office that he could register to vote. His arrest was part of Florida’s Governor De Santis' push to root out voter fraud in the state. De Santis has been criticized for politicizing voter fraud, placing people like Robert Wood in the middle of a political struggle that they have no say in and no power to remove themselves from it. I mention these two people not to demonstrate that you can’t trust someone who has done wrong, or that they should get a second chance. My point is that like Zacchaeus, they are complex people, in complicated situations, living convoluted lives. We think of justice as righting wrongs, punishing the people who do wrong and break laws. But in the case of Zacchaeus and at least Robert Wood, justice comes from looking beyond our first impressions and assumptions to the heart of people, to their intent, to the presence of the Holy Spirit within them. The people grumbling at Jesus for eating with a sinner wanted justice for what they thought Zacchaeus did wrong, when Jesus was saying that for Zacchaeus, there was salvation for him without regard for his job. The priority is on salvation by God’s grace, not by what was or wasn’t done.

Where does that leave us?

We want to be correct when it comes to understanding who is right, who is wrong, who is righteous, and who needs to be held accountable. And that is a good and necessary thing. But the more we push for clear lines between those categories, the more anxious we get about where we stand, and the less tolerant we get toward the gray areas of real life complexity and legitimate complications. We don’t always want to see the sinner reconciled to God, especially when we are not confident or recognized in our efforts to be righteous and avoid temptation. So long as we attempt to define salvation and justice on our terms, rather than accepting God’s terms through faith, we will never be satisfied. We have to be able to accept Zacchaeus’ good deeds on their own merit and balance them against his job, which means accepting that life is messier and more complex than we want to admit. Otherwise, the mercy and compassion we have for those clear-cut cases, the mercy and compassion for those people we just know are righteous, are hidden by suspicion and bigotry as we serve our own purposes and our own needs. Maybe we can see how Zacchaeus is righteous despite his line of work, but can we see that Robert Wood and people like him are also deserving of justice? Maybe even to vote? It brings to my mind the question of where can we find God’s justice in the world?