Simplicity in Identity: Luke 19:1-10
Ordinary Time
Jesus entered Jericho
and was passing through town. 2 A
man there named Zacchaeus, a ruler among tax collectors, was rich. 3 He was trying to see who Jesus was, but,
being a short man, he couldn’t because of the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed up a sycamore
tree so he could see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. 5 When Jesus came to that spot, he looked up
and said, “Zacchaeus, come down at once. I must
stay in your home today.” 6 So
Zacchaeus came down at once, happy to welcome Jesus.
7 Everyone who saw this grumbled, saying, “He has gone to
be the guest of a sinner.”
8 Zacchaeus stopped and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I
give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated anyone, I repay
them four times as much.”
9 Jesus said to him, “Today, salvation has come to this household because he
too is a son of Abraham. 10 The Human One came to seek and save the lost.” (CEB)
One of
my favorite films when I was a kid was the 1973 Walt Disney animated feature Robin
Hood. I didn’t need to know who Roger
Miller was to know that I fell in love with the kind and clever fox who cared
about the common folk and was frustrated by the greedy Prince John. If you haven’t seen the film, I highly
recommend it.
While
the historical figures who inspired Robin Hood are a lot more complicated, the
film is very much a Disney binary: Robin
Hood is good, and the sniveling Prince John is bad. In fact, he is truly a cowardly lion aided
and abetted by Sir Hiss, a snake in a hat and coat that is forever hilarious in
the reality that snakes don’t have shoulders.
Part of why Prince John is bad, the film tells us, is that he keeps
trying to catch and imprison Robin Hood—Robin Hood, who only wants to have
parties in the forest and make sure the rabbit family has enough to eat. The various cronies and guards of Prince John
speak of Robin Hood as someone treacherous, dangerous, and awful; the audience,
of course, knows that all those adjectives really apply to John and his ilk. It is a battle of who Robin Hood is, and the
intermittent songs of Alan a Dale give us guidelines about who we’re supposed
to believe about the identity descriptions being tossed about. Fortunately, when King Richard (a much more
regal lion) returns, there is lovely guitar music and a wedding to tell us that
the true identity of Robin Hood has won out and he and Maid Marion are free to
live happily ever after as the good foxes they are.
My
apologies. Spoiler alert, if you’ve not
seen the film.
We
continue our series on “Simplicity” this week by talking about simplifying not
only our stuff, as last week, but also our identities. It’s an apt topic the day before Halloween,
when costumes are celebrated and the idea of not knowing who someone is takes
on a festive rather than frightening air.
Whatever costume you are—or decidedly are not—planning to wear tomorrow,
you likely understand how to be slightly different versions of yourself in
different situations.
That’s not to say that you have fully different
identities, necessarily, and hopefully none of you are being hounded by the
terrible Prince John as an outlaw. But
we all do some form of tailoring of ourselves; the parts of us we bring forward
for a Friday night out with friends are probably not going to surface at Sunday
lunch with Great Aunt Catherine. It’s
good, to have variation; it’s less good to feel like we have to alter
ourselves in order to fit. Remembering
not to swear in front of one’s great aunt is a courtesy; having to pretend to
have a different job or a job at all is an imposition. Choosing to downplay a partner to avoid
teasing is one thing; having to hide one’s significant other for fear of backlash
is a cruelty. When altering pieces of
one’s persona is not a choice, it is no longer the same as being respectful of
relational boundaries.
This is a truth known by marginalized communities in
all sorts of ways: having to
fundamentally shift one’s mode of presentation or communication so as not to be
ostracized or endangered by a community is not an inconvenience but an
unhealthy imbalance. Being complex is
human; being forced to mask oneself for survival is injustice.
We discovered some of the difference during the
pandemic, when a lot of the lines between our voluntary personas blurred. Rightly so; when the world becomes mostly
confined to a box on a screen, it’s harder to remember why we needed all the
masks in the first place. Our energy turned
less to hiding our hobbies and more to hiding our sweatpants and we began
asking questions about who was really in charge of setting all the
expectations, anyway. It was good, and unexpected,
and healthy to look at the identities we held and realize we didn’t actually
need all of them. Now, however, as we try
to navigate a world irreversibly altered by the pandemic, a lot of us are
picking up masks again as though they’re anything other than painful.
The
gospel story this morning has, hopefully, gotten the Zaccheus song stuck in
your head as firmly as it’s been in mine.
This is a story of identities: Zaccheus, we are told, is a tax
collector—not only that but a ruler of tax collectors. He was rich, rich enough that Luke the
gospel writer wants to make sure we know it in a sentence that has little
bearing on anything else; a man in Jericho was wealthy. It looks like the cue to we who come to this
reading that this will be a story of Jesus’ transformation of this little guy while
everyone around them nods sagely about the corruption of money. After all, both the sermon of last week and
the texts right before this scene are about the dangers of having too much
attachment to one’s wealth. Easy peasy,
Zaccheus will be changed and we’ll all go home to eat Halloween candy with our
reminder that the love of money is the root of all evil.[1]
Except Luke’s
story doesn’t quite follow our expectations.
Zaccheus, set up to be an arrogant tax agent, wants so badly to see
Jesus that he runs ahead of the crowd and climbs a tree. I don’t know if any of you have tried
climbing a tree lately, but it is not a dignified affair no matter your
height. And a grown man sitting in a
tree looks ridiculous in any age, so Zaccheus—already on the outside of his
community owing to the distaste for his job, already aware of the ways his
identities are defined as unwelcome—sacrifices his propriety because that’s how
much he wants to see Jesus. Who else in Scripture do we see giving up the
identity of respectability because it’s not as important as connecting with the
Christ? The disciples; the poor; the
outcasts who become stars of the stories about how we are not called to judge. Zaccheus has been presented to us as the sheriff
of Nottingham but suddenly he looks a lot more like Little John. Even his name is a clue from Luke that things
are not what they seem: “Zaccheus” means “purity” or “righteousness.”[2]
Jesus
rewards Zaccheus’ courage by stopping at the tree and calling up, “Zaccheus,
come down at once. I must stay at your
home today.” The crowd, of course,
grumbles. They know who Zaccheus
is: a traitor, a swindler, a puppet of Rome.
Sarah Dylan Breuer notes that, “The crowd presumes that Zaccheas [sic] hoards his possessions and
not only cheats the people, but fails to pay the penalty, and so when Jesus
invites himself to Zaccheas' [sic] house, Jesus joins their set of THOSE
people, the sinners. But Zaccheas [sic]is not a cheat, nor does he hoard his wealth;
as he says, ‘I give half of my wealth to the poor, and if I find I have
defrauded anyone, I pay back four times as much.’ These are things he is
already doing, even before meeting Jesus. This chief tax collector, who
receives only disdain from his neighbors, is actually far more generous and
intentional about doing justice than is the respectable ruler of Luke 18:18-25.”[3]
It may not be the usual way we read
this story, but the verbs Zaccheus uses when he talks about the things he does
are all in present tense in the Greek. “The
Episcopal priest Elizabeth Kaeton notes the several ironies here. The
despicable Zacchaeus is the generous one. The traditional interpretation that
Zacchaeus is a sinner who's converted ‘tricks us into committing the very sin
that the story condemns. It presents Zacchaeus not as a righteous and generous
man who is wrongly scorned by his prejudiced neighbors, but as the story of a
penitent sinner.’
“’Turns out,’ says Kaeton…‘Jesus is
once again turning our world upside down, confronting us with our assumptions
about who is good and who is evil and demonstrating for us the tricks we play
in our minds before we treat one another — one way or another. Like the crowd
murmuring about Zacchaeus, it is easy to be blinded by our prejudice of ‘those
people’ and find ourselves accusing the very person or people we should be
emulating.’”[4]
“He, too, is a son of Abraham,” Jesus
says about this ruler of tax collectors, this person everyone thought they
knew. Jesus doesn’t care how many
different identities other people have given Zaccheus, or how sure they are
that he’s the bad guy here; Jesus cares about the identity God has given him,
the recognition that this man who scrambled up a tree is a beloved creation. Jesus tells the whole town to rethink who
Zaccheus is, and Luke tells us the same as we read. As ever, Jesus looks at the good-and-evil
binary we humans have created and says, “Let’s rethink this.”
In our Simplicity series, we’re
talking about what is needed and what we can shed. As we’ve returned to in-office jobs or retooled
what working from home looks like; as kids return to school and after school
activities; as our culture tries to force a “return to normal” as though what
we had before the lockdowns was anything normal, what identities have been
given to you? Do they fit? Are people telling you that you are one thing
when you know, in your heart of hearts, it is not true? Have people decided that you’re Bad Prince
John, or Good Robin Hood, without letting you be the wonderfully awful fullness
of you?
Have you been doing that to yourself?
It is so easy to take on the pressure
of others in fitting a role—a kind of “go along to get along” in the hectic
rush of a world revving back into motion after two years of comparative
stillness. It would have been easier for Zaccheus to accept that he was not
welcome, not good enough, but he insists to the Jesus for Whom he climbed a
tree that no, there is more than that, there is depth to this ruler of tax
collectors. We, the readers, don’t get
any more of the story; we don’t get to see what salvation in his house looks
like or whether the neighbors are suitably chastised for their
assumptions. The gospels rarely tie off
the narrative threads with a lovely guitar piece and the triumphant return of
King Richard, but that encourages us to take the story we have and see why it
might matter to us. Zaccheus, at the end
of the day, has a lot of identities: he is a man who climbs trees, a tax
collector, a rich person, a short person, a man who hosts a travelling rabbi, an
outcast, an oddity. But the one identity
that matters to Jesus is that he is a son of Abraham; he is one of God’s, and
everything else is subordinate to that.
As you go through the identities that
may be stacking up for you: rich, poor, successful, scraping by, family person,
single person, straight, queer, Scottish-American, African-American, DC fan,
Marvel fan, coffee lover, tea drinker, professor, accountant, quilter,
woodworker, Christian, questioning, whatever—hear this reminder that you, too,
are one of God’s. That’s where
everything else is anchored. That’s the
foundation of any other identity you hold, and the measure for all of
them. If you’re being asked to hold an
identity—by someone else or by you yourself—that contradicts you being a
beloved child of God, ditch the identity.
You do not need it, and it is not helping you.
Easier said than done, for sure, and
it takes time to tease out all the parts we play in the various stages of our
lives. So in the thirty days you’re
taking to sort through stuff, keep an eye on who you’re being asked to be and
start sorting through the identities you accept as definitions of you. Are they in line with being God’s? Great, keep them. Do they require you make yourself smaller,
lesser, unwelcome? Toss them like the
garbage they are.
And go listen to the Robin Hood
soundtrack while you’re sorting. It’s
good music.
May we remember who and Whose we are;
may we not ask others to be less than God’s beloved; and may we refrain from
thinking we know everything about a person from one piece of information. Amen.
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