Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 19 verses 1 through 10:
He entered Jericho and was passing through it. 2A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax-collector and was rich. 3He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. 4So he ran ahead and climbed a sycomore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. 5When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’ 6So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. 7All who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.’ 8Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.’ 9Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. 10For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.’
Jesus truly saw no one as beyond God’s salvation. That was welcome news for the blind, the lame, the leper, and all the poor peasants who became his followers. But when Jesus opened his arms to the tax collector also he drew suspicion and criticism and stirred up a great deal of hostility amongst that throng of followers. It was the first hint that the great crowd which surrounded him would soon turn its cheers to jeers.
I came to understand just how vilely hated a tax collector like Zacchaeus was when I once heard the confession of a friend and dying Vietnam War veteran. As he sat dying of cancer, with just a few weeks to live, he shared with me an experience he had in war that still deeply troubled him. He and some other American and South Vietnamese soldiers had been in a small South Vietnamese community when a group of armed men pushed another man into the center of the village. The people surrounded the man, spit at and hit and in other ways brutalized him. After 10 minutes or so they then executed him in front of the whole village. The men in the village cheered. So did the South Vietnamese soldiers. The American GI’s did nothing to intervene. They simply stood and watched while smoking cigarettes.
My friend told me that the executed man was a North Vietnamese operative. He would often come into the village and demand money in exchange for not raping and pillaging and burning it. He was an extortionist in the first degree. The people hated him. They wanted him died. He had made the mistake of showing up when the American soldiers were present. This had been his last mistake.
And the real kicker for me in the story was what the people called him. My friend said they called the man a “tax collector”.
There’s the children’s song about Zacchaeus being a “wee little man, a wee little man was he”. But that’s not what I think of when I read this story. I don’t think of children at all. I think of grown men brutalizing one another. I don’t think of a wee little man; I think of a dead man.
And, I think of how appalling it must have been to the villagers in Jericho to hear Jesus say that the tax collector was a son of Abraham also.
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