Zacchaeus Sunday

(Luke 19:1-10)

Today is already the first of the preparatory Sundays leading us toward Great Lent. Today we read the Gospel account of Zacchaeus, a despised tax-collector, a man who came to get a glimpse of Jesus as He was passing by, but because of his short stature and the great crowd of people, he could not have a clear view. So Zacchaeus, in his zeal climbed into the branches of a sycamore tree in order to get a view of our Lord as He passed by. When Jesus came along this way, He made a point of stopping and looking up to Zacchaeus, calling out to him to “make haste and come down – for I desire to stay in your house this day”.

Many people began to grumble and judge, saying “He has gone to be a guest in the house of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus, fearing that Christ would indeed pass Him by because of this unworthiness, declared his efforts to do good, saying that he gave half his goods to the poor and strove always to make fair transactions in his business. Our Lord, in His kindness and mercy and in His single-minded sense of purpose, declared to Zacchaeus and to all, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham; for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

The Holy Church again, as always, brings to us the manifestation of the Holy Gospels into our own lives… for today we have the call to repentance, the promise of salvation, and the presentation of the means by which we must make our efforts toward repenting.

Just like Zacchaeus, our sins make us ‘short of stature’ spiritually. Our vision of God is often lost and obscured because we cannot see past the crowd and the hustle and bustle of the world and our daily concerns. We, like Zacchaeus, must take action and find the means to somehow climb above the tumult of the worldliness in which we live in order to gain perspective and get a glimpse of God. Just as Zacchaeus climbed the sycamore tree, we are invited to begin ascending the ladder of divine ascent as we approach the holy season of the Great Fast. We should pay particular attention to the Gospel readings over the course of the next several Sundays – for they are precisely arranged to put before us that ladder of repentance which leads us to God. We shall hear about the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, and the Final Judgement of all mankind. Each of these Gospel readings and pre-lenten Sundays begin to raise our sights up toward God.

So, this is the first step… we need to climb up above the clamor of the world and get some perspective from which we can begin to hope to see God.

Once we’ve raised ourselves above the worldliness of our lives, we then need to have the courage to ‘go out on a limb’ and step forward in faith. It is often the case that we hesitate to put our faith in God because we are bothered by doubts, by our overly-rational ways of thinking that demand proof before we invest ourselves in something. It is a mistake to subject our Creator and our spiritual progress and obedience to the selfish will of our limited understanding. If we wait for the day when we have it all figured out, we shall wait an eternity!

We must indeed take the risk of reaching out to God in faith… however, I think that if we open our eyes and look at things with honesty and simplicity, we don’t need to go forward in a purely blind faith. Look around the walls of the Church – there you will see the icons of those men and women who we recognize and celebrate as God’s saints. These holy men and women testify to the truth of Christianity by virtue of the sanctity of their lives. It doesn’t take long to study the lives of these holy ones to see the thread of God’s grace working in their lives, and, quite often, in their martyric deaths. If it’s proof we’re looking for, we’ve got the results of the experience of faith in the lives of the saints – a clear testimony to the results of faith and the workings of God in the lives of human beings. Faith also has a way of building upon itself… if we dare to be like Zacchaeus and take the step out onto that branch of faith, we begin to experience the presence and working of God in our lives more and more- faith building upon faith. We need to have that simple-hearted, guileless trust that, if we put our trust and faith in God, He will take care of us. As the Gospel tells us, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all things will be added unto you.”

So we have climbed the tree and have inched out onto the limb - raising ourselves up and daring to step forward in faith… now what? What happened next for Zacchaeus?... Our Lord passed by, saw Zacchaeus efforts to reach Him, and called him down so that He might come to his house. 

In order to greet Christ and bring Him into his home, Zacchaeus needed to come down from his perch, get his feet on the ground, and bring Christ into his house where he then served Him. This is a spiritual truth for all of us… it is of extreme importance for us to climb up and gain that spiritual perspective, to venture out onto the seemingly fragile limbs of faith, and then we must be ready to be humble and grounded – ready to serve the Lord as he calls us to serve Him.

If we pay attention and prepare ourselves appropriately through these coming weeks that call us to raise ourselves up above the confusion and preoccupations of the world and lead us to repentance and exercising our faith in God, we then will come to the beginning of the Great Fast itself with the Sunday of Forgiveness, in which Jesus comes by and calls us to make haste and come down - calling us to humble ourselves before Him and before each other. And what is the fruit of that humility, that sense of contrition and broken-heartedness? Salvation shall come to the house of our soul! For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost!

Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us make every effort to pull ourselves up above the distractions and obstructions of this world to gain perspective and a clearer view of God. Let us take the risk of faith and pay attention to and follow the guidance of the Holy Church as She leads us along the path of repentance in our preparation for the Great Fast – that season of renewal and ‘spiritual spring cleaning’ leading us to the glory of Christ’s resurrection – our salvation and the Kingdom of Heaven.