The Transformation at the Table--August 27, 2024

 

The Transformation at the Table--August 27, 2024

"Zacchaeus 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.' Then Jesus said to him, 'Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a soon of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and save the lost'." [Luke 19:8-10]

Imagine you get a call from your neighbors one evening wanting to know if the rumors they have heard are true: the gossip around town is that your adult son has gotten swayed by some new religious teacher, vowed to give away fifty percent of everything he's got in the bank, as well as selling his property and giving half of the closing price away to a bunch of poor nobodies, and on top of that, he's now admitting he got rich cheating on taxes and is going to pay restitution to the people he bilked to the tune of four times over what he owes each of them.

What would you say if that had happened to your kid? What would you say if someone you loved dearly started doing such crazy-sounding things as giving away half of their possessions to strangers and started talking about paying reparations to the people they had taken advantage of? My hunch? You'd wonder if they had gotten taken in by a cult, or been radicalized in some cause that your neighbors wouldn't approve of.

Jesus, on the other hand, says, "Today, salvation has come to this house."

This, after all, is what Zacchaeus' story is all about, isn't it? Sometimes we don't get any further in our recollection than the children's song about this story--you know it, go ahead and sing it with me: "Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he! He climbed up in the sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see!" But the end of the story--the transformation at the table--is where the whole thing is headed. Jesus invites himself over to Zacchaeus' house, presumably for dinner, despite the fact that everybody knows that Zacchaeus is one of those dirty, wicked, crooked, sell-outs to the empire who collected taxes for the Romans. And when Zacchaeus comes face to face with a love that accepts him as he is--and which has made no demands or placed no conditions on him--Zacchaeus is changed. And he knows what needs to be rearranged in his life: the thing that had him in a stranglehold (his money) needed to be cut away from around his neck. He promises--again, without Jesus having told him he "had to" in order to get into heaven or anything--to give away half his possessions to the poor and to make reparations to those he has defrauded as a tax collector, by paying them back four times what he had gotten away with. And Jesus holds this up to all the scowling Respectable Religious people and says, "See? This is what salvation looks like! Love has set him free from what was killing him--he was lost and now is found! He was dead--and now he is fully alive again!"

But again, it's worth asking: how willing are we to let Jesus loose in our lives this way--or in the lives of our children--if he's going to have this kind of effect on us all? How willing are we to let Jesus, you know, radicalize us, if it means we might be forced to reconsider what we are living for... what we use our resources for... how we have gotten our money... and what we do with our lives? Or would we keep our children away from such a dangerous teacher and his dangerous teaching that might make them call into question the endless quest for more money and bigger houses? Would we let our children be exposed to the teaching and love of Jesus if we knew he might keep them from growing up to be good little consumers who help the economy grow with their endless consumption? Are we prepared to let Jesus so completely rearrange our priorities that we value repairing relations with people we have exploited, whether directly or indirectly, over keeping our piles of money? In other words, are we willing to let ourselves and those we love be radicalized by Jesus?

See, I think we often get the Christian faith backward on this point. I think we often start with our own personal wish lists--the dream job, the new romance, the bigger paycheck, the nicer vehicle, and such--and then we assume that Jesus' job is to get us those things. We pray, we sing, we give to our churches, we put the fish sticker on our bumper. All that. Maybe we even promise to vote for the candidates the talking heads on TV and memes on social media tell us are the candidates that supposedly "true Christians" vote for, all in order to get Jesus to bring us all the things on our personal wish lists. In other words, we want to use our faith as a means to an end: as an investment, a transaction, or a tit-for-tat deal, where we do something for God and then God endorses our laundry list of demands without question. We stay unchanged, and God gives us what we want in exchange for our shows of piety. If that isn't popular religion, I'll eat my hat.

But Zacchaeus' story reminds us that to have Jesus come barging into our lives (often unannounced and even uninvited) will change us. For the better, ultimately, for sure--but sometimes it means both we and our wish-lists are changed in the end. Sometimes it will mean a whole new self emerges--a reinvention of who we are, in light of how Love grabs hold of us. Sometimes it means Jesus gets down to the root (Latin "radix"--which is where our word "radical" comes from, just as a reminder) of us and starts all over with us, replacing the old, rotten transactional thinking and the self-centered Me-and-My-Group-First garbage in our hearts with grace. But we shouldn't be surprised if it changes us to take our faith in Jesus seriously. We shouldn't be surprised if Jesus' grip on our lives both sets us free from the things that were choking the life out of us and also leads us to dramatically revise our priorities in life. And we shouldn't be surprised if, like Zacchaeus, we find ourselves somehow more alive because of the encounter even if it also means leaving behind and giving away the things we used to live for.

Just be prepared if some of the folks in your life start to squirm because all of a sudden you start questioning what was worth building your life on.

So, fair warning today: Jesus reserves the right to walk right into your life today, bidden or unbidden, show up at your table, and shake up everything you thought was settled in your life with his unconditional, prevenient love, and then reorient you in that love toward other people, too. Even if it makes the Respectable Religious folk in our lives clutch their pearls over it, may we be so radicalized by Jesus.

Lord Jesus, make us your new creations today, and let your love work its transforming power in each of us, even if it challenges and changes us today.