Sermon — October 30, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
I have some good news for you and some bad news for you. Which one do you want first?
Well actually, it’s not up to you. The order has been predetermined. Because if last week’s sermon could’ve been titled “Some Good News for Tax Collectors,” this week is the bad news. Last week, if you weren’t here or you need a refresher, Jesus told a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector, standing in the Temple, praying, and how the Pharisee—a good, upstanding, righteous person—was praying, “Thank God I am not like other people… certainly not like that tax collector!” And the tax collector—the “Sherriff of Nottingham” character in the story, the one whose whole job it was to shake down his own people and ship their money off to Rome—simply prayed “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” and it was he who went home justified, not the other. The moral of the story being that it is better in God’s eyes to recognize our own imperfection than to try to justify ourselves through comparison with another person. And that’s good news for the tax collector: However unsympathetic or unethical a person may be, as soon as they turn and ask God’s forgiveness, they will find that God has already forgiven them.
But Jesus cuts the story short. We’re left wondering about what happens next. After the tax collector’s prayer in the Temple, does he resume his regularly-scheduled program of economic exploitation? Does he apologize for harming his neighbors, and then go back the next day to harming them? To put it in theological language: Has he simply “been justified,” been reckoned as righteous before God, been forgiven without being transformed? Or is he being “sanctified”? Is his actual life changing to become more holy over time?
Jesus didn’t answer those questions in last week’s story. He left us with the good news for tax collectors, with the idea that we are never too far gone for God’s forgiveness.
But this week comes the bad news for tax collectors. Or at least for Zacchaeus.
Luke describes Zacchaeus not merely as a tax collector but as the “chief tax collector,” in other translations the “chief toll collector.” (Luke 19:2) This was not like being a low-level bureaucrat. In fact, it wasn’t like being a high-level bureaucrat. “Chief tax collector” wasn’t a job promotion, or an honor bestowed on a distinguished civil servant. It was a privilege he paid for.
The Roman Empire operated its system of taxes and tolls like a modern franchise system. If you were rich enough, you could purchase the right to collect tolls on behalf of the emperor in a certain area. In exchange, you were responsible for sending along a certain amount of money every year. It doesn’t take an MBA to see how this would led to corruption. The chief toll collector had every possible incentive to overcharge, to squeeze as much money as he could out of his area, because anything over and above what he owed Rome was pure profit.
If this sounds like a terrible way to run a country, it turns out it was. And if you think it sounds like theft, it turns out Zacchaeus thought so too, and he said as much to Jesus. It’s a comic scene: Zacchaeus, this wealthy and prominent man, clambering up into a tree to see Jesus. But you can understand the urgency: Zacchaeus has a choice to make. If this Jesus of Nazareth is just another would-be Messiah, another pretender to the throne, then Zacchaeus has nothing to worry about.
But if he’s the real deal, if he’s the Messiah, as they say, then Zacchaeus had better act fast. Because God’s chosen king is coming to clean house, and it’s a much better idea to be remembered as one of his earliest supporters than to be branded as a collaborator.
And so when Jesus stands at the foot of the tree and calls up to him, “Zacchaeus, come down. I’m coming for dinner,” Zacchaeus acts quickly and decisively. He doesn’t stop where the tax collector did last Sunday, with the simple prayer, “God, be merciful to me!” He goes further: “Look, half 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.” (Luke 19:8)
“Four times as much” is a telling phrase. It doesn’t just mean “I’ll pay a big fine.” It’s something more specific than that. If you turn in your Bible to the “Book of Torts,” which is to say Exodus 22, you’ll find a meticulously-detailed set of penalties for damaging someone else’s penalty. What happens if I dig a well, and don’t cover it, and your ox falls in? What do I owe you if my ox gores your ox? And what if my ox had done this before? (This, by the way, is where most people who set out to read the Bible cover to cover run out of steam.)
And then in the next verse, what happens if I steal your ox or your sheep and I slaughter it, and eat it, or sell it on to someone else? I owe you five oxen for a stolen ox; four sheep for a stolen sheep. I don’t just owe you one sheep back, to return your wealth to the status quo. No, I’ve harmed you, and I owe you one sheep to replace the one I stole, and three more sheep, to make reparations for that wrong.
So in promising to repay those whom he’s defrauded fourfold, Zacchaeus not only admits his theft, he recognizes that he knew it was theft, and that he knew the proper penalty for that theft. But he doesn’t only recognize and admit that he has done something wrong. He offers the appropriate repayment that’s prescribed to repair those relationships.
Now, you can apply this to a whole range of wrongs in life. This is probably an incredibly satisfying story to anyone who’s ever heard the words, “Well, I’ve already apologized? Isn’t that enough?” No. As a matter of fact. It’s not. When you have wronged someone, it’s one thing to apologize and to be forgiven for what you’ve done. But it takes much more to be reconciled, to really repair things so you can once again be in right relationship with someone. Apologies aren’t enough. Returning what was stolen isn’t enough. Repairing the relationship takes something more.
This Gospel reading comes at a fascinating time in the life of our church. I spent most of yesterday at our annual Diocesan Convention, where, among the many other important but not always interesting acts of a church convention, we voted to begin establishing an $11 million reparations “as a part”—and here I quote from the resolution—”as a part of our effort to address our legacy of the wealth accumulated through the enslaved labor of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans on our behalf.”
It’s easy for us in Massachusetts to look at the question of reparations for slavery and see ourselves as “the good guys.” Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts well before this parish was founded. Boston was a center of abolitionist thinking and activism. But what our diocese and many of our parishes have found in their own historical research is more complicated. Many early Boston Episcopalians were among the leaders of the trans-Atlantic merchant class, and while they may not have “owned” enslaved people, they profited from their labor. More than a few Boston merchants made their fortunes from slavery well after it had been abolished in our Commonwealth: building or owning the ships that trafficked kidnapped West Africans to the Americas, processing the molasses and rum made with slave-grown sugar cane, starting the American industrial revolution by building factories to convert cotton grown in the South by enslaved people into cheap textiles. Many of these men, it turns out, were pious and devoted supporters of the church, and they gave great sums of money to our diocese and our parishes; money extracted, in part, by practices infinitely more brutal and more inhumane than anything Zacchaeus could imagine. And this is what’s so interesting about this situation: None of my family lived in this country until decades after slavery had been abolished. That’s probably true for many of you, as well. But due to the miracle of compounding interest and sound financial practices, we are all still benefiting from the money they gave long before we were alive.
And now, like Zacchaeus did, we owe it back.
I’m telling you this in part just by way of information, so you know about important conversations in our church. I should add that the reparations plan actually won’t affect our budget as a parish. As parishes and individuals, we’ll be invited to make our own contributions to the fund, but certainly not required. It’s actually a pretty well-structured plan, I think: the diocese is taking a chunk of its own endowment to seed the fund, then allocating some of its annual endowment draw and a portion of parish assessments every year to go into it, without raising those assessments, so that each parish will be supporting the fund without actually paying hurting our own budgets. (It will mean a somewhat significant cut to our diocese’s operating budget, instead.) And if anyone has any questions about how this all will work or any concerns or opinions, feel free to talk to me about them at Coffee Hour.
But I also want to celebrate this Biblical model of reparations to restore broken relationships as good news in and of itself. I joked that this was a good news/bad news situation for tax collectors, and sure, Zacchaeus is going to lose half his stuff, which is a bummer. But there’s good news here for all of us. It’s so easy to feel powerless in this world, as if we’re just stuck up in a sycamore tree watching things fall apart. It’s so easy to feel like our problems are intractable, like there’s nothing you or I can do to make things right, whether that’s in a difficult relationship or a violent world, in the face of our own failings the ways in which we’ve benefited from what our confession calls “the evils done on our behalf.” And it’s easy to feel unforgiveable in our culture, as if we can never recover from a mistake, let alone from intentional wrongdoing. But the good news of Zacchaeus is that you always have the choice to turn and change. And there are actual, tangible, concrete ways to help make things right.
As long as we decide to get down out of that tree and follow where Jesus leads.