Room at the Banquet

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.

Zacchaeus, we read, was trying to see who Jesus was, but he’s a bit vertically challenged, and he can’t see past the crowd. Can’t help but hear this story this morning overlaid with the horrific scenes from South Korea of people crushed in the crowd by fellow Halloween goers. Our prayers go out to them, and we’re reminded of the real danger of a crowd. 

How often is it the people gathered around Jesus, Christians, that prevent us from seeing who Jesus is! Judgment, hypocrisy and self-righteousness can all block the view or worse.  Zacchaeus, as a tax collector, would not have been popular. Worse, he was a rich tax collector: a shill for the Roman empire who pads his living by cheating his fellow Jews under the threat of violent retaliation by the occupying powers. Zacchaeus’s work would certainly have scored him dirty glances from the crowd who knew he took advantage. Chief tax collector was one of those professions of which it could be said: “Well, it’s not honest, but it’s much.” 

Yet there is an honestness to Zacchaeus, a rawness to him: he wants to see Jesus. Where does this desire come from? It’s sincere and urgent: he wants to see who Jesus is. Zacchaeus in his earnestness, his searching, finds his way to a place where he can see despite the crowd. He climbs up a tree, hoping to catch a glimpse. He takes a risk, goes out on a limb for a vantage point. When Jesus passes by the place where he was, he stops and looks up at him. It’s a cinematic moment, a lesson in perspective: Zacchaeus looks down into Jesus’s foreshortened face framed by sycamore leaves, deep eyes improbably trained back to meet his gaze. I didn’t think he would see me here. Jesus looks up at Zacchaeus, perched as he is among the branches, tunic surely flapping in the wind in all his glory. He is utterly exposed! Exactly as he is, no pretending or posturing.

The good shepherd leaves the flock to go after the lost sheep because the shepherd loves the sheep, and here Jesus comes for Zacchaeus and sees him just as he is, an earnest swindler. Jesus looks up at him and loves him. Zacchaeus is known, and precious, not merely one among a faceless crowd. And Jesus says to him: “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” “I must stay at your house today.” Here is the hinge in the story, the swing, the reversal Luke so loves to use to show us the graciousness of the kingdom of God. Zacchaeus was seeking Jesus earnestly, yes, and yet that earnestness and searching was a reflection of God’s own yearning for Zacchaeus. Jesus wants earnestly to draw us to himself and through him to the Father in the Spirit. “Hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” I must make my home within you! Jesus is inviting himself over for dinner, to Zacchaeus’s house and ours, constantly, urgently, yearning to be close to us, if we’ll only let him in. Our own reaching out for God—when fully inhabited with earnestness, urgency, and all the painful confrontation with our own nakedness that entails—eventually opens onto the revelation that God has been searching us out all along. A hidden gem in our hymnal points to this prevenient grace, grace that runs ahead of us and prepares our way before we ever begin to walk it. This is hymn 689, with words by Jean Ingelow (1820-1897):

I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me.
It was not I that found, O Savior true,
no, I was found of thee.

Thou didst reach forth thy hand and mine enfold,
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea.
‘Twas not so much that I on thee took hold
as thou, dear Lord, on me.

I find, I walk, I love, but, oh, the whole
of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee!
For thou wert long beforehand with my soul,
always thou lovedst me.

“We love because God first loved us,” and Jesus is the tangible expression of that love. Though Christmas is still on the other side of Halloween, the grocery stores have begun to lay hints, and so I hope you’ll forgive the preacher the same as we move steadily toward Advent, that beautiful dark season of getting ready to enter the mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus is coming to our house! The home of God is among mortals; the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; in Jesus God becomes incarnate in a human life, showing us the form love that takes in the world. In Jesus God has come so very near. He dwells in our hearts already, as the very ground of our being, and he wants to wake us up to that living, loving reality: “I must stay at your house—today!”

Today? I want to ask. Today, are you sure? But I haven’t got the house ready for guests! All my extra towels are dirty, the kitchen’s a wreck, I’m really only half moved in, and the living room is strewn with dog toys—not to mention dog hair! You can’t come over today, Jesus. Maybe next week, once I’ve had time to clean everything up. 

No, I must stay with you—today! “The Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” This is the piece Zacchaeus, by grace, gets exactly right. He’s a crook, and he knows it, and he isn’t trying to hide it from Jesus or himself or anyone anymore. He’s just lost: a lost sheep in need of a shepherd, a lost coin stuck in a crack under the bed, waiting for a patient, searching hand to sweep him free. And it’s in this admission of lostness that he can be found. Exposing, even welcoming our brokenness, failures, sinfulness, we become little and dependent on God like a child and able to receive the grace already pouring itself out for us in each moment. 

Jesus isn’t put off by the fragile reality of our condition. Jesus doesn’t worry about being the guest of one who’s a sinner, as the grumbling onlookers assert. Much the opposite: “The Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” Jesus has a special love for all of us who are lost. We don’t have to fix ourselves or find ourselves or make our lives ship-shape by desperate effort. Jesus will seek us out and save us. “It was not I that found, O savior true, no I was found of thee.”

I recently had occasion to try to explain to someone my own story of returning to faith as if for the first time. I find this difficult to narrate on a good day: “the Spirit blows where it will,” and “the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind.” But she asked me, “How did you manage to leave the religious tradition you were raised in but to keep Jesus? How did you keep Jesus?” I fumbled a bit trying to offer something coherent before giving up the messier, gracious truth: “I didn’t keep him, I tried to lose him, actually—but he came back for me.” If I did anything it was to give up on the false images of God that were crowding me out from actually meeting Jesus. And when I was most empty-handed and lost and had nothing to offer but naked longing, Jesus passed by, stopped and looked at me, and invited himself over to stay.

The desire for God is itself God-given, a reflection of God’s desire for us. Jesus wants to be with us and to stay with us, to invite himself in and thereby invite us into the intimacy of love that flows between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the already-given love of God that is the fabric of all reality, the ground of being, the good green pasture stretched out before us.

Jesus will teach us how to receive him. Grace runs ahead of us. He’s coming to our house, but he’s going to be the host of this meal. It’s going to be a feast, a big heavenly banquet to celebrate that the lost one has been found. God is not content with Zacchaeus and you and me as the only dinner guests. The Son of Man has come to seek out and to save all the lost. And so he takes us in and heals us and teaches us to be generous and off we go, back out to the crowd to preach the same good news that came to us: God has come near in Jesus and there is room for everyone at the party.