Serious Repentance 

A Sermon preached on Sunday, November 4, 2007

by Pastor Terry Davis

First Presbyterian Church, Hartford, CT

Luke 19:1 - 10 ¹He (Jesus) 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 sycamore 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.”

This story is really outrageous.  Almost no one in this story acts in a way that you would expect.  Ten year old kids might climb up in a tree to better see a parade, but it seems totally out of character for a mature man, a man who is very rich and powerful, to climb up a tree to see anyone, no matter how important the person passing by might be.  Even if Zacchaeus was a midget or a dwarf it is hard to imaging a tax collector climbing a tree, much less the chief tax collector for all of Jericho, it would be below his dignity.  Can you imagine Governor Rell’s director of Revenue services climbing up in a tree to see the pope?  But Luke says that it was so important to Zacchaeus to see this religious teacher that he put aside all his dignity and gathered up his expensive robes around him and climbed up a sycamore tree to get a better view and see Jesus.

On seeing him up in that tree something moved Jesus to reach out to him; perhaps he sensed a certain desperation in the life of someone who would do something so undignified.  Jesus called him by name, .Zacchaeus, come down out of that tree; I will be your guest for dinner this afternoon.  You can immediately sense the disapproval from the crowd.  Doesn’t he know who he is?  People in Jesus day often talked about tax collectors and sinners like they were one in the same.  In our time people may not be too fond of IRS agents, any more than moon shiners loved the revenuers, but it was not the same as it was in Roman occupied Palestine.  The Romans hired Jews to collect taxes from the Jews.  If you worked for Rome, especially if your work was collecting taxes for Rome you were an enemy to all your neighbors.  You were collecting money from them to support the hated occupation of the country.  And then few of them were honest; the system was set up to discourage honesty.  Rome didn’t pay the tax collectors a certain percentage of what they collected; instead the collectors were assigned a total they were expected to extract from the people.  Everything that they collected over and above what Rome had assigned them to collect belonged to the tax collector.

But here is Jesus inviting himself to the home of this despised tax collector; he is going to be the guest of someone who is a collaborator with the enemy.  But Zacchaeus was overjoyed to welcome him and hurriedly got down from his perch in the sycamore tree and went off to prepare for his guest.  He probably had very few guests, besides fellow tax collectors who would come to his home?  No one loved him, they might fear him, but no one loved him, no one respected him, everyone he met thought of him as a vile person to be avoided.  He was as lonely as a funeral director.

And here was the most important person to ever visit Jericho in that generation coming to be his guest for dinner.  He knew that all the people who normally walked across the street to avoid him would be willing to attend the party tonight just to be where Jesus was.

Of course they did come and many of them fully expected to hear Jesus denounce Zacchaeus’s sins.  After all wasn’t he carrying on where John the Baptizer had left off?  Many of the townspeople knew about John, how he preached fire and brimstone, the ax is laid at the root of the tree and every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown in to the fire.  The tax collectors asked John what to do, and he told them to collect no more than was assigned to them, to repent and come down into the water.

 But Jesus says no word of condemnation.  There is no moral judgment on Jesus part; he treated Zacchaeus as a child of God, a person as good as anyone else.  Jesus obviously was honored to be a guest in the home of a person that others would rather spit on than to eat his food.  Where are Jesus morals?  Yes, you should love the sinner, but hate the sin, isn’t that right?  But not Jesus.  It was like the woman caught in adultery, after everyone had left he said: has no one condemned you?  Neither do I condemn you.  It is as John said, God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world should be saved through him.

But look at what Zacchaeus does in response to this total acceptance on the part of Jesus.  Jesus loved him, did not condemn him, and did not demand anything from Zacchaeus except that he allows him to be his guest.  In response Zacchaeus responded by an amazing display of repentance.  We could understand if he repented and threw himself on Jesus mercy if Jesus had taken him to task for his way of life and his sinful ways.  We see all the time that people express repentance and remorse when they stand before a judge for sentencing; but Jesus wasn’t sitting in judgment on Zacchaeus.  That is what all the others were saying or at least thinking: Jesus is just condoning all the sins of this vile man by being his guest for dinner. 

But Zacchaeus stands up and does much more than express his remorse; he shows real repentance, serious repentance, not weeping and asking for mercy and making excuses, but real repentance demonstrated by first promising to give away half of his wealth to the poor;  but then promising to make restitution four times over to all those who he had defrauded.

The church that claims that it follows Jesus has been condemning and judging people for 2000 years.  Before communion Presbyterians used to send elders around to all of the members to examine them concerning their faith and their morals.  They would condemn and exclude from the Lord’s Supper those who were not worthy.  We have thought that the most successful evangelistic sermons were those that condemned sin and sinners.  It has certainly been the pattern that has prevailed from Jonathan Edwards who preached sinners in the hands of an angry God, through Billy Graham and down to most modern televangelists; but it wasn’t Jesus way.  He loved and accepted Zacchaeus, and in doing so saw another son of Abraham be born again, knowing himself to be a beloved child of God.