Recently the story of Jesus’s encounter with Zacchaeus appeared on
pray-as-you-go
at this link for November 19th; “coincidentally,”
Menlo Church’s November 24th sermon covered the same passage.
The lovely Carol showed me a page from her devotional guide that
also focused on this passage, and encouraged its readers to write a few
paragraphs about salvation: what does that mean to me? Following are a few thoughts.
9Jesus said to him, “Today
salvation has come to this house,
because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10For
the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Luke 19:9–10, NIV (2013)
Perhaps you know the story: Zacchaeus, a rich and corrupt tax collector
in first-century Israel, encounters Jesus in Jericho; Jesus goes to
Zack’s house for a meal, Zack repents, and Jesus says that
salvation had come to the house. The full
text
is here.
Reflecting on this story, and particularly what Jesus says about
salvation, it struck me that my understanding of the passage is quite
different from the way I understood it 20–30 years ago.
Back then, as a young evangelical, I would have had a very narrow
idea of “salvation”: I thought it meant the shift from a dim
eternal destiny to a bright one. Before salvation, Zacchaeus was
headed for hell; once saved, he was headed for heaven.
The way this happened, I would have said, was that some time during
the visit, Zack came to “believe in Jesus” (in a John 3:16 sort of way), and at that point, became a child of God,
as John 1:12 promises. Being thus adopted by God, he was now
destined for heaven.
And I would have said that his proclamation (“Here and
now I give half of my possessions to the poor…”) was evidence
of Zack’s belief and perhaps of an incipient transformation wrought
by God.
That belief somehow caused God to change his mind about Zack; God’s
view used to be that Zack was deserving of hell, but after Zack came to
believe, God saw him as forgiven: in the words of the hymn, “clothed in His righteousness alone / faultless to stand before the throne.”
OK, that explanation wasn’t
as clear and crisp as I’d have liked, though, because as Romans 3
teaches, nobody ever looks for God. Ephesians 2:8 says we’re saved
by grace through faith, but even faith is a gift from God; we can’t
generate that faith by ourselves.
Suppose that Zacchaeus had said nothing about providing for the poor,
or about making restitution to those he cheated? It would not have made
any difference to me back then; my view, based on verses like John 1:12
and John 3:16 and John 5:24, was that basically “all you need is to believe.”
Although there was some muddiness in my understanding, that’s how I
thought about the “salvation” thing.
Thirty years later…
How is my thinking different today? For one thing, my understanding
of “salvation” is broader and with a different focus.
As I understand it,
in first-century Israel,
Eternity-in-Hell-after-you-die
was not the thing people would feel most in need of being saved from.
They
would be thinking of how to be saved from oppression, poverty,
fear or shame. Or from being a pariah in the community.
Which Zacchaeus was. I wonder how his short
stature affected his experience growing up. Was he ridiculed or bullied?
Is that why he he decided to collaborate with the Roman oppressors to
exploit his own people? And to cheat them besides?
So he became a tax collector, then chief. He got money, and maybe some
sort of revenge against his persecutors, but his wealth didn’t gain
him respect within the community. I see him as caught in a viscious
cycle partly of his own making. And I think that
when Zacchaeus saw Jesus, he didn’t see the kind of hate and judgment
that he saw on the faces of those around him. Somehow, during the
party, he was enabled to see a way out of that viscious
cycle—he saw a better way to be. This is the kind of
thing that can happen when Jesus encounters us: we find ourselves
suddenly able to take a step we had not previously imagined.
As Paul wrote in
Titus 3: “For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led
astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, spending our days in
malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the
goodness and mercy of God our savior appeared, he saved us, not on the
basis of our good deeds, but according to his mercy…”
God, in the person of Jesus, made it possible for Zacchaeus to
escape the slavery of those various passions and pleasures—or
at least, to begin the journey. How could Zacchaeus keep on the
journey? How can any of us do so? The author of Hebrews exhorts us
to pay attention so as not to drift away.
1We must pay more careful attention,
therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.
2For if the message spoken by angels
was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its
just punishment, 3how shall we escape
if we ignore such a great salvation?
from Hebrews 2
She
writes that Jesus is “the source of eternal salvation
to all who obey him” (5:9). She exhorts us to
be diligent in pursuing our hope, that
we may not be sluggish, but “imitators of those who through faith and
patience inherit the promises” (6:12).
What does this look like? Suppose I fall into the ocean at night.
I can’t touch bottom. Suddenly I hear a life preserver splash in
the water but I can’t see it.
A voice tells me to swim ahead. It tells me to turn right; I pay
careful attention and do what I’m told. Eventually I grab it.
In this story, I have a big problem: I’m helpless in the water.
Do I want to be saved? Well, yes—but I’m way more concerned
about drowning than about eternal destiny. I had to pay attention;
I couldn’t ignore such a salvation. I had to obey.
But I might also be worried about eternal destiny;
it’s the kind of thing we tend to postpone thinking about until the
last possible moment. And a
first-century Israelite might very well be thinking about
sin and forgiveness. The book of Leviticus has the most instances of
“forgiven” of any in the English Bible. John baptized
people “for the remission of sins.”
So I think people would be concerned about both. Actually, as
I was thinking and writing about this, I remembered that first-century
Greek has a lot fewer words than modern American English. The word
translated “saved” can be (and sometimes is) translated
“healed.” And in Matthew’s gospel, we read that
the angel told Joseph to call the baby Jesus, “because
he will save his people from their sins” (1:21).
I now think of salvation as being much broader: as saving the
whole person from every kind of hurt: ostracism, drowning, cancer,
PTSD, guilt and shame, loneliness, depression, famine, sword.
Ultimately, from death: as the Apostle Paul writes, we are
destined not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our
Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or
asleep (a euphemism for dying), we may live together with him.
I think that’s in 1 Thessalonians… yes it is:
link here (NASB)
