Sayings of Jesus: “Today salvation has come to this house”

The church we were at last Sunday had an all-age service, which was lots of fun. The central Bible story was Jesus’ encounter with a man named Zacchaeus in Luke 19. Several things struck me in the story, not least the saying of Jesus that’s today’s title.

Without further ado, here’s the story; if you know it well enough, scroll past.

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.’ So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, ‘Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.’

Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’

The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) mention tax collectors about 25 times; Luke makes most references. This is highly disproportionate to mentions of other occupations, not least because tax collectors represented a tiny percentage of the population. For Luke, especially, they seem to serve as a kind of byword for those in society that the religious elite regarded as social outcasts, morally suspect, and religious failures—people whose commitment to temple and Torah fell short of the religious leaders' unsympathetic high expectations.

We should not be too quick to compare tax collectors in Jesus’ day with those dedicated, altruistic civil servants who work for HMRC (any potential similarities that might come to mind when completing our tax returns notwithstanding). Tax collectors were Jewish collaborators who worked for the occupying Romans, collecting the punitive taxes they levied on local populations throughout the Roman Empire.

If that wasn’t bad enough, tax collectors took advantage of their powerful positions, under the protection of accompanying Roman soldiers, not just to collect the Roman taxes but to charge additional amounts for themselves, to which the Romans were happy to turn a blind eye—hence Zacchaeus being described as ‘wealthy’ (as a chief tax collector, presumably very wealthy).

In many renderings of this story, Zacchaeus being short and climbing a tree gets central billing; the takeaway from the story is Zacchaeus going to such lengths to pursue Jesus and being rewarded by Jesus for his passion. Maybe. But all the text says is that he “wanted to see who Jesus was.” Rather neutral, wouldn’t you say?

The fulcrum of the story is not the climbing of the tree, or being short. It’s Jesus inviting himself round to Zacchaeus’ house, presumably for lunch, given that Jesus was just passing through. This would have been shocking for everyone present—the text says that “All the people saw this and began to mutter, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’”

It’s funny when we think of Jesus and hospitality. Jesus had no home of his own, so nowhere to host (I think the only occasion in the Gospels where Jesus appears to have hosted was when he borrowed a room for the Last Supper). Why does that matter? Hosting means you are in control, a position of power. Being a guest is relinquishing control, a position of humility and vulnerability. An interesting thought, perhaps. Jesus repeatedly places himself in the position of guest in Luke.

More importantly, accepting (or offering) hospitality, in that culture, epitomised welcome and inclusion. In this case, of course, Jesus welcoming and including “a sinner”—not even, to our knowledge from the text—a former, repentant sinner. Hence the criticism not just from the religious leaders of whom one might expect it but “all the people” present.

But now it gets even more interesting. Nothing more has happened in the story that we know of to this point. Luke may have compressed the story somewhat, but they haven’t been for lunch at Zacchaeus’ house, haven’t chatted for a few hours, after which Zacchaeus made the then-current equivalent of a decision to become a Christian based on Jesus’ wisdom and teaching. No Sinner’s Prayer was prayed. But something prompted Zacchaeus to declare that he would give half his possessions to the poor and repay four times the amount of money he’d cheated people out of.

That sounds like a comprehensive repentance, doesn’t it? And yet, would it be too cynical to question that? If Elon Musk gave half his possessions (of $1 trillion) to the poor, he’d still have $500 billion to live on. And I’m sceptical about Zacchaeus’ framing of “if I have cheated anybody out of anything…” It would be an unusual tax collector, especially a chief tax collector, who hadn’t cheated anybody out of anything! It was taken for granted that’s what tax collectors did! Luke chose not to avert that impression by introducing him as a righteous tax collector.        

So maybe Jesus’ words reflect not the end of a journey for Zacchaeus, but more the beginning of a journey. Not least because Jesus has said only two sentences to the man to this point, paraphrased as “Come down from the tree. I’m coming for lunch!” Hardly something we would have seen Billy Graham incorporating into his message.

We should always be careful not to read into the text what isn’t there—especially when we’re expecting (but not finding) features deriving from the last 2,000 years of Christianity, and so we’re tempted to augment the passage with them. And especially not those deriving from the last 500 years of evangelical thinking, such as a Sinner’s Prayer.

We don’t know what we don’t know about Zacchaeus; only what Luke has told us. We don’t know what had been going on in his life, what he knew about Jesus to this point, and what triggered his statement to Jesus.

Interestingly, the entire focus of his ‘repentance speech’ is money. Nothing in the least comparable to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, where people “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.” And that’s from those already Christians!

Either we need to read something like that prayer into the text (assuming that it must have happened with Zacchaeus, but Luke’s just cut it out to keep the word count down) or we take the text as we have it at face value and conclude that Jesus’ expectations and approach are rather different from the authors of the Book of Common Prayer. Or evangelical expectations and approach more widely.   

The saying of Jesus that we’ve borrowed for the title—“Today salvation has come to this house”—is enigmatic. What, exactly, did Jesus mean by ‘salvation’? (A separate question that needn’t distract us is: did Jesus mean Zacchaeus personally, or everyone in his household? Take a look at the story of the jailer “and his whole household” in Acts 16; see v.34.)

Many would keep things simple and say Jesus meant “going to heaven when you die.” Which is not necessarily wrong, but perhaps at best incomplete. Not for the first time is Jesus linking salvation, present and future, in some way to what people do with their money (righteously as well as unrighteously acquired money; albeit that in Jesus’ world, there was a presumption that wealth acquisition was almost invariably unrighteous). Take, for example, the Parable of Abraham, Lazarus, and the (probably deliberately unnamed) Rich Man, or the encounter with the Rich Young Ruler.  

The only contextual clue as to what aspect of “salvation” Jesus had in mind (bearing in mind the Greek word sōtēria is very comprehensive—encompassing a broad, holistic understanding) is his reference to “this man, too, is a son of Abraham.” Salvation here looks remarkably like restoration to the people of God. Jesus publicly declares that this man that everyone had written off—who was not welcome and included in their community—is indeed part of Abraham's family.

In other words, this, too, was an explicit statement of welcome and inclusion to place alongside the culturally-signalled welcome and inclusion reflected in accepting Zacchaeus’ hospitality.

It’s amazing how often Jesus seems to go out of his way to explicitly welcome and include people who everyone else had decided didn’t belong. And how often there is no explicit prior ‘change’ recorded on the part of those he is welcoming and including.

Indeed, one might even go so far as to say that contrary to the standard evangelical ordering of “repentance, followed by acceptance,” Jesus deliberately reverses that: “acceptance, followed by repentance.” There are several other Gospel stories we could also cite as examples, but those will have to await another day.