One Final Time: Poor Man, Rich Man, and the Cost of Discipleship

Lk 18:35-19:28: 21^st Sunday after Pentecost

Jesus concluded the twinned teaching of Lk 18:1-14 (the last two Sunday’s readings) by reiterating his pronouncement from 14:11: “The exalted will be brought down, and the humbled lifted up” (18:14b). This both looks back to Mary’s Magnificat (1:52), and forward to this Sunday’s gospel: the story of Zacchaeus the rich man and a poor beggar, a summary, culminating story that deserves my longest blog this year!

Luke’s infamous story of Zacchaeus always comes up in the Year C lectionary right around Halloween in North America. This is fitting: as a story of reparation rather than charity, it is indeed scary to those of us who fear any kind of resource redistribution, much less accountability for deeper injustices lurking in our haunted present and past, a matter Elaine and I explore in our 2021 Healing Haunted Histories! Despite the Halloween industrial complex’s trivialization of ghosts, our scriptures insist that the blood of the slain does cry out from the ground.

Tax collectors referred to in the New Testament were local Jews employed by the colonial occupiers to do something called “tax farming.” In this system, the farmer paid Rome its money in advance, then made it up by exacting commissions on enforcing taxes, tolls and customs (on land, on products and on persons). Since the taxed had no idea what sort of financial arrangement had been negotiated by the farmer, they were at the mercy of whatever he charged. Due to their extortion as agents of Rome, these collectors were socially rejected, religiously excommunicated and viewed as political traitors.” But street-level tax collectors like the one we met in last Sunday’s gospel text—the ones doing the street level dirty work—were rarely socially powerful, since their profits flowed up the hierarchical ladder. The chief tax collector, however, would have been the richest and thus the most rapacious and despised.

And he would hardly have been perceived by Jesus’ peasant audience as an innocent or jolly little fellow! Let us remember that this ancient tax system, as a political and economic structure that strategically advantaged the already rich, was not so different from our modern systems that benefit the few and exploit the many. This is especially true in the plutocratic Trump administration, as evidenced by how the recent budget bill cut taxes for the wealthy and took away social services from the poor.

The best way to understand the significance of the Zaccheaus episode is to see how it culminates a narrative arc of Luke’s storytelling. As noted repeatedly in earlier blogs this year, the middle part of Luke’s gospel is structured on a scaffold of six episodes that portray rich men.

The first five of these portraits are decidedly unflattering: the rich fool who builds bigger barns to warehouse his wealth; the bloated man and the banquet from hell; the absentee landlord who fires a manager who has been redistributing his wealth; the bitterly poignant tale of Lazarus and Dives; and a rich man who turns away from of Jesus’ call reparations in order to walk the Way. Repetition is the key to pedagogy! This series maps the real society in which Jesus lived and Luke wrote, and articulates the core story within the larger narrative of Luke: Jesus’ diagnosis of the pathologies of Affluenza and Plutocracy. And it leads up to the Zaccheaus text, after which Luke pivots his overall plot to its final sequence as Jesus enters Jerusalem for his final showdown with the Powers of Mammon.

The Zaccheaus story pings on each of the previous rich man tales, especially that of Lazarus and Dives, which lies at the center of this series like a fulcrum. That terrifying doublet portrays Lazarus and Dives in immediate yet utterly segregated proximity, in order to dramatically highlight the chasma mega— the great chasm—that separates the worlds of rich and poor. It is a sobering warning tale about how if we live with radical disparity, we also die by it.

The Zaccheaus story narrates a similar doublet. It is immediately preceded by a poor blind man episode, who lives across the same uncrossable gulf from Zaccheus (note the similar vocabulary in the two dyptichs above). But this time the disaster of the chasma mega will be avoided by a surprise twist. While Luke’s relentless string of caricatures portray the bad news about the killing system of the wealthy, ultimately his gospel is also about good news to the poor first (introduced way back in the Beatitueds), but also the healing even of the rich—if we walk the Recovery Way of reparation.

In the Zaccheaus twinning, poor and rich man are juxtaposed tightly by their respective proximity to Jericho at the outset, and in the course of each story both are granted vision insofar as they make a decision to follow Jesus’ Way. In the process there is a certain leveling of the playing field. The poor man is “lifted up” by Jesus, and the rich man is “brought down” from his perch high above.  At the end of this sequence, both subjects will stand on more level ground as a reunited family, sharing the gifts of God more equitably

Luke takes us to the threshold of Jericho, a great center for trade, the port of entry for all traffic crossing the Judean frontier and the river Jordan from the east. This is why Zacchaeus was strategically headquartered there—and why the poor man stationed himself at the gate, to receive alms from the pilgrims heading up to Jerusalem for Passover. Obviously, these two characters represent the top and bottom of the social pyramid in this powerful place.

Was Zack “short” of stature, or “young in age,” as the Greek term hēlikia is translated in every other usage in N.T.? If the latter, then Zack would have inherited his lofty position as a result of family patronage, probably to the royal house of Herod (who kept their winter palace in Jericho).  So his privilege contrasts sharply with the unnamed blind man, who had endured years of marginalization and invisibility. But this is a story full of surprises, the first of which is that we’re told that this universally scorned representative of an oppressive system of occupation was actually “trying to see Jesus.” Here is the first narrative connection Luke makes between Zacl and the poor man in the previous story: they both want to see—because they both are blind, if in different ways. Luke thus binds the fate of these two archetypally contrasting characters together, though they inhabit opposite ends of the social spectrum.

The tree in which Zack perched was a mulberry or sycamore tree (Gk sukomorea).  And Jesus had something to say about such trees earlier in Luke:  “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree (Gk sukaminō), ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (17:6).  You see, Jesus believed that another economic order was both possible and imperative. So here he challenges someone high up in that very tree to do something impossible—and sure enough, Zacchaeus’ whole world will end up uprooted and replanted into the soil of what we call Sabbath Economics. (Parenthetically, John the Revelator had a vision of the oppressive imperial economy of Rome similarly disappearing into the sea in Rev 18:21—apparently a motif that reflected old peasant dreams of justice.)

Now come more surprising twists in the story. Summoning Zack to “come down” from his lofty position, Jesus summarily invites himself over for dinner—an aggressive and risky strategy—defying the code of good decorum by demanding hospitality (19:5). Despite having been hard on rich people thus far in Luke’s gospel, and having just seen his call to discipleship flatly rejected by a rich man a few episodes earlier (Lk 18:18-30), Jesus nevertheless continues to take initiative. He just doesn’t give up—just like the persistent woman of 18:1-8!   

This shock is immediately followed by another: Zack hurries down and welcomes Jesus “joyfully” (19:6). This is an unexpected and even courageous pivot for someone of his social standing; after all, he lives in the insular bubble of the wealthy. And surely it is evident to him that by welcoming the homeless man Jesus he is also welcoming Jesus’ entourage—which specifically now includes the poor man of the previous episode, who has joined its ranks.  Imagine this raggedy group of folk trooping into Zack’s beautiful, elegant crib—a scenario that contrasts radically with the inpenetrability of Dives’ mansion to the poor who suffering at its gates (16:20).

If we’re not unsettled by this awkward “class boundary-crossing,” the other characters in the story are. There is immediate resistance, from both sides: Jesus’ people object to sharing table fellowship with an oppressor (18:7), while Zack’s handlers and gatekeepers are no doubt worried about the fine china and silverware.

Apparently Zack can sense the tension. So, read carefully now, Luke tells us “he stood still.”  Here is a second key connection to the previous story: it’s the same exact phrase that described what Jesus did when he heard the poor man screaming at him (18:40).  He stopped and took the time to feel and hear the cry of the poor—as opposed to just walking by.  It must have been contagious, because now it’s Zack who stops dead in his tracks. Luke uses this sort of rhetorical repetition to suggest that he has encountered not only Jesus, but the disenfranchised as well.  He “sees” them, likely for the first time, since the destitute were so relentlessly invisibilized (as they still are in our world). In that Zen moment of pause, Zack realizes that Jesus is interested in more than hospitality. (As we’ll see in a moment, he’d likely been prepped.)  Then, in a stunning turn of events—and heart—he offers, unbidden, two actions through which he embraces what the rich man in Luke 17 flatly rejected: redistributing wealth.

Zacheaus does not indulge in a pious lament about inequality, or a ritual apology in front of the press, or a call for a high-level commission to study the problem, or a rant about government policies. Rather, he commits to redistributing his wealth–half of it, not a 10% tithe (per the Pharisee last week). Huparchonton is best translated as “properties,” not just possessions orsurplus cash. To the poor, not to the nonprofit industrial complex.Let us be clear: what Luke’s character is proposing here is not charity, nor white saviorism, nor guilt-money, nor donations with strings attached, or any of the other strategies that lock the privileged into splendid insulation. It is restitution and repatriation, according to the teaching of Torah. Exodus 22 says that one who has stolen from another must restore equity and then some—4 or 5 fold—in order to make up for breach of trust, aggravation and injustice.  Zack is doing nothing more or less than recovering the Sabbath Economics teachings of his ancestors.

Leviticus 6, in turn, indicts defrauding—and deception, robbery, lying and swearing falsely—which frankly reads like an annotated history of how the rich have always exploited the poor. Breaking faith and relationship requires restitution of what was expropriated plus 20%, a commitment that is adjudicated through elaborate rituals of accountability. Zack entertain the prospect that his system may have defrauded some folks; one can imagine Jesus raising an eyebrow and saying, “If???” At which point Zac goes well beyond Torah’s 20%. He is not just making restitution; he is making reparations. The verb apodidomi is an intensification of the verb “to give,” and means “payback”—or in the slogan of Indigenous people the world over today, #LANDBACK! True conversion requires nothing less. Needless to say, this encounter stands in stark contrast to every other Lukan portrait of rich men—not to mention to the dominant theology of our churches.

An explanation of Zack’s dramatic initiative is suggested by Luke’s story arc. His underling Levi in Capernaum back in Luke 5:27-28 responded to Jesus’ call not only by abandoning his tax office, but by inviting Jesus and his friends to his home for a feast. Objections were raised against Jubilee hospitality—debtors and debt collectors sharing table fellowship—since the table was a primary determiner of social relations in antiquity, and such boundary-crossing would threaten the status quo. As chief tax tsar Zack must have received intelligence from encounters like Levi’s: the prophet from Nazareth was serious about actual redistribution of wealth to those on the other side of the socio-economic divide.

How Jesus responds in that earlier episode illuminates our Zaccheaus story: “You can’t heal people who don’t know they’re sick,” he says (5:31-32).  Only those who acknowledge their dis-ease will be motivated to change. That’s Twelve Step Recovery religion. Jesus can’t do much for those who fancy themselves pious, or “woke,” or who don’t think there are fatal contradictions in the status quo. But he can build a movement with those who commit to the hard, lifelong work of repentance: turning personal and political history around. And Zack has now joined this movement.  We might well wonder how this wealthy member of the oppressor class could have gotten so clear about following Jesus, whereas through the long history of the church we Christians have managed to avoid this memo like the plague.

Jesus responds with an extraordinary, 3-fold “blessing” (19:9-10). First, he declares that “today salvation has come to this house.” He means this literally: when Jesus and all his funky friends crossed the chasma mega into Zack’s home, they brought his liberation. It is the encounter that animates transformation. Secondly, by recognizing him as a son of Abraham,
Jesus restores Zack’s membership in his ancestral community, which wealth and oppression had shattered. This links him to the “bent-over woman” (a condition symbolizing being crippled by an unpayable burden of debt) back in Luke 13:16, where Jesus similarly named her a “daughter of Abraham” (the only two appearances of this phrase in the entire gospel tradition). Jesus was clear that both the poorest debtor and the richest creditor have to be healed for the body politic truly to be made whole. And for Luke, that’s the Abraham who was rocking Lazarus in his bosom, while directing Dives’ attention to that chasma mega and the equity teachings of Torah and the prophets (16:22-31)!

The bent over woman and the poor blind man were dehumanized by economic disparity, and made whole (in economic as well as physical terms). But the chief tax collector, adds Jesus, is lost, hopelessly addicted to privilege and power, unless and until he restores equity. Which is why Zaccheaus and his economic and political class must express repentance through redistributive reparation. “Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham” is Lazarus’s song; this one is ours.

At the culmination of Luke’s sprawling narrative about rich people, Jesus challenges and accompanies Zack to take Step 1, the portal to recovery and healing, to be followed by searching moral inventory, amends and reparations. Wendell Berry (right) puts this whole matter succinctly for the modern progeny of Zaccheaus under capitalism. In our historical moment, the addict’s excuse will not do. Not for climate crisis; not for racialized disparities; not for genocidal militarism. If we want to follow Jesus, we must follow Zacheaus on the way of reparations.

  This text narrates the archetypal Sabbath Economics demonstration project in Luke’s story (to be realized again by the Pentecost community of mutual aid in Acts 2-4). But Zack’s is not a happily-ever-after-ending. Luke transitions to the next episode with the phrase “as they were listening to this exchange” (19:11)—referring to both characters in the story and to us as audience! Because he doesn’t want us to get too triumphalistic about Zack’s breakthrough. One conversion, no matter how astonishing or infectious, does not system-change make! So to underline the point, Jesus quickly introduces a parable about yet another rich and powerful ruler—probably a political parody of Herod.

The Parable of the Pounds has been neutered (like the Zaccheaus story) by our churches as a morality tale about capitalist “responsibility.” In fact, it is a warning tale about the cost of discipleship for those who would resist the Mammon system and its profiteering principles, as does the third servant. His noncooperation is punished by the autocrat with public execution. This is at once a thinly-veiled allusion to both Zack’s inevitable fate at the hand of his overlords, and Jesus’ own death at the hands of the plutocrats! Speaking truth to power has consequences. And it will take more than a few faithful witnesses to overturn a deeply entrenched system.

So what have we learned from this summary gospel episode? 

• Jesus pays attention to the marginalized, and empowers their recovery of a full humanity: “Your faith has liberated you” he says to the poor blind man.
• He also invites the powerful to change, by emphasizing that reparations are the only way to recover kinship that has been shattered by social and economic disparity.
• And he is realistic about resisting the Domination system, which is why he called his followers to a discipleship of the cross.

The whole sequence of Luke 19 culminates Luke’s narrative of the personal and political struggle between “Mammon” and “Manna” at the heart of the Jesus Way.
The Zaccheaus story offers an object lesson of radical transformation as liberty, justice and healing for everyone. But for those of us who have a leg up in that Jericho tree—who have too much, who have benefitted materially from extractive settler colonialism, and who continue to enjoy class and race privilege— this requires concrete reparations. (See Healing Haunted Histories chapter 8 for examples.)

Note: My last 2025 blog on Lukan lections during Year C will be two weeks from now. I’ve tried to popularize and summarize my more detailed study of texts in HARP. We hope you will buy and engage the book, and find in it a resource for do the important work of reading our scriptures in this time of so many crises. We also need your partnership in getting word about it into “seminaries, sanctuaries and streets.” Given how the publishing industry is now, it is up to authors and their readers to spread the word about volumes that matter. Together we can build capacity to heal Affluenza and resist Plutocracy. 
Thanks, Ched