NOTES for Luk 19:1-10

"And Zacchaeus comes to mind too, the tax collector, a short man who wanted to catch even one glimpse of the Savior. He could not make his way through the crowd, and people despised him because he was short, but he climbed a tree and sat there, and watched... And the Lord called him and came to his house. And we too are short in stature, spiritually. We have not earned at all the right for Him to come to us. Yet He does come...

The Lord said to Zacchaeus: "Today I will be with you." And to each of us He says: "Today I will be with you." "I will be with you," says the Lord; what else do we need? Only to understand well that He comes into a poorly prepared house, not into the kind of house where everyone is waiting for the Guest, where everything shines and everything is decorated, but into a shabby, dark house, full of dust, as if abandoned.

Such is our soul, with its little faith and negligence, spiritual laziness, with prayer that barely glows like a dying flame. With neglect for the commandments and church rules, with constant irritation at everything, with continual bitterness and judgment of one another.

You come to us,
while our thoughts at that moment wander far away...
And it turns out that You are not our King,
but our pride, self-will, self-love,
ambition, vanity,
all the bustle after which we run,
to which we cling"

(Father Alexander Men, from Andrei Eremin's book "A Pastor at the Turn of the Century")

Today we read Luke the evangelist's account of the conversion of Zacchaeus. Beginning with this day, the Sunday Gospel readings will give us food for reflection and prayer that will help us prepare for Great Lent and, therefore, to a certain extent, for Pascha. And this path begins for us with the story of Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector, who disregarded his social standing just to see the Lord Jesus.

A man of short stature, he could not get close to Christ because of the crowd. It is important to notice exactly what Zacchaeus had to give up. He was not only a wealthy man, but also the head of the tax office. He represented Roman authority, and his work of collecting taxes and duties touched every inhabitant of Jericho. The Jews despised tax collectors as traitors, but feared Roman power. Therefore, to "lower himself" in the eyes of the townspeople meant for Zacchaeus both countless difficulties and an outburst of social contempt. All this, to use the words of the apostle Paul, he "counted as loss."

We read this story because during the approaching fast every Christian is given the opportunity to seek Christ without thinking about how he looks in the eyes of those around him. That is why Zacchaeus's example is so important for us. And that is why it is so important that the Lord rewards him with the words: "Today salvation has come to this house."

Zacchaeus is an amazingly likable person. The evangelist tells us that he was short in stature. On the one hand, this is needed simply to explain his unusual action. But on the other hand, let us try to live a little into this image. People of short stature very often have a sore or vulnerable self-esteem, because in childhood, and later too, they are often teased and boys mock them. Recall in confirmation at least Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tale "Little Longnose." And now imagine: such a person climbs a tree in public, as if he were a cat, not fearing once again to become a laughingstock among people. This remotely reminds us of something holy-foolish. We always stand before this choice: people's opinion or striving toward God. If you live in an atheistic environment, people may tell you to your face or behind your back, and you always feel it, that you are not quite right in the head, that you go to church, that every family has its black sheep. Anything can happen. But what difference is there between people laughing at you and your being able to see God? In one of Vladimir Vysotsky's songs there are these words: "The giraffe is tall; he knows better." And if you are so short that even an old parrot will not stand up for you with such words, how much love for God must one have in order to overcome everything. Let us therefore try to see living people in the gospel figures, for that is what they were, and somehow make friends with them, as we make friends with members of our community.

How does the Savior find the people whose house He is ready to enter? Perhaps the same way He finds those whom He calls to follow Him. And yet, how? Here is Zacchaeus, a man who by no accepted standards in a religious environment was suitable for a visit. Not merely a tax collector, but a chief, as we would say today, of the local tax office. The occupation itself was questionable, and in those specific conditions all the more so, since one had to work for Roman power, for strangers, one might say, for occupiers.

Of course, even the most religious Pharisees paid taxes, and no one except perhaps the Zealots doubted their piety. But the Zealots were true fanatics, calling for a religious war with Rome until final victory, until the Messiah came. Yet paying taxes is one thing, and helping collect them is quite another. The first is forced; the second is voluntary. And voluntary sin is not forgiven, one cannot be cleansed of its consequences even after sincere repentance. The will to evil is a terrible and irreversible thing, so believing Jews of that time thought.

Zacchaeus apparently very much wanted that very reversibility. That is why he climbed the tree, despite his respectable position. He had evidently heard that Someone was traveling through Judea and Samaria who could cleanse even from sin committed by one's own free will. And such a desire for purity, for deliverance from sin, is immediately visible to God's gaze. That means it is visible to the Messiah's gaze as well, for He sees the situation with God's eyes. And He at once goes to the house of the one who wants deliverance from the power of sin. That is why Christ came: to deliver from the power of sin those who want to be delivered from it. And to give such people the chance to begin life with a clean slate, in His Kingdom.

Christ's words bring us great joy, yet following these words is also the hardest thing of all. The position that the Lord Jesus expresses in these words provoked the greatest indignation and protest from the scribes and Pharisees around Christ.

These words of Christ place great responsibility on us. Above all, it is very important to remember them when we see people who are unpleasant to us, whose appearance or actions arouse our indignation, people whom we consider "bad." It is precisely them, the lost - not those in the process of perishing, but those already finally lost - whom the Lord Jesus came to find and save. After that, contempt for them is plainly impossible.

But most importantly, He came to seek out and save us, each one of us. Not some splendid righteous people who earned a reward and became worthy of it, but us, lost under the weight of incurable sins.

Jesus’ words bring a big enjoyment to us, but to comply with these words may not be easy at all. The position, that the Lord Jesus marks out with these words, created most of all indignations and protests from Pharisees and scribes who surrounded Jesus.

These words of Jesus bind us to many things. It is above all important to remember them, when we see persons, who don't please us, who by their appearance or acts “make our blood boil”, those that we consider of being "bad". It is exactly for them, the lost (not those who are getting lost, but those who are already lost), that the Lord Jesus came to find and save. Obviously, it is in no way possible to disdain them after this.

But the main thing here is that: He came to seek and to save us, each of us. Us means here we that are lost under the irreparable burden of sins, and not some kind of gorgeous righteous men, who deserved and became worthy of the reward.

Most Christians usually understand the parable of the minas precisely as a parable about minas - perhaps not about money in the strict sense, but certainly as a parable about the gifts God gives a person. About the fact that the talents God gives cannot be left undeveloped: after all, on the day of Judgment one must return everything to Him with a profit. But this is only one, outer side of the situation described by the parable. It also has a deeper layer of meaning. And it is no accident that the Savior uses money as the central image of His parable, money entrusted to different people so that they would put it into circulation. Everyone knows that money must work. It must be in circulation. In constant motion. Otherwise, in one way or another, it loses value.

The value of money is maintained by the dynamics of its circulation. And it is precisely this, paradoxical as it may sound, that makes money most resemble that breath of the Kingdom which we call grace. What they have in common is precisely dynamics. As money can function normally only while in circulation, so the breath of the Kingdom, grace, can exist only in constant movement. A person receives this breath from God freely, but its further existence is determined as much by God as by the person. This is understandable: breathing is a process; it cannot be limited to one inhalation and exhalation. And this process cannot be sustained without human participation.

Meanwhile, a person's spiritual life depends on the intensity of this process. Or, more precisely, this process itself is spiritual life. A person's participation in it gradually turns the participant into a bearer of the breath of the Kingdom, turning his heart into a vessel that contains this breath. And it determines what a person will bring to God on the day of Judgment.

It is no wonder that the one who returned the whole sum to his master without profit lost what had been given to him. He had not changed. He remained the same. There was no merit of his in the breath of the Kingdom that breathed within him: he had received it freely. And he did nothing so that it would touch him in any measure. So that it would in some way change his own life. By the end of the path this man remained just as he had been at the beginning. And he was left with nothing. A sad but fitting outcome.

If earlier Jesus displeased pious people by associating with tax collectors, that is, tax farmers, and sinners, those who openly did not keep the law, now He crosses every boundary: He enters the house of the chief extortioner and declares forgiveness of sins to him simply because he promised to change his ways. He explains this by saying that Zacchaeus too is, after all, a "son of Abraham." In that language this means that he too is a human being, that God created him for Himself, for life and joy.

In theory, we too know that "man is created for happiness," but for us humanity is still divided into those who have deserved this happiness and those who have not, into the worthy and the unworthy. We ourselves, of course, end up among the "better part"; that is why the Pharisees, like all normal people, "began to grumble" when Christ turned out to be in the house of a "sinful man." The Lord knows how to see a human being in everyone, and this is a skill that should be learned.