Sermon for Evensong on the 18th Sunday after Trinity, 19th October 2014, at St Mary’s, Stoke D’Abernon

1 John 3:17 – Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

I think this is a very timely passage for us to look at.

If you ‘have this world’s good’, if you are well-off … The funny thing is that, if I took a straw poll of everyone here tonight, I expect that not many of us would consider themselves to be ‘well-off’. We would immediately point to some footballer’s palace in Queen’s Drive, or a Bentley with blacked-out windows driving past, and we might well say, ‘I’m not in that league! I’m not really well-off.’

But if you think of the news stories about Ebola in Africa, and the pictures of Sierra Leone or Liberia, compared with those people, even those of us on a modest pension are really well-off.

Closer to home, just by virtue of our living in Cobham and Stoke D’Abernon, we are much better-off than people who live in the slums of Glasgow, or Liverpool, or Portsmouth. Even in Cobham, as we know in the Foodbank, there are people living in great need.

There was a big demonstration yesterday organised by the trades unions, with the slogan that ‘Britain deserves a pay rise’. The bosses, it was said, had received pay rises and bonuses, even during the recession and during this time of austerity, but normal working people were on average £50 a week worse off.

For the first time in 50 years, Health Service staff such as nurses and midwives went on strike last week. The government had refused to give them a pay rise which an independent review body had awarded to them. The government’s answer was that, if they had awarded the pay rise, then fewer people could be employed.

In other words, it was better that more people had jobs which paid too little for them to live on, than that the government should find the money to pay our nurses and midwives properly for their vital work. And, at the same time, apparently the government can find the money for bombs and missiles in Iraq, and for tax cuts for the wealthy. I’d better not go into that area; you will complain that I am being political.

But clearly, there is a big gap – and a widening one – between the haves and the have-nots, both internationally, as between the western nations and the third world; say, between people in Britain and people in Sierra Leone: and nearer to home, in the towns and villages of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. ‘The rich man in his castle, and the poor man at his gate.’ [Mrs C. F. Alexander, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’]

In this context, I think we can all acknowledge that, relatively speaking, we are well-off. We ‘have this world’s good’, in Biblical terms.

So does this passage apply to us? Remember the ‘summary of the law’, which Jesus gave. We must love God, and love our neighbour. [Deut.6:5; Lev.19:18; Luke 10:27]

If we ‘see a brother or sister in need’, we are reminded about Jesus’ great parable of compassion, the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29f). The Samaritan didn’t know much about the fellow he found lying injured in the road. He was in need, in need of medical attention and in need of a place of refuge.

Just think for a minute about what would happen if we came across a scruffy bloke lying in a gutter, perhaps looking the worse for wear, who’d been in a fight. Not really our sort of person. We might even think that he’d got himself into the fight. A bit bashed-up: but nothing to do with us. Remember the people who passed by on the other side, the priest and the Levite: respectable people. They didn’t want to get involved.

But Jesus taught us in that parable that whoever is in need, however unsuitable or strange they are, they are our neighbour, and we ought to show compassion, love, to them.

The people here at St Mary’s are great supporters of the Foodbank, and I know how much food and how much money you all give. It’s much appreciated.

But, not necessarily here, of course, I do sometimes hear comments or questions about what the Foodbank does, here in Cobham. Are there really needy people here? Are they really needy, or are they just swinging the lead?

I had a chat with a couple from Effingham the other day while I was at the car wash. They wanted to know how the Foodbank worked. I explained that it provides food for people who are hungry, but who don’t have enough money to buy food. I explained that they get a food voucher from an agency which can assess their needs objectively, such as the Jobcentre, Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Housing Benefit office or Cobham Centre for the Community, for example. Then they take their voucher to the Foodbank and receive a nutritionally balanced pack of food to last them and their family at least three days.

‘Oh, I know a Foodbank customer’, said the man I was talking to. ‘He keeps losing his job. He always knows how to do the job better than his boss, and he gets fired. And he drinks too much. He inherited his house. He raised money on a mortgage on it, and drank the money. He defaulted on the mortgage so he lost his house. I bet he comes begging to the Foodbank!’

In other words, the man was in need, but he was in need because he had behaved badly. He had brought misfortune on himself. It was his fault that he was hungry. And the implied thought was that we should not be helping people like that.

You see articles in the newspapers about so-called benefit cheats, scroungers, who prefer to live on benefits rather than work. You should be reassured, incidentally, that a major piece of research undertaken by churches nationally here in the UK found that only a tiny percentage of people are out of work for longer than one year, and that benefit fraud is similarly very small. I can give you the reference if you would like to read the report. [http://csc.ceceurope.org/fileadmin/filer/csc/Social_Economic_Issues/Truth-And-Lies-Report.pdf]

But go back to what S. John wrote in his letter here. ‘Whoso…. seeth his brother have need’: the only criterion is, does he have need? Not, is he deserving? Not, has he brought misfortune on himself? Did the chap on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho get himself into a fight? Did he provoke someone? The Samaritan didn’t ask. He did the right thing.

As you may know, the Foodbank keeps a record of the causes of people’s poverty, of the reasons why they have had to ask for food. The biggest cause, here in Cobham, is not withdrawal of benefit or any other reason to do with the cuts to the welfare state (although these do feature in our statistics); no, that’s not the biggest reason for hunger here. It is that the people, many of whom do have jobs, are just not being paid enough to live on.

We don’t ask whether they organise their lives badly: we don’t judge whether they could do things better. It may well be that, with our knowledge and, perhaps, superior education and intelligence, we could find a way out of poverty if it was us who was suffering it.

What we do is to offer as much advice and as much what’s called ‘signposting’ as we can, to organisations such as Christians Against Poverty, so our clients can get as much practical help as possible.

But, when it comes to a brother or sister in need, we try to follow Jesus’ advice, not to judge, not to be judgmental. The first thing is to feed them. Then we can try to see if there is a way for them to get out of the poverty trap. But it is never OK to blame a poor person for being poor.

Why should you agree? Why should you not feel that some people are more deserving than others? I suggest that S. John, in this saying, ‘Whoso hath this world’s good,’ and so on, is linking compassion for the needy with Jesus’ – and the Jewish law’s – first commandment, to love God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. If you are not generous to the needy, then, S. John asks, how can you have love for God in you? Love God, and love your neighbour. But if you don’t love your neighbour, then it means you don’t love God either. As S. John says, in this wonderful lesson,

My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.

Sermon for Mattins for Harvest Festival at St Mary’s on 21st September 2014
Deut.8:1-10, 1 Cor. 15:35-44

Apparently many children today are not quite sure where sausages or chicken nuggets or hamburgers come from. They even have the same sort of difficulty with beans, especially baked beans. They think that perhaps they come from a special chicken nugget or baked bean factory! There is often consternation when the truth comes out, and they realise that they are eating what was once a bird, a chicken, or a cow – and that the delicious tomatoey baked beans were actually rather boring white things when they were harvested.

Some children even think that food somehow miraculously materialises from the supermarket, that Waitrose or Sainsbury’s is where chicken nuggets and the other favourites come from: and they don’t really look behind that.

Harvest Festival is a time for some gentle correctives to these thoughts. There are a few prize marrows and other large, improbable vegetables which people have grown in their gardens and which they bring to church in celebration of the fertility of their garden.

But the children’s greatest source of food, the supermarket, also provides a lot of the food which we bring to church at Harvest Festival, in tins, in packets, in bags: and leaving aside for the moment the question where the food came from, we can say that another important thing about Harvest Festival is where the food is going to go: that we intend to give the food to people who don’t have enough to eat. That’s fine.

But I sometimes wonder whether it’s not just children who, in a way, think that food just comes, just comes from the supermarket, and don’t look behind it to piece together the full creation story.

It’s rather tempting, even for us, not to worry where the food comes from, if the food just comes. Most of us are fortunate enough to have enough money to be able to go into Waitrose or Sainsbury’s, or to the fish van, to the Patisserie or to Conisbee’s or to the Surrey Hills butcher in Oxshott – and just pick up the food that we need, that our families need.

Because we’re grown-ups, we know that the meat and the fish don’t just come from steak trees or salmon bushes, and we know that peas and beans have to be grown and harvested. We’re pleased when the beans come from a farm in Surrey or Sussex. We sort of don’t mind when the beans come from Kenya, because we feel we’re helping to support the economy of a poorer country by buying their beans – and they are very good beans.

Some people say, in the light of this, that there’s not much point in worrying about the question of creation. They look at the creation stories in Genesis – God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh – and they dismiss it all as being just picturesque stories with no scientific basis in fact.

They go further than that because they say that just because the Creation story in Genesis is clearly just a story, and we now know better about how things are created, as a result of Darwin’s work, for example: that things just evolve, and through the principle of the survival of the fittest, they get better, more apt for their purposes, as each generation comes forward; because of that, there’s no need to think about a creator or a sustainer of life.

The stuff just gets made, it just grows, it turns up at Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, we buy it and we eat it. There’s no need really to think about a creator any more. Things just work anyway. That’s what people say.

But imagine that you could in fact construct all the physical bits that go to make up a living thing, say, a seed for potatoes. Supposing your seed had all the right biological makeup so that it was just like a naturally occurring seed. And if you planted your synthetic seed in the ground alongside a naturally occurring one, what would happen? I’m pretty sure that in the current state of knowledge at least, our synthetic seed would not grow. There is no spark of life in it, whereas a naturally occurring seed, which has been grown in a nursery, Tozers for example at Pyports, will, if you plant it and water it, have a very good chance of growing into a plant and having life.

St Paul makes the distinction in his 1st letter to the Corinthians, chapter 3: ‘I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.’ It does seem to be still true that God gives life. We can infer our way back to the presence of God precisely because we can’t ultimately create life.

We can create all the things which may give rise to life: we can mess about with genetics so as to create cloned sheep like Dolly; we can certainly interfere with genetics by selective breeding; but what we can’t do is to provide that spark of life.

For many people who feel there’s no need to look behind the supermarket, that might tempt them into becoming atheists. No need to bother with a creator. No need to think about how that creator might regard us, if you think there is no need to be concerned about how and why our supermarket basket can be filled with such wonderful things. I’m afraid that accounts for quite a lot of people today.

But supposing you turn the thing on its head, and you say clearly that, although we know it grows, we don’t know what starts it growing, what that spark of life is, that makes a real seed, a naturally occurring seed, grow, whereas the synthetic seed, which we have made up from artificial materials, stays inert. If we accept that it is God the creator at work, then all of a sudden the idea that all you need to bother about is how you get hold of things, from the supermarket or wherever, not where they ultimately come from – all of a sudden, that idea becomes very inadequate.

Because if there is a creator, if we accept that there is a creator, that our seed will not grow unless God gives the increase, then it’s very difficult to ignore the presence of the creator. Moreover, because creation, and what we would now call sustainability in creation, clearly does happen, because seeds do grow, we can see the tracks of God. We can see God at work.

The harvest shows us that God is sustaining our world. It’s another dimension, a spiritual aspect, to what we see and enjoy. Hence the various places in the Bible which suggest that the physical things, which we use or which nourish us physically, are not the only things we need. ‘Man does not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ comes in Deuteronomy, in our first lesson this morning, and Jesus quotes it when he is being tempted by the Devil in the wilderness [Matt.4:4].

And then – you see – it all goes much further. St Paul realises that the power he sees at work in creation, what makes the seed, just a bare seed, grow into something quite different, is the key to understanding – well, maybe not fully understanding, but believing in, the resurrection of the dead at the end. The key is how God’s creative power transforms and grows things. ‘Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed’ (1 Cor. 15:51).

Now, what price your scientific scoffing, the sort of thing Richard Dawkins says here? If you can just ignore creation, and get the wherewithal for your life just from the supermarket, is that enough? Would you really want to pass up the possibility that there is so much more, that you can have so much more?

I say that we should see harvest, by all means the harvest here at Harvest Festival, and the harvest we can get any time from Waitrose, as signs of something altogether greater. It’s not just what you pay at the checkout. There is an eternal checkout to consider too. ‘It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: … It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.’ So remember –

We plough the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land.
But it is fed and watered
By God’s almighty hand. M.Claudius, tr. Jane M. Campbell

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the 8th Sunday after Trinity, 10th August 2014
Acts 14:8-20

I went to two memorials this week. The first one was to remember the start of the First World War, to give thanks for the self-sacrifice and bravery of the people from this community who served in that war.

The second was much more personal. It followed a Nigerian custom that, if a person dies, they hold a memorial service for them ten years later, ‘ten years on’, to recall them to mind and to celebrate their lives. They were a charming young couple who had come to St Andrew’s about the time of the Millennium, with a couple of small children. Both originally from Nigeria, but brought up in England. Rather glamorous, successful young people. I had begun to know them slightly, over coffee after the 10 o’clock service.

Then, at the age of 38, with absolutely no warning, he had an asthma attack which brought out a latent defect in his heart, and, despite the hospital’s best efforts, he died. It must have been terribly tough for his widow; and it was terribly tough again, earlier this week, when she was called upon to deliver a tribute to him in the service and to play host at a fine reception afterwards, to celebrate his life. He would have been very proud of her.

The First World War commemoration was in a sense a commemoration of something which didn’t really make sense: and for sure, the second was commemorating someone who had been taken away far too young. No logic, no justification for what happened, there either.

Although, in relation to the First World War, you can say that there were important principles at stake, upholding alliances, protecting weaker countries against aggression, and so on, there was no big, overriding reason for it, like the fight against Nazism in the Second World War.

The First World War was said to be ‘the war to end all wars’: but quite patently, this was not true. We are still surrounded by warlike behaviour, the resort to force and violence, when reason has failed.

In Gaza, we are invited to support the Disasters Emergency Committee’s appeal for rebuilding and relief. I hope that we will all be generous, because the need is huge. But it did occur to me, when I heard the appeal being made on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee on the wireless, that it is extraordinary that Israel is not being asked to pay for the damage which it has done.

Israel is a rich nation, with one of the most powerful armies in the world. They have destroyed large parts of Gaza, in circumstances where it is doubtful whether they had any right to do so in international law. Will the Palestinians be able to send the Israelis a bill? I hope so. But I rather doubt it. It would be nice to think that the International Court of Justice could entertain a claim for damages.

Some people locally have been giving to support a Palestinian village, Wadi Fuqeen. Wadi Fuqeen is at the bottom of a hill, in a valley. At the top is an Israeli ‘settlement’, illegally built. Not only does the settlement – and by the way, you shouldn’t think in terms of some kind of pioneer encampment when you talk about settlements: you should instead have a picture of something like Milton Keynes – not only does the settlement divert away most of the water which used to feed the village of Wadi Fuqeen, but also they have arranged their sewage system so that the outfall flows over the fields farmed by the villagers. And of course the so-called security barrier – the wall – passes between the fields, where the village farmers work, and their houses where they live. So even if you do have some unpolluted agricultural land, it will take you a long time to reach it.

None of this, of course, justifies Hamas firing rockets at the Israelis: but I think you can understand the frustration and sense of injustice which might have prompted them to do it. I believe that there are many other stories like that of Wadi Fuqeen in Palestine.

The common feature of all these episodes is that, when diplomacy fails, when people haven’t persuaded each other by normal rhetoric and argument, then they may well resort to violence.

It’s interesting that St Paul on his missionary journey, from Antioch to Iconium and then to Lystra and Derbe, had a disagreement, a running disagreement, with some of the Jews that he met on the way. He was a travelling preacher, and his practice was to preach in the local synagogue.

He came into conflict, not only with devout Jews, but also religious competitors, competitors for the title of being true prophets. It’s interesting how St Paul dealt with them. We don’t get descriptions of him having some kind of Socratic dialogue with his opponents, at the end of which they were persuaded by rational argument. Instead, when he came across Elymas, the false prophet, the magus, the seer relied upon by the Roman governor, he didn’t try to persuade him, but instead he just made him temporarily blind (Acts 13). It may be that, if he could do this, he was thinking of his own temporary blindness, which of course was the prelude to his coming to faith in Jesus. So perhaps he hoped that the same thing would happen to Elymas.

Then when he was about to preach to the people at Lystra, which in Greek folklore was supposed to be a place where the ancient gods, like Jupiter and Mercury, had lived, instead of simply offering reasoning and argument, he started off by doing a miracle. He healed the crippled man.

It doesn’t seem to take us any nearer to finding an answer to the big question which keeps coming up today. How can we resolve disputes and differences, especially when they concern where your home is, where you live, what laws you obey – or which god you worship?

The depressing thing is that it always seems to come back to violence. Even for poor St Paul. At the end of our lesson in Acts 14, it’s almost mentioned in passing, but nevertheless it happened, that some Jews who had followed him from Antioch and Iconium, cornered him; they stoned him and left him for dead.

It doesn’t bear thinking about, the mechanics of what must have happened. St Paul must either have been protected by God, or have been unbelievably lucky, because miraculously he survived. It’s not claimed as a sort of resurrection event, but it must have looked like a miracle to the Christian congregation.

What Paul preached was not a clever argument, not conventional wisdom: he said, ‘We bring you good news, that you should turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.’ [Acts 14:14].The true God had showed Himself, had showed that ‘he has not left you without some clue to his nature, in the kindness he shows: he sends you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons, and gives you food and good cheer in plenty’. [Acts 14:17, NEB]

When I think about my friend’s commemoration of her late husband, it shows how what Paul preached about can work. How did the young widow with two small children cope with the loss of her husband before he was 40? How has she found the strength, over the last ten years, to bring those two children up so well – one is just starting in the sixth form, and the other has passed the exams and takes up a place at St John’s this September?

How did you do it? I asked her once. It was so unfair – why did it have to be her husband? But she said quietly, ‘My faith really helped.’ She trusts in God. She prays. It’s not easy. But her prayers are answered.

We mustn’t forget God, when these crises press in on us. In Gaza, what would Jesus say? What does God want us to do? God said, ‘Thou shalt not kill’: Jesus added the generous words of the Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. So Israel must not automatically retaliate, if the Palestinians in desperation fire off old Soviet Grad rockets, which the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile defence system easily intercepts. Israel must not automatically retaliate, still less retaliate with overwhelming force.

But how can we get this message through to them? Just as Paul didn’t try to reason, so much as to bring in God’s power, to demonstrate His presence, so we must pray for the Holy Spirit to bring these warring parties out of their blindness. We Christians have a distinctive message to give, which in a sense is not logical. It must no longer be OK to reciprocate, to hit back. Violence does not change people’s minds. The point about Gaza is not really about whether a particular action taken in retaliation was ‘proportionate’. It is that any retaliation is wrong.

In these most important areas, perhaps there is no real logic. War is chaos.

‘Thou whose almighty Word
Chaos and darkness heard,
And took their flight;
Hear us, we humbly pray,
And where the Gospel-day
Sheds not its glorious ray,
Let there be light!’ [J. Marriott]

Our task as Christians is to keep sending this message of peace, to keep listening to the word of God in church and in prayer. Whoever is hurt, whoever is in need; whoever has lost their home: they are our neighbours.

Roger McCormick and his colleagues in what is to become the ‘CCP Foundation’ (see http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/conductcosts/contacts-2/) have produced research which shows that fines and damages paid and estimated for misconduct, in the 10 banks which they have studied, in the last 5 years have amounted to £157 billion worldwide. In the UK alone this amounts, on average, to nearly £6 billion per annum.

These figures are now being analysed further to identify whether any of the banks under review are improving their performance: and to identify criteria by which performance in this area can be compared, across different countries, markets and types of bank.

It is however clear that conduct costs, or rather the cost of misconduct, are a very significant impost on the cost of trade and the efficiency of the banking system, and are therefore, as a matter of public policy, a mischief which urgently calls for a remedy. Indeed even the bankers themselves recognise that there is an urgent need for public trust in their activities to be restored.

Given that such misconduct is clearly a bad thing, how is it to be stopped? McCormick tells a story to bankers and others at his seminars. Imagine you are on one side of a transaction, and you notice that your counterparty has made a serious mistake, which they have not noticed. The result of the mistake is that you will do much better out of the transaction than you would have done if the other side had not made their mistake.

What do you do? Keep silent and pocket the profit, or point out the mistake – and get what you would reasonably have expected to get out of the transaction, but no more?

Today, McCormick has said, many of those, to whom he puts the story, find it difficult to answer. It might be thought that their chief objective is to make money, to maximise profit. It is not part of their objective to do this in an ethical way. Instead, their only thought of ethical considerations is whether they will, by acting in a particular way, lay themselves open to regulatory sanction. The criterion is not whether it is bad to do something, but whether a policeman will catch me if I do it.

But regulators, almost by definition, offer no solution: we are, after all, trying to reduce the amount of fines and penalties. If we simply say that regulators should regulate less strictly, it would reduce the fines, but it would not necessarily improve the conduct. (We can observe in passing that in identifying the mischief which is banking misconduct, we have defined it by the amount it costs rather than by its moral badness – but it nevertheless remains a serious mischief.)

What is to be done? Lawyers will be familiar with the alleged antithesis between what is lawful, and what is morally right. The existence of that antithesis is, it could be said, a major factor in facilitating banking misconduct. It might look as though bankers’ conduct is determined not by any consideration whether something is morally right, but rather whether it is legally permitted – or whether, even if it is unlawful, whether there is a risk of being caught out by a regulator.

It seems that the only way to obviate conduct costs entirely is to improve conduct – morally. If it were true that a course of action needed to be both lawful and morally right, this would leave no room for moral arbitrage of the kind which McCormick’s story brings out.

How can this be brought about? I suggest that, as well as experts in the upholding of professional standards – such as members of the International Accounting Standards Committee, say – it would be helpful to invite the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to widen the scope of his activity, for example in the St Paul’s Institute, so as to include advice to and involvement with the Conduct Costs Project.

Hugh D Bryant
Reader (Licensed Lay Minister) in the Church of England; former Solicitor and Marine Underwriter

Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday after Trinity, 6th July 2014 at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Luke 18:31-19:10

When I was little, I was rather puzzled in Sunday School and in scripture lessons at school, when we came across Bible references to ‘publicans and sinners’ (the exact phrase comes in Luke 15:1 – KJV). I know that modern Bibles translate ‘publican’ as ‘tax gatherer’ or ‘tax collector’, but in the Authorised Version, which is the one I grew up with, they are called ‘publicans’.

Maybe it was my Methodist upbringing, but for a long time I thought that the Bible had it in for pub landlords – presumably, because they allowed the dreaded alcohol to be taken on their premises.

In time I learned the correct meaning. ‘Publican’ comes from publicanus in Latin: somebody who looks after publicum, the public, or state, revenue.

But I was still to some extent puzzled, why tax collectors should be singled out as being automatically, by their very nature, sinful. ‘. when the Pharisees saw it, [they asked], “Why does your master eat with publicans and sinners?” Matt.9:11, KJV.

And here is the same thing, in the context of Jesus eating with Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus the superintendent of tax gatherers. However much one may hate paying tax, it does seem extreme to equate being a tax gatherer with being a sinner, just because of what you do for a living.

Even the people who were tax gatherers, publicans, acknowledged the fact that they were sinners. Think of the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, both saying their prayers. The Pharisee prayed, ‘God I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican …’ The publican would only say, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’ (Luke 18:11,13, KJV).

It’s not obvious what the sin involved in being a tax gatherer was. It doesn’t seem to contravene any of the Ten Commandments. The Romans had privatised the business of tax collection in what we would recognise as a rather modern way. Publicans had to bid for franchises, the right to collect taxes in a particular place. They weren’t paid a salary. So long as they paid over to the Roman governor the amount assessed for their district, whatever they made on top, they could keep.

That made them uniquely reprehensible to their fellow Jews. I don’t think we would feel very warmly towards tax inspectors if they’d been privatised. Imagine – you might have a special division of Wonga, or nPower, collecting your tax. Instead of the tax office simply collecting what the government had decreed should be your tax liability, the Wonga Tax Division would charge a steep uplift on top of the basic tax price. Because they had negotiated an exclusive franchise for collection of tax in Stoke D’Abernon, say, there would be nothing you could do about it. You would have to stand idly by while these people made huge profits out of something which you might well think ought to be a government function.

So they were hated; so much so, that just being a publican, being a tax collector, was equated with being bad, with being sinful. Perhaps Zacchaeus had heard that when Jesus met Matthew, he had enjoyed a meal which had been attended by a lot of tax-gatherers. So Zacchaeus might have inferred that Jesus wasn’t automatically opposed to tax gatherers (see Matt. 9:10-11).

In a way, you might think it was a bit strange that Zacchaeus, being a top tax man and rich, would cast aside his dignity, run ahead of the crowd and climb up into a tree. Of course some people do clamber up into inaccessible places in order to get a better view of some VIP coming by. I wonder whether we’ll see people climbing into trees to get a better view of Sophie, Countess of Wessex, when she comes to open the Riverhill beautification on Wednesday afternoon.

Somehow I have a feeling that, although there will be plenty of rich people there, I don’t think they’ll be climbing up into trees. But Zacchaeus did – and Jesus spotted him in the sycamore tree. ‘Be quick and come down; I must come and stay with you today.’ (Luke 19:5). Said Jesus, ‘Because it’s imperative that I come and stay with you. [My literal translation].’ Not, ‘Would it be all right if I came and stayed with you?’ It’s an imperative; it’s necessary [δει] that I come and stay with you.

And Zacchaeus came down, and made Jesus welcome at his house. ‘He received him joyfully’, it says. But everyone who saw it ‘began to grumble’. There’s a wonderful onomatopoeic Greek word in the original here, διεγογγυζον [‘diegonguzon’]: what a wonderfully grumbly word it is! ‘διεγογγυζον’ – they muttered, they murmured, among themselves.

What they muttered was, ‘He has gone to stay with a man who is a sinner: a publican, a tax-gatherer.’ Then the story cuts to Zacchaeus’ house, because we hear – almost as though Zacchaeus knows what they are saying – that he reacts to it by doing good. The modern translation [NRSV] says he said, ‘Half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor… and if I have defrauded anyone .. I will pay back four times as much.

The Greek doesn’t say that. The Greek says, ‘I am giving [διδωμι] half my money to the poor … and I am repaying four-fold’ [αποδιδωμι τετραπλουν].

I think that’s quite important. There isn’t any conditionality to it: no if something-or-other, then I will do something. He’s saying, ‘I am doing it.’ If it was, ‘I will do it, I will give half my money to the poor, and if I have ripped anybody off I will give them back four times what they gave me’, then it would look like a sort of a bargain. Look, Jesus: if I give half my money to the poor or if I give compensation for all the exploitation I’ve done, will you let me into the Kingdom of Heaven? Will you forgive me my sins?

But that’s not what he says. Jesus has already said he wants to come and stay with him. Indeed, he must stay with him, he says; and Zacchaeus has received him gladly. So it’s not a question that Zacchaeus needs to do things, in order for Jesus to want to come to him, to be at home with him. That has already happened.

It’s more a question of how Zacchaeus reacts to Jesus being at home with him. Having Jesus in the house makes Zacchaeus want to be generous and to right the wrongs which he has done.

So this is a parable, a piece of Jesus’ teaching, not just a nice story of a little chap in a sycamore tree. If you compare Zacchaeus with the blind man, whose faith has made him whole, just earlier in the story, Zacchaeus is much more tentative. He’s not specially faithful. He’s just curious – which is why he climbs up in the tree for a better look. But he didn’t make any protestations of faith. He simply made Jesus welcome.

It’s a lesson which still holds good today. If we are open to the good news of Jesus – if we always ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ – then we will want to follow Him. We will want to go the extra mile, to make generous charitable gifts, to face up to things we’ve done wrong, and do more than we have to, to put them right. And it doesn’t matter if we aren’t especially good people. Indeed, we could be really bad people – but Jesus will still want to come and stay. Publicans and sinners. Could one of them be one of us?