So we can already identify with one of the most fascinating insider-outsiders in Scripture: Zacchaeus, the very short Jewish tax collector. James Alison (in "Jesus the Forgiving Victim") gives us a very perceptive psychological portrait of Zacchaeus, who knew Jesus was coming through Jericho (without plans to stop there) and so, seeking to see who Jesus was‚ climbed a tree. Alison explains
"The first is that he was a chief tax collector....Zacchaeus would have been something much closer to a quisling, a traitor, than a modern public servant. The Romans, as the colonial power, naturally wanted to tax their subjects. But they couldn't be bothered to set up a complicated bureaucracy of their own to do that. So they did something much simpler: estimated the revenue that they could squeeze out of a particular location in a year, and then sold the right to farm the revenues in that locality to the highest bidder. Thus they got a good proportion of the revenue that they would have got if they collected it themselves, but without the cost of enforcing collection.
"The revenue farmer became effectively the local enforcer of foreign taxation, and someone who would expect to profit from it. As you can imagine, such persons were not popular with their fellow citizens....Verbal darts like 'Profiteer' and 'Quisling', would doubtless have come zinging towards Zacchaeus' ears on a regular basis."
Zacchaeus is also both rich and short. We aren't told why he's rich: perhaps he was always rich, and thus able to buy the right to farm the taxes. Or he had become rich because of his zeal in collecting these taxes. "But the combination of these two factors - his position and his riches - already speaks to the complicated nature of his relationship with his fellow citizens. He is in fact in a dangerous situation: a half-insider, half-outsider - one of us, but also one of them; on the other hand, he is also rich, so the object of a certain fascination and envy, as well as perhaps of interested friendships in order to get occasional loans." (Alison.)
He is enough of an insider to have learned about Jesus and to be drawn by the same fascination as the crowd's to see this celebrity. Now ordinarily Zaccchaeus would be wary of his fellow citizens when they become a crowd. Who knows what any of them would do or say when they saw him? Who knows if, united by their hatred of him, they could be incited into violence? Moreover, he is short, and that much more vulnerable to being trampled by deliberate "mistake."
Perhaps another part of the drive and ambition in Zacchaeus could be fueled by his short stature: "always having to look up to people, to prove yourself, to be noticed, always being looked down on by people, accustomed to being made to feel inferior." (Alison).
Like the crowd, Zacchaeus seeks to see who Jesus is. But he's wise and prudent enough to climb a tree to do this so he's not in danger from the crowd. He positions himself in a tree on the route that Jesus is likely to take. Then Jesus surprises both the crowd and Zacchaeus. Luke the Gospel writer, tells us
"And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, 'Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for I must stay at your house today."
What? Wasn't Jesus just supposed to be passing through Jericho?!
And - Jesus is looking UP at Zacchaeus?! Seeing him in a place where he has carefully hidden himself so that he could see, but not be seen!
"Please consider how odd this is for Zacchaeus. Small of stature, he was entirely unaccustomed to being looked at from beneath by anyone at all. On the contrary, part of his complex relationship with everyone was that they looked down on him, and he had to look up at them. And yet here, suddenly and without any warning at all, for the first time in ages, he is looked at from underneath. He has no armor underneath. He has no habit of protecting himself from being looked at from beneath. He is well accustomed to deflecting less than friendly looks from above. But the only people who could conceivably look at him from beneath were infants and children, people not dangerous to him. And it is not any old glance that he now receives from beneath." (Alison).
The one who looks up to and at Zacchaeus from within the crowd is not a part of that crowd, not someone influenced at all by the crowd's potential for jealousy, fear, and violence. No, this Another calls him by name and looks at him with the gentleness and vulnerability of a child, seeking his hospitality. The crowd's reaction is predictable:
"And when they saw it, they all murmured, 'He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner."
Crowds can easily move from Palm Sunday to Good Friday when challenged by Jesus: from curiosity to adulation to rage at the One who refuses to bow to their estimate of who is good or bad, worthy or unworthy of a "good" person's attention and friendship.
But the man who, intimidated in advance by the danger of the crowd, had climbed a tree to safety, suddenly finds his new safety and worth in the gaze of Jesus.
"And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, 'Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.'
"...Zacchaeus is no longer cowed, no longer hiding, no longer small, no longer run by the way he was tied in to the crowd before." (Alison.) Now he stands tall. Now he chooses to reconnect with the people of Israel in a new way of "being together." He's not concerned with future accusations of goodness, badness, or impropriety. For Jesus says to him "Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham."
When I read these passages by James Alison, I reflected on them from this perspective: simultaneously every one of us is Zacchaeus, the crowd, and Jesus.
Once we can see that we also are part of a crowd composed of those who accept us, alternately accept and reject us, have opinions on all our beliefs and actions - once we can see our lives from this perspective, we can ask ourselves "How much am I run by the crowd in which I live? How much do their opinions of me and their lifestyles affect me? How much do their beliefs about faith affect me?"
We can also ask ourselves "What are the ways in which I interact with this crowd? Am I honest and straightforward? Am I independent in forming my beliefs? Or do I bow to or use and/or manipulate others, striving for status or success or money or a way to belong?"
Once we know in our hearts that we truly seek to see and know Jesus for Who He is, how do I go about it? Do I decide to see him from "my" crowd's perspective? A perspective which can be very fickle: praising him or growing angry at him because we don't like the way Jesus estimated the goodness or badness of a person?
Or do we "climb a tree?" Find a way to mentally, emotionally, and spiritually stand apart from the crowd so that we have a clear sight of our Master and can meet his gaze with open eyes and an open heart? Do we wholeheartedly believe that if we seek Jesus we will find him, and living with and in him we will have the strength to follow Jesus as our Way instead of the crowd as our Way?
If we do, Jesus will enter our souls as our honored Guest and remain with us forever.
But also we can sometimes be a part of that fickle and blind crowd. We can refuse to accept that, as Jesus adds to them, "the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost." The truth is that there are a lot of people who are lost whom we don't want to see saved - our crowd's "tax collectors": namely, those we consider our enemies. You know, those whom, if we admit it, we sometimes imagine consigned to hell-fire, even though part of us admits that they too are sons and daughters of God. Our society considers many of these people unreachable and unimportant: murderers, robbers, addicts, the violently mentally ill. So our society, our "crowd," warehouses them in prisons (often for-profit) and it's out of sight, out of mind.
We also can be part of the crowd which does not care to hear Jesus' other words, often based on the prophet Hosea's passage: "For I (read "God" here) desire steadfast love/mercy and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings."
Society - the biggest crowd of all - is very selective about who is an insider and who is an outsider. To this day, U.S. and Canadian society consider Native Americans to be outsiders, not worthy of love or mercy, for the simple reason that they are not White. They have stubbornly resisted our attempts to force them to be assimilated: to adopt our language, our religion, and our culture which, in our eyes, are vastly superior to theirs, and they refuse to throw over theirs. Do you think I'm exaggerating?
Native American Thomas King, best-selling author, and one of Canada's premier public figures - he has won the Order of Canada - recounts this story in his classic "The Inconvenient Indian":
"Speaking in 1892, at the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, Richard Pratt, a fifty-two year-old army captain, stood and told the audience how assimilation might be accomplished in a more humane and effective manner.
"Education.
"Pratt's plan was a simple one. North America would have to kill the Indian in order to save the man. "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man' was the exact quotation, and while it sounds harsh, it was an improvement on Philadelphia lawyer Henry Pancoast's 1882 suggestion that, 'We must either butcher them (Indians) or civilize them, and what we do we must do quickly.'
"For Pratt, the problem of educating and civilizing the Indian was not race or some defect in the blood. It was environmental determinism. 'It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage,' said Platt. 'He is born a blank, like the rest of us. We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization.'
"Now that's a pleasant thought.
"In 1879, Pratt opened one of the first modern residential schools for Indians (children) at the old Carlisle Army Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania....Carlisle was the first truly off-reservation residential school...to limit the access of Native children to their families and communities....The Carlisle model called for schools to be situated as far away from Native communities as possible. The model insisted that personal contact between parents and students be greatly reduced or eliminated altogether. It prohibited the practice of Native traditions and the speaking of Native languages. The children were taught to read and write English, encouraged to join a Protestant Christian denomination, and given vocational training....
(My note: there were Catholic residential schools also.)
"No one knows for sure how many Native children wound up at residential schools in the United States. Canada reckons their own numbers at about 150, 000, so the tally for America would have been considerably higher. But for the children who did find themselves there, the schools were, in all ways, a death trap. Children were stripped of their cultures and their languages. Up to 50% of them lost their lives to disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse - 50%. One in two. If residential schools had been a virulent disease, they would have been in the same category as smallpox and Ebola....
"...let's turn things around and ask a somewhat different question. What would have happened if the residential schools had been public schools instead? Schools in Toronto, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York. What would have happened if the children who were dying were White? What would have happened if one of them were your child?....
"Instead of trying to kill the Indian to save the child, North America might have gone into partnership with the various (Indian) nations, and together, they could have come up with an education plan that would have complemented Native cultures and, perhaps, even enriched White culture at the same time."
Which brings us round to Jesus' call to us to become other Christs. Can we look at others with the gaze of Jesus, come to others seeing them as having minds, hearts, souls, similarities, and differences equal in worth to our own?
Can we have the humility and vulnerability of the Jesus who met Zacchaeus by looking up to and at him? Can we call others by their true names, go to where they are to break bread and visit instead of constantly calling people to come to where we are?
So often, out of our insecurity or our pride we want to appear invulnerable and "perfect" to others, the ones whom others should try to emulate. We hesitate to reveal our weakness, our brokenness. Yet the Jesus we worship appears before all naked and on a cross, saving us by coming to us beneath our armor where our tears and fears lie. People are most blessed by us when we share our weakness, our brokenness - because then, equal to us, they can share their own.
If we are White, the great temptation is to believe the Crowd Lie of the perfect Dominant Culture, the perfect Promised Land; we're all too ready to make everyone over in our image and likeness instead of looking at the beauty which the "outsiders" already possess. We prefer conquest to partnership. We deafen our ears to God's cry "I desire steadfast love/mercy, not sacrifice" and we sacrifice others who are not Insiders to fulfill the Manifest Destiny of White America. Their burned homes and stolen land become our perverted "burnt offerings" to the false gods of progress and economic prosperity for the Chosen Few. To become an American does not mean to cast aside one's culture and adopt Anglo-European culture. People can speak English - and their Native tongues. They can enjoy Anglo-European culture and still preserve their own.
We are all by turns Zacchaeus, the crowd, and other Christs. May Christ open our minds and hearts so that we seek him and him alone as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. May we walk gently and humbly in this world, climbing beyond the violence and false values of the crowd, and approaching others not from a position of superiority but with equality of heart.