We began this Season of Origins questioning what really happened in Jericho during the days of Joshua and thanks to the lectionary we are ending in the city of Jericho as well. I didn’t expect this or even notice it until this week.

When we set out to design this new liturgical season we decided to stick with the established lectionary passages rather than go in search of new ones that were more conducive to our theme.

I wondered how the story of Zacchaeus might tie into all of this and didn’t make the connection till this week that he is the chief tax collector of the same city that Joshua was said to have conquered 1400 years earlier. That got me curious about the history of Jericho and when I get curious I go digging.

It turns out that thanks to its copious springs, Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the world. Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 20 successive settlements there, the first of which dates back 11,000 years to 9000 BCE.

Jericho is described all the way back in Deuteronomy as the "city of palm trees.” And from what I can tell, if Zillow had existed back then, people would have been checking out its listings all of the time. It was kind of like the Beverly Hills of the Ancient Near East. At one point it even served as the private estate of Alexander the Great (between 336 and 323 BCE).

Three hundred years later, Herod leased it from Elizabeth Taylor after Mark Anthony gave it to her as a gift. (Yeah, though I should say that I’m getting all this from Wikipedia, so some names and dates may be a little off.) After they lost to Octavian and committed suicide rather than submit to him, the new emperor granted Herod absolute rule over Jericho where he oversaw the construction of the hippodrome and new aqueducts to bring water to his winter palaces where he had his brother-in-law drowned during a banquet.

(So actually maybe it was more like 90210 crossed with Game of Thrones).

But you get the idea. It was a happening place and as such, it appears numerous times in the gospels.

Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan just 6 miles east of Jericho. He healed 2 blind men in Jericho (Matthew 20:29), set the parable of the Good Samaritan between Jericho and Jerusalem, and today, encounters a tax collector by the name of Zacchaeus in Jericho on his way to the cross. And not just any tax collector, but the chief tax collector of what was, apparently, one of the wealthiest cities in the region. So I think it is fair to say that Zacchaeus was not just “a wee little man,” as the song goes, but a very, very wealthy man to boot.

And this is an important detail because, as you may know, the gospel of Luke is not easy on the wealthy.

From Mary’s Magnificat where the rich are sent away empty, to Jesus’s blessing and woe’s in his Sermon on the Plain (6:24), to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, to Jesus’ heartbreaking interaction with the rich young ruler, you get the sense that the rich are the hardest people for Jesus to save. Indeed, when the rich young ruler walks away from Jesus in the chapter right before this one rather then give up his wealth to become a disciple, Jesus says straight out:

‘How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25Indeed, it is easier for (what? Anyone remember?) easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’

26 Those who heard it said, ‘Then who can be saved?’(Luke 18.)

And Jesus, having just failed with the rich young ruler and perhaps feeling a little put out said, “hold my beer.”

Well, not exactly. He said, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God,” before making a beeline for Jericho, the wealthiest place around, to do what he just said was all but impossible.

He finds the one guy in Jericho who was not only rich but filthy rich by such corrupt means that everyone would have regarded him as a lost cause, and invites himself over for lunch.

But here is where the story takes a turn for the unexpected, as stories often do in Jericho. Remember this is the same city where Joshua’s spies were saved by an unlikely partnership with Rahab, a citizen of Jericho who hid the Israelite spies from the king’s guard in her home and then helped them escape with the promise that when they came back with their army to wipe out the city that they would not harm her or her family.

She saved them and in return they saved her. Which makes a certain amount of sense except for the fact that the rationale for wiping out everyone in Jericho was to keep the Israelites pure - pure of the Canaanite’s foreign ideas, ways, gods, and religion. Pure! I know I mentioned this two weeks ago, but given their aim to purify the land, it bears repeating that Rahab was a sex worker. Her house was a brothel. One wonders how the spies ended up in her house to begin with…but I digress.

Which is to say that there is an irony here in the fact that the one person in Jericho who protected the spies and who they in turn protected - protected to such an extent that they allowed her marry one of their elders paving the way for her to become the great, great, grandmother of no less than King David - was both a Canaanite and a sex worker.

The Israelites were there to purify the land and take it for themselves but it was someone who they all would have agreed was anything but pure who helped them do it. It was only because they accepted the help of a “sinner” and welcomed a foreign enemy into their tribe, that they succeeded.

And now we have another highly unlikely scenario in front of us. Jesus has managed to find the chief tax collector of Jericho, but he is up a tree looking down at Jesus looking up at him.

Given his profession, Zacchaeus would have been considered a sinner par excellence, much like Rahab; at least as far as his neighbors were concerned. And, given his profession and extreme wealth, running ahead and climbing a tree to see Jesus would have been considered strange behavior indeed, so strange that it’s worth considering why he’s up in that sycamore before we go any further.

After all, no matter how short he was, there is nothing dignified about a grown man in his position behaving in this way. Furthermore, Luke tells us that when Jesus invited himself over, Zacchaeus “hurried down and was happy to welcome him.” He doesn’t just want to see Jesus, he can’t wait to host him; which is strange behavior for a sinner, is it not?

But what if Zacchaeus - whose name literally means clean or innocent - isn’t the sinner everyone assumes he is? What if he’s the pure one as his name implies?

The people begin to grumble - never a good sign in scripture - grumble about how inappropriate it is for Jesus to go to the house of a sinner when Zacchaeus - to everyone’s amazement - upends their assumptions.  This does not come through clearly in the New Revised Standard translation that we use, but when Zacchaeus finally speaks, he is not repenting but giving Jesus an account of how he already behaves.

Most scholars agree that it makes a whole lot more sense to translate his words in the present tense rather than the future tense such that what Zacchaeus is really saying in the greek is: “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor already, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

It turns out that Zacchaeus has already reformed his behavior not because he’s just met Jesus or been accepted by Jesus, but - and this is just my theory now, but I think it makes sense - in anticipation of the hope that he would someday meet Jesus.

Remember how I said that Jesus was baptized just 6 miles east of Jericho. Well at the beginning of Luke, when John the Baptist was preaching, he called the crowd to repentance in anticipation of the coming Messiah.

“Produce fruit in keeping with repentance,” cried John. “And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.

John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”

“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.

Friends, I think Zacchaeus was there that day. I think he listened to John and realized that being Jewish - a son of Abraham, a member of his tribe - was not enough. He went home that day with a repentant heart, turned his life around, and reformed his ways. And that is why, I think that when he heard Jesus was coming, he couldn’t wait to see him.

Zacchaeus is ready to meet his messiah. His heart is open and his conscience is clean. He may be the exception that proves the rule, but this particular camel has found his way through the eye of the needle and he has been living a just and generous life ever since his encounter with John.

Here, in the city of Jericho of all places, is a true son of Abraham. Salvation for the people has once again come to the most unlikely house in Jericho and been found in a most unlikely person. For if Zacchaeus is the one who has been wrongly judged then it is not Zacchaeus who needs to repent any more than it is Zacchaeus who needs to get saved.

It is, instead, all the “good” people who made assumptions about Zacchaeus and thought it was ok to shun him, who need to repent. It is all of the “good” people who judged him on the basis of what he was rather than who he was, who need to get saved by welcoming him into their hearts the way he is welcoming Jesus into his home.

Friends, I believe on this day at the end of this new season that this is a message we all need to hear, because whether we find our selves on the left or the right, I think the church as a whole has lost its way and found itself steeped in judgment and exclusion.

Today is a day to imagine a better future for the church on earth even as we anticipate a heavenly future where God will reconcile all things and all people to one another and to God. Over the past 3 weeks we’ve talked a lot about the damage the church has done throughout the ages whenever it has discounted people as less than.

I guess I’d like to imagine a church where we stop doing that, which for me means keeping my heart and my mind open to people within the wider church with whom I disagree.. disagree to such an extent that I judge them as sinners before they even open their mouths.

We are now so divided, not just in this country but in the church, that I have more in common with a progressive Jew or Muslim or Buddhist than I do with a conservative Christian, and that division is slowly but surely destroying us and everything we all hold dear.

I’d like to imagine a church where I don’t just grumble about those people, the way the crowd grumbled about Zacchaeus, but make room for them to speak their truth and room in my heart to listen.

Room to see and believe that there is perhaps more to their story than I know.

Room to see and believe that people can change.

Room to see and believe that you can’t judge a book by its cover anymore than you should judge a person by the tribe they belong to, the job they do, the church they attend, or the party they vote for.

Room to see and believe that when we write off one another, judge one another, exclude one another, or dehumanize one another, we are harming ourselves as much as we are harming those we other.

Because if there is one thing we see over and over in the Bible, it is is that our salvation is inextricably bound up in our relationships to each other.

What we are taught over and over is that how we love others, especially the other - whoever that is for you – how we love the other is how we love God.

I want to imagine a church where that love has the power to change us all till we become - not like each other - but more and more like the one Zacchaeus couldn’t wait to see and greet and welcome into his home. May what feels impossible for us mortals, be possible with God. Amen.

Footnote: From David Lose at Working Preacher: “it turns out those who translate the verbs as future oriented appeal to a grammatical category called a present-future tense. The trouble is, as my Sermon Brainwave pal Matt Skinner informed me during our podcast on this passage, the only occurrence of this verb tense is Luke 19:8. Yes, that's right: rather than translate this sentence in the present tense -- which of course would muck up interpreting this as a repentance scene -- translators have actually created a new grammatical category that occurs once and only once to justify their theological interpretation and bias. http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=1556