Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 30 October 2022.
• First Reading: Habakkuk 1: 1–4 (Habakkuk’s complaint: How long must I call but you will not listen?)
• Psalm 119: 137-144
• Epistle: 2 Thessalonians 1: 1 – 12 (Paul’s confidence in the church in its perseverance and faith amid persecution)
• Gospel: Luke 19: 1-10 (Jesus and Zacchaeus: Today salvation has come to this house)
The cry goes up, ‘WHY?’ when we are confronted with war, deprivation, floods and all other natural disasters. It all seems so unfair – is God blind and deaf, or just indifferent? The proverbial clockmaker who wound up creation and then left it to its own devices, to run down into chaos and death.
For many, the experience of life has led them to just this conclusion so that they have abandoned faith – certainly in God but also in humanity itself.
For some, they believe in what they can see and touch, and in what others have said about science, but God is left out of the equation and morality is what is convenient in the sight of the most powerful and influential in the land.
Certainly when whole communities have been disrupted or have lost a full generation of young people, this has been thought.
I have to tell you that you are not alone and that the bible also records the same kind of thoughts.
Habakkuk has exactly the same questions and he was asking them around 600 BC. Why was God silent and inactive in the face of wrongdoing and injustice? When there was destruction and violence, strife and conflict? The law was paralyzed and justice did not prevail.
But then he was asking more than why the weather had turned sour or the crops and livestock had failed. He was also asking about why human institutions, such as the law, had also failed.
God was not just a God of creation to be worshipped through fertility cults with their appropriate orgies and human sacrifices. God was also a God of order in all parts of the human realm.
He was a God of order in human relations and actions, transactions and attitudes, in human communities and their institutions. God was more than a God of creation – He was also a God of morality in all respects, from the most intimate aspects of personal relations to the actions of all organs of the state.
Now the question was becoming more pointed: why had human relations and morality failed so spectacularly? Wars are fought when two sides clash, people are oppressed when one stronger group suppresses another.
In this respect, nothing in human society has changed, and what was happening during the time of Habakkuk is so today.
And so we get to Jesus, coming to terms with the local tax collector in Jericho.
Tax collectors were there to do the dirty work of the land’s Roman occupiers, and to squeeze money out of their own community and kinsfolk. So long as they paid Rome the agreed sum, how they recovered their costs was entirely their affair and they could do what they liked – and many did just that.
So Zacchaeus, a short man anyway, had to climb up a tree in order to see Jesus because nobody in the welcoming crowd was going to do him any favours.
And so Jesus personally confronted a local outcast. And He met him, not with condemnation or criticism, but with an invitation to spend time with Him. Jesus would enter this man’s house – with His disciples, including Matthew, His own reformed tax collector – and they would speak together.
Jesus would speak and ask questions – and He would listen to the answers, and Zacchaeus would do likewise – and he would definitely listen to the answers.
But then Zacchaeus had no ground for any kind of personal confidence, certainly not in the presence of Jesus whom he was so desperate to see. Zacchaeus was already changing, his desire to see Jesus wenet far beyond anything he could imagine.
By the end of it, Zacchaeus was a changed man. He was acknowledged by Jesus as a son of Abraham – part of the community of Israel.
Sins could be and were forgiven – and the most despised man in the town was renewed in his self-respect, even if his fellow townsfolk might have wondered.
But more than that, Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem – to the cross, not to put too fine a point on it. There He would become everything that every cheat and bully and extortioner had been and done.
Jesus would take the personal blame for their sins, and God would vindicate that self-offering by raising Him from the dead.
The very thing that Habakkuk and millions like him had lamented, Jesus would become so that the right and full judgment of God might not be compromised, and He would do it in utter love and self-giving.
But there is another aspect to this, for in writing to the Thessalonians Paul assures them that there will indeed be a final reckoning. There would be a Day of the Lord and of Judgment.
The sins of those who had been determined to place themselves above any kind of morality or of judgment would be brought to an accounting, and those down the centuries who had mourned the ravages of hatred and violence of theft and corruption, would see satisfaction.
Justice would be done and be seen to be done. But mercy would also reign on those who acknowledged their rebellion against God and His provision for their restoration in His sight.
