Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s, Metro Christian Zoom meeting (dated 11th April 2021). You can also follow our series via our YouTube channel.
READ: LUKE 19:1-10 (NLT)
A SYMBOLIC CHEESING OFF
In 2015, the fastest growing language in the UK was Emoji 😮 (in case you were wondering, last year it was Welsh). That may have been six years ago, but Emoji still remains, globally, one of the most used languages, with us sending, on average, 10 billion emoji a day![i]
To point out the obvious, we find using symbols and pictures a more potent and direct way of making a statement.
Why just tell someone you found that funny when you can put a 😂
Why use words to say you’re tired 😴, or sick 🤢, or sad 😥?
Jesus used symbols, too! No, I’m not talking about emoji. But Jesus did things that sent a message. He does so in Luke 19—a message that causes Jericho, as verse 7 tells us, to grumble.
The Greek word used (διαγογγύζω, diagoggyzo, de-ä-gon-gü’-zo), means to murmur, but this is not some internal, low volume, private grumble—the whole crowd murmurs. There is volume to this. They are indignant. They are brassed off. Aggravated. Annoyed. Irritated. Miffed. Or, to use my preferred way of saying it, they are cheesed off with what Jesus has just done.
What is it that Jesus has done? Is it just because Zacchaeus is a tax collector, someone who is seen as a traitor to his own people because he collects taxes on behalf of Rome? Well, that’s part of it, but it goes deeper than that.
In many middle-eastern communities (and many other communities around our globe), hospitality is a big thing. It’s crucial to be ready to receive guests and travellers, especially those deemed important. If someone important wishes to take a rest stop within your community, and you are not prepared to receive them, then that is a huge social insult to them, a communal slap across the face.
A traveller may not decide to stay, they may pass through—that’s OK. But in case they choose to stay, then it’s a wise move to have a place prepared.
So, if your community is going to receive a guest, then you’re going to have that important conversation about who houses them. You are going to pick the home, the family, that best represents, what you consider to be, the qualities of the community.
Why am I saying this? Because Jericho knows Jesus is on his way (in Luke 10:1, Jesus had already sent a number of disciples ahead of him to the towns he planned to visit on his way to Jerusalem), and Jesus may choose to stay, be it overnight or a few days. So, I’m going to suggest that Jericho already have somewhere prepared for Jesus to stay—a place they feel best represents the moral, religious, and social upstanding of their community.
I’m also going to suggest that when Jericho looked into the possible candidates for the honour of hosting Jesus, Zacchaeus would not have made the cut. From their perspective, Zacchaeus is something of a blight—they don’t want someone like Jesus staying with someone like Zacchaeus. He may live and work in Jericho, but he is not Jericho, in their eyes.
Like the blind man in the previous passage, who is hushed by the crowd around Jesus (a crowd from Jericho) (see Luke 18:39), they want to limit Jesus’ contact with certain people. They’re wanting push certain people out of sight like people sweep dirt under a rug. Or, as in the case of the Atlanta, when the homeless were forcibly removed from the streets prior to hosting the Olympic Games and other events.[ii]
They probably don’t mind them seeing Jesus, but they are attempting to build a wall around who has access to Jesus. But, like with Jericho of old, Jesus is not going to permit this wall to stand.
So, to go back to what happens in Luke 19: Jesus approaches Jericho. As per the custom, a crowd goes out from Jericho to meet him, and they accompany Jesus back to Jericho. Jesus then enters Jericho, and he makes his way through the town (Luke 19:1)—Jesus’ footsteps seem to indicate that he is not intending to stay. Again, that is not a problem. But, as Jesus passes out of Jericho, he stops below a sycamore tree along the roadside; the very tree that a tax-collector called Zacchaeus is perched within, and then Jesus calls Zacchaeus by name and invites himself to be a guest a Zacchaeus’ home. Then Jesus, and an ecstatic Zacchaeus, return back to Jericho to stay.
And the crowd are cheesed off. They have a place prepared, and they know that Jesus would have been aware of this custom. And now, Jesus, this so-called teacher of God, has gone home with someone they consider to be a notorious sinner, someone they feel doesn’t represent Jericho, someone they have pushed to the margins of their community.
What did Jesus do? To put it bluntly, Jesus has just insulted the town of Jericho.[iii]
TABLES OF RESISTANCE
This isn’t the only time when Jesus’ behaviour gets up people’s noses, either. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ eating habits are also murmured about within Luke 5:30 and 15:1-2. To use the opinionated words of complaint in Luke 5:30, Jesus chooses to eat with the kind of people others regard as scum!
Now maybe, we feel, people like Zacchaeus, who exhort money, deserve that term. Although, there is a good case that his community had misjudged Zacchaeus (I’m not going to explore that here, but there is an endnote).[iv] However, even if he was scum, it would be wrong to believe that everyone these people branded as scum, or notorious sinner, deserved such labels. Like our own times, they are likely discriminated against, stigmatised, marginalised, or trapped within systems that rob them of real choice.
Whatever the case, Jesus eats with them and this habit irritates people. What does Jesus think he’s doing, and why is he purposely doing this? Well, he’s making a profound, symbolic statement about what the Kingdom of God is like: God’s Kingdom has come to seek out and dine with people like Zacchaeus!
As professor Christine Pohl points out, ‘Hospitality is resistance… Especially when the larger society disregards or dishonours certain persons, small acts of respect and welcome are potent far beyond themselves. They point to a different system of valuing and an alternate model of relationships.’[v]
In other words, Jesus used tables to send a message about the upside-down nature of the Kingdom.
Jesus understood the importance of eating together, and the transformative effect that an invitation, a welcome, can have upon the life of an individual or a community. Middle Eastern cultures have always understood this. Eating together in the Middle East isn’t solely about the necessity to feed. Sitting and eating together, sharing stories, being made welcome—these are the means of establishing and strengthening the bonds of a community. The table is the birthing place of relationship!
It shouldn’t surprise us then that, as a Middle Eastern book, the Bible is full of feasts and table symbols. To think of it from a certain perspective, the Bible is the story of God’s extended invitation for humanity to come and eat together, in God’s presence, at God’s table. From beginning to end, God has been trying to eat with us, and meals and feasts have always provided a potent way of speaking about that.
SKINS AND SACRIFICES
The story of the garden, way back in Genesis, already hints at this. In Genesis chapter three, after the Man and Woman have eaten the forbidden fruit, God comes walking through the garden seeking humanity.
You may notice that the narrative wants us to know the time of day for this divine ramble: God is walking in the evening time (Genesis 3:8). I’m not inclined to see this as a leisurely stroll in the cool evening air, especially when I consider that the main meal in Middle Eastern societies, the communal meal, traditionally takes place in the evening. The original hearers of this story (and those in the Middle East today) would naturally associate this time of day with eating together, and would have known what God was looking to do as he sought out humanity.
God was seeking to share a meal with humanity in the garden of creation. And despite the disruption caused by the discovery of what Adam and Eve had done, I don’t think God’s pursuit was prevented. Why do I say this? Well, later on in this scene, God is said to have made clothing for Adam and Eve out of animal skins.[vi] So I have to ask: What happened to the animal’s meat?
We can often treat the deaths of these animals as an afterthought; something God had to do in response to Adam and Eve’s sin. What makes more sense is that the meal of goat, or calf—or whatever it was—was already in God’s mind. God had come to eat with Humanity in the garden, and the Serpent’s attempt to sabotage the Creator’s dining arrangements—by getting Adam and Eve to snack on something else beforehand—fails, because the Serpent has overlooked the persistent, faithful, seeking love of God.
Yes, Adam an Eve’s sin has cosmic consequences. Yes, there are relational consequences between them and God, between Earth and Heaven, and between themselves. Yes, they lose paradise, and something of sin’s corrosive agency is unleashed within humanity. But what’s God’s response to the rift that Adam and Eve created? What’s God’s response to Adam and Eve hiding and running away? How does God seek to repair the relational divides? God prepares a meal and invites humanity to sit together, and eat together, with God.
It’s the meal—the communion of human and Divine—that’s the reason for the animal’s death. It’s not that God had to kill some innocent creature to enable God to forgive; God’s forgiveness and mercy are embodied in the Divine’s provision of a table.
All Adam and Eve have to do is except the meal God has prepared, and in embracing God’s invitation to eat, Adam and Eve are subsequently fed and clothed by God—they are transformed both inside and then outside.
From that point onwards, the Bible is full of echoes and symbols of the invitation to commune and to feast with God. (We could think of the Cain and Abel account in this light, but time doesn’t allow).
To jump forward from the garden, the sacrificial system of Moses has, as its focal point, this same pursuit of sharing a divine meal together. Some, not all, of the sacrificial rituals called for an animal to be killed. But the carcass wasn’t thrown away as waste, as if the purpose of a sacrifice was to kill and animal and walk away. The finale of the animal sacrifices was a meal; the people ate these sacrifices together as a shared celebration of God’s merciful presence.[vii]
These sacrificial feasts with God were not a private, tiered or elitist affair, either. All of Israel were invited to attend these feasts and reciprocate God’s forgiveness through sharing their food with one another—and especially with those who depended most upon the sacrificial meals and the tithes: the poor, the outcast, the orphaned and the widow, those on the margins. Therefore, to eat with God had direct consequences for the health and bonds of the wider community.
This is why bringing defective offerings, such as a sick animal, was considered such a serious offence within the sacrificial system. To give disease-ridden food to God as a sacrifice also meant feeding those is need rancid and potentially fatal food. There’s no love for your neighbour in such an act. There’s no desire for communion if you’re content with putting poison in the mouth of your kith and kin. Such acts, passionately rebuked by the Old Testament prophets, spat upon God’s dream of sitting and eating with humanity, they distorted the expression of God’s rule.
Like the Mosaic sacrifices and the story of Adam and Eve, the Prophets also used the imagery of a divine table when they spoke of God’s reign on Earth. The prophet Isaiah, for example, imagined God’s Kingdom resembling a great banquet, in which all the nations of the world sat in unison together in the presence of God: ‘In Jerusalem, the Lord of Heavens Armies will spread a wonderful feast for all the people of the world. It will be a delicious banquet with clear, well-aged wine and choice meat. There he will remove the cloud of gloom, the shadow of death that hangs over the earth. He will swallow up death forever!’(Isaiah 25:6-8a, NLT, 2015 ed, italics mine)
John, in Revelation, echoes that banquet from Isaiah. John sees the culmination of God’s kingdom as a lavish wedding ceremony. As an angelic messenger tells John, ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb’. (Revelation 19:7-9a, NLT)
And let’s not forget those wonderful words of invitation in Revelation 3:20, ‘Look! Here I stand at the door and knock. If your hear me calling and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal as friends.’ (NLT)
GOD’S GUEST LIST
As I said, since the beginning God has tirelessly pursued a meal with us, and the symbol of a meal, a table, has always been a powerful way of talking about that redemptive hope, a way of talking about God’s Kingdom on earth. God has consistently called us back to the family table.
As the late screenwriter, Nora Ephron, apparently said it, ‘A family is a group of people who eat the same thing for dinner.’ That’s what God wants—for us to sit together and to sit with God, and share what God has provided.
Unsurprisingly then, Jesus intentionally tapped into these Old Testament images of meals, and dining with people was a non-negotiable in his ministry.
Jesus purposely went out of his way to recline and eat with people. Jesus’ table manners spoke with a sharp, prophetic edge into his surrounding culture. He purposely ate with those that others shunned. He shared meals with outcasts, prostitutes and the marginalised of his day. Jesus knew what he was doing. Jesus knew he was crossing over social barriers and divides. He knew the statement his eating habits were making!
And this habit frequently got Jesus in trouble because, according to his food critics, he was eating with the wrong sorts of people; he was choosing to dine with the unclean and the socially unacceptable. Jesus was inviting people they felt shouldn’t be invited.
But this never stopped Jesus. Leaning on Isaiah’s imagery, Jesus revealed that God had indeed come to feast with all people. Like God in Eden, Jesus was seeking people and inviting them to eat with God. Jesus’ intentional inclusiveness at mealtimes was the centrepiece of his declaration that God’s Kingdom had been birthed on Earth and that this is what it looked like and how it operated.
All were invited, and all are still invited, to partake of God’s invitation. And it’s important to remember that when we read this story about Jericho and Zacchaeus. When Jesus goes back to Zacchaeus’ house, he is not shunning everybody else—he’s inviting the whole of Jericho to come, too, including those Jericho wants to shun.
But it is they who shun Jesus’ invite. They refuse to partake in the inaugural feasts of the God’s Kingdom—they would rather grumble and complain, and exclude themselves. They refuse to sit and eat with Jesus, because embracing Jesus’ expression meant also having to eat and sit with those whom Jesus chose to eat and sit with, and they don’t want to sit and eat with the likes of them.
For those who already had certain convictions about who was welcome at God’s Table, for those who felt that they had earned or deserved a seat at the table, this open hospitality was a push too far; it insulted their sensibilities.[viii]
And if we are honest, God’s guest list also insults us, because it’s like God doesn’t have a guest list at all. God just invites and invites. It’s like God is saying, ‘Anyone and everyone is welcome. If you recognise your thirst and hunger, then come. Come and taste what I have to offer, and as you do so, you’ll discover what your heart has always been thirsty for.’ (cf. Isaiah 55:1-2, and Revelation 22:17).
‘This is what God’s Kingdom is like:,’ to quote the late Rachel Held Evans, ‘a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.’[ix]
Of course, we loved that message when we first heard it and responded to it. And yet, for some reason, after we’ve got our foot through the door, we can be tempted to thin that invitation down. Like the people of Jericho seeing Jesus head off with Zacchaeus, we too can grumble when someone says the words ‘all are welcome.’ We want to put conditions and prerequisites on it, like change.
Now sure, what we’re eating at God’s table, what we’re tasting and digesting, nourishes us and works in us and finds expression in our life. But the invitation precedes any change in our lives, and it’s the invitation and meal that stimulates that change. Change is important, absolutely; God wants us to bear the divine image. But it would be blasphemous for any us to tamper with God’s invite.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a sermon called The Drum Major Instinct, once remarked, ‘[Any] church that violates the “whosever will, let him come” doctrine is a dead, cold church and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.’
I’d go further than that, and say that any church, any Christian that violates the ‘whosoever will, let him come’ doctrine is just mirroring the preferences of our day and age, and doesn’t look a thing like the upside-down kingdom of God, and neither does it imitate the life of Christ, and nor does it bear God’s image.
[i] For more life-changing emoji facts, see 😄 95% Of Internet Users Have Used An Emoji. Over 10 Billion Emojis Are Sent Daily – South Florida Reporter
[ii] See As Olympics Approach, Homeless Are Not Feeling at Home in Atlanta – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[iii] Theses cultural insights, and their particular thrust into the story of Jericho and Zacchaeus, were gleaned from Kenneth E. Bailey’s wonderful, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. It’s a great book, and I would highly recommend it.
[iv] It could be that Zacchaeus wasn’t as bad as we thought. Scholar, Amy-Jill Levine, points out that, in the original Greek language, there is no future tense in Zacchaeus’ words to Jesus in Luke 19:8. In other words, there is no will. In the Greek, Zacchaeus is saying, ‘I give half my wealth to the poor and, if I overcharge, I give them back four times as much.’ Zacchaeus, in this statement, is affirming his present observance to such Torah as Exodus 21:37. If this is the case, then he’s been wrongly judged by his community and discriminated against; they presume he is corrupt because he’s tax collector. Therefore, Jesus’ visit and words of salvation have provided a forum for Zacchaeus to be heard by his surrounding community and for Jesus to affirm Zacchaeus as a son of Abraham with that community (see Amy-Jill Levine’s comments in New Cambridge Bible Commentary, The Gospel of Luke, p.511-512).
[v] Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, p.61
[vi] Genesis 3:21.
[vii] For example, see Deuteronomy 12: 17-27, 14: 22-29, 15:19-20, 16:14, 26:1-12. It’s this context of a meal that also sheds light on the sins of Eli’s sons, in 1 Samuel 2:12-29—they were stealing from God’s table, taking for themselves the best of the meat offered; meals that others had intended to eat together.
[viii] As writer Zach Hoag points out, ‘Jesus rocked the status quo by embracing the nones and dones of his day. And not just embracing them but saying that the kingdom of God will be more like fraternizing with them than feasting with us.’ The Light is Winning: Why Religion Just Might Bring us Back to Life, p. 53
[ix] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church,
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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