forest hill 
November 2, 2025
Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
Commemoration of the Departed
"A Time to Party"
Yet another story about a tax collector this week! The parallels between this story and the one we read last week are striking. Once again, a hated government official is the recipient of Jesus’ grace. What’s Jesus doing, fraternizing with the folks that everybody hates?
Once again, the crowd grumbles. Tax collectors in Roman-occupied Israel are not the sorts of people we expect Jesus to hang out with. These are the sorts of people who made life unpleasant for Jesus’ friends. They had a reputation of enforcing the rule of the unjust occupiers, and feathering their own nests by overcharging the peasants in the process. And unlike last week’s story, which was clearly a parable (a fictional story about fictional characters, told as a teaching device), this one appears to be a real-life story about a real-life encounter. Apparently Jesus not only talked a good line; he actually followed his own advice!
If last week’s parable provoked a more abstract conversation among his audience, this one must have really got under the collar. We’re moving from theory to practice here! It’s one thing to talk in the abstract about how God might offer mercy to a repentant abuser; it’s another thing all together to invite yourself over for dinner to his house – especially when the “repentance” doesn’t even happen until after the dinner party is arranged. What if Jesus had invited himself to dinner, and Zacchaeus didn’t reciprocate by promising to change his ways?
Should we be eating dinner with the officials who cheat our friends? Should we even give the time of day to the people who stand for abhorrent values? How do Jesus’ actions here square with the “cancel culture” that’s so popular in our society today, especially among people with strongly held moral positions? Does this story offer any insight on how getting out of our social “bubbles” might lead to something positive?
How we interact with the people who do things we hate is a huge issue. We need to be cautious about seeing this story as a prescription for how we always ought to behave, of course. This is one incident, not a Divine Commandment. Would Jesus have eaten dinner with some tax collectors, and shunned others? Maybe the fact that Zacchaeus was up the tree watching gave Jesus an “in” that he could capitalize on? Maybe Jesus would have treated a different tax collector differently? How might we know? What would you do? How might we offer the kind of grace that Jesus offered to people whose actions we hate, without condoning the abuse? How do you know when someone is ready to make a dramatic change in their life?
Again… it’s a heartwarming story that’s a whole lot more difficult to enact in real-life. There’s no easy answers to those questions. But come noodle through some of the implications with us on Sunday, as we reflect on the nature and limits of God’s grace, and how that might shove us out of our own comfort zones.