A Different Kind of Life

Zacchaeus the Thief

Meanwhile, Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “I will give half my wealth to the poor, Lord, and if I have overcharged people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much!”
--Luke 19:8

The story of Zacchaeus is absolutely fascinating—a man encounters Jesus and his life and outlook are completely and utterly changed as a result. Yet I find that a great many people fail to recognize how significant the change really is. In order to fully grasp what is going on here, it is necessary to understand the backstory at work.

First of all, Luke states that Zacchaeus was a “tax collector.” Unlike our modern day IRS workers, who are paid by the government, tax collectors in Jesus’ day actually paid the government for the right to collect taxes in an area. Potential tax collectors would bid for the rights to a particular area, and whoever had the highest bid won the right to collect the taxes. Once the rights had been awarded to a particular area, that was the end of the Roman government’s involvement in the matter—as long as they received the predetermined amount of taxes for an area, they did not care how much was actually collected. So a tax collector made his profit on any additional taxes he was able to collect above and beyond his predetermined amount. Needless to say, these guys weren’t particularly popular. (You can imagine how well-liked a “chief tax collector would have been.”)

Second, you also have to keep in mind that Zacchaeus is a Jew. To become a tax collector in Jesus’ time was to essentially side with the Roman government against your own people—tax collectors were seen as traitors, heretics, and outcasts from Jewish society. Again, not a very popular position (although a very lucrative one.)

For the third element, let us return to the story itself. After he has encountered Jesus and spent some time around him, he states that he will give half of his wealth to the poor and pay back those he cheated four times the amount. Here’s the significance of this: to begin with, he’s giving half his wealth away off the top, no questions asked. Beyond that, there are three categories of theft in Jewish law:
1. Intentional theft—you steal it, and you sell it or kill it (in the case of livestock). You must pay back four times the amount.
2. Intentional theft—you steal it and you still have it. You must pay back double.
3. Disregard for property of another—you borrow something and break it or it is stolen from you. You must pay back the full amount.
So according to this scale, Zacchaeus falls into the second category. Yet he willingly places himself into the first category—why?

You see, he encountered Jesus, and in so doing he recognized for the first time the condition of his own heart. He recognized what his wealth had done to him and the lives around him, and he realized what needed to be done to make it right.

This is a complete and utter change of heart and life—this is what happens when someone authentically encounters Jesus.

Between Friends

(This is an interesting thought from Brennan Manning’s book A Stranger to Self-Hatred)

A fellow Franciscan once challenged me: “Do you ever reflect upon the fact that Jesus feels proud of you? Proud that you accepted the faith that he offered you? Proud that you chose him for a friend and Lord? Is he proud of you that you haven’t given up? Proud that you believe enough to try again and again? Proud that you trust that he can help you? Do you ever think that Jesus appreciates you for wanting him, for wanting to say no to so many things that would separate you from him? Do you think that Jesus can ever be grateful to you for pausing to smile, comfort, give to one of his children who have such great need to see a smile, to feel a touch? Do you ever think of Jesus being grateful to you for learning more about him so that you can speak to others more deeply and truly about him? Do you ever think that Jesus can be angry or disappointed in you for not believing that he has forgiven you totally? He said, ‘I do not call you servants, but friends…’ Therefore, there is the possibility of every feeling and emotion that can exist between friends to exist here and now between Jesus and you.”

What Happens at 4 am...

In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning, I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.
--Psalm 5:3

Let me just preface everything that I am about to say with the following statement: I hate mornings. I really, really hate mornings. It is my personal belief that nothing should ever start before 10:00 for any reason.

With that in mind, I woke up this morning at 3:30 am. I didn’t wake up because of a noise in the house (no more than usual), or because it was hot in the room (which is a shock for me), or even because I was in an uncomfortable position (even though I was—thank you very much, dog). I just woke up, and simply could not get back to sleep despite my best efforts. So, after a half-hour of laying there in futility, I decided to just give up on it and get up. Keep in mind that even though I am wide-awake at this point, I’m not really happy about it—in my mind, there is no acceptable reason to be up at 4 am.

But I discovered something this morning, something that I knew but had never really experienced firsthand. It is really still and quiet in the morning—particularly the 4:00 am part of the morning. I think that today was the first time in my life that I have ever been completely awake at this time in the morning, coherent enough to really take in the experience.

As I said, everything is still and quiet in the morning. It was one of those kinds of quiet where you could almost hear your thoughts out loud; a quiet where there is absolutely nothing to distract you from contemplating God, your life, or anything else. I understand now why monastic orders throughout history have placed such an emphasis on this time of the day—there are no distractions, no pressures, nothing to interrupt the peaceful moments that God longs to give us.

It was at that point I realized—when was the last time that I have been absolutely still before God? When was the last time that I didn’t come to him in a rush, demanding solutions to my problems or solutions to my suffering? When was the last time that I simply sat in his presence and waited on Him to speak?

I honestly don’t know, but I know after today that it has been far too long.

Reconciliation as Worship

So if you are standing before the altar in the Temple, offering a sacrifice to God, and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there beside the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.
--Matthew 5:23-24

I have been thinking a lot lately about how the church/Christianity is viewed by modern society—how the world looks at us who claim to follow Jesus. I am interested in the impressions that we give to the world, the stereotypes we carry (or contribute to, unfortunately), and the way that we live out the faith that we claim.

One of the charges that I have seen leveled against followers of Jesus is that we are only interested in “religious stuff”—that we lack an authentic connection to or concern for the “real world.” In the same vein, it seems that God is viewed in a similar light; after all, if his people are only concerned with “church stuff,” then it must be that that is all he cares about as well, right?

Yet here Jesus goes completely against the grain on this idea. Keep in mind that in the Judaism of his day, offering a sacrifice in the Temple was the foremost method of worship to God—it didn’t get any more “religious” than that. Offering a sacrifice was the most important thing that you could do religiously. But essentially Jesus tells this crowd, “Even if you are doing the most important ‘religious’ stuff that you can do, if you remember that there is reconciliation that needs to happen between you and another person, then that takes precedence. Go and do it, then come back and do the religious stuff.” It is a complete reversal of their framework.

So what do we make of this for today? After all, Jesus seems to be saying that our relationships with people—how we interact, how we treat them, what we do with conflict, and so on—are a crucial part of our worship and pursuit of Him. Put simply, that if we claim to be following him, then it must bear fruit in the way that we deal with other people. If we believe what Jesus seems to be saying, then it seems that perhaps the “religious stuff” is not nearly as important to God as is commonly assumed.

What do you think? Have I blown this out of proportion, or is reconciliation really that important?

What's in the Tank?

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
--John 3:16

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. You win the lottery. (A nice start to any hypothetical story, eh?) You decide you want to do something nice for a friend, so you decide to buy them a gift—a new car. (Hey, you hypothetically won the lottery; so buying a hypothetical car shouldn’t be a big deal, right?) Excited, you take them the new car and tell them that everything is taken care of, and all they have to do to enjoy this fantastic car anytime they want is to put gas in it and go.

You check back with them a few days later to see how they are enjoying it, only to find out that it isn’t working, hasn’t been working, and in fact is now completely broken. Needless to say, you would be a bit stunned and concerned. (Come on, you spent good hypothetical money on this hypothetical car.) You ask them, “What happened?” and they tell you, “I don’t know—I put gas in the thing, and it started making all kinds of funny noises and smells and finally just stopped working altogether.” After a few more questions, you discover that they filled the car with diesel rather than gasoline.

It doesn’t require a whole lot of automotive or mechanical knowledge to deduce that the root of their problem lies in the fact that they tried to power the car with the wrong thing.

Let us now return to the question from yesterday—whether or not the easy explanation for our twisted view of love is the end of the matter. Is it really the case that our selfishness is a sufficient explanation for how we can “fall in love with love?”

I would say no—not because our selfishness isn’t a factor, but rather because the easy explanation doesn’t explain the depth of our insatiable desire. You see, we are all well aware that regardless of how many (good or bad) relationships, friendships, or sexual encounters we have, our desire is never sated—we remain unfulfilled. Yet at the same time, we are unable to abandon the idea of perfect, fulfilling love; whether or not we are willing to admit it, we all search for a “soulmate”—someone to fulfill our every emotional and relational desire.

Put simply, our idea of love doesn’t work because we fill it with the wrong thing.

It is not that our feeling/idea of love is expecting too much, it is that we are expecting it from the wrong source. You and I were made to experience a dynamic, all-encompassing, life-changing, pervasive kind of love. Yet if we don’t seek that love in the right place, then we will be perpetually disappointed (as well as increasingly self-serving and destructive toward the object of our affections).

Thoughts?

Me or the Thought of Me....

Who do you love?
Girl I see through, through your love
Who do you love?
Me or the thought of me, me or the thought of me?
--John Mayer, “I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)”

As I was listening to the radio on the way to work this morning, this song came on. It is now several hours later, and this lyric is still rattling around in my head. (At least I like this song—most of the time when this kind of thing happens, it ends up being a song that I despise.)

All that aside, it’s an interesting thought to consider. Have you ever loved the idea of someone more than you loved the actual person? On the flipside, have you ever been on the receiving end of this, had someone love the thought of you more than they actually loved you? To put it in another common phrase, have you ever seen someone (or been that someone yourself) who was “in love with love?”

Why are we like this? Why are we so addicted to this feeling of “love” that we are able to detach it completely from reality like this?

The easy answer here is that we are selfish creatures; that we twist our idea of love and who that love is to suit our own desires. It is easily proven that we suppress everything else in an effort to achieve our own pleasure and fulfillment. In such a scenario, specific people become little more than tools or opportunities for our own consumption and fulfillment. Yet is that all there is to it?

Is the easy answer the right one in this case?

Atheism is too Simple

(Today's post is from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. What do you think about what he says?)

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because a man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that they world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were not light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should ever know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

You Know Plenty--What Do You Want?

The Jewish leaders surrounded him and asked, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus replied, “I have already told you, and you don’t believe me. The proof is what I do in the name of my Father.”
—John 10:24-25

As I was reading this passage today, it struck me how remarkably similar it is to things that get said about God in contemporary society. Things like “If God is real, why doesn’t he just show himself?” and “Why didn’t Jesus just spell everything out exactly? Why do we have to have faith?”

I find it interesting that people in Jesus’ day asked him the very same things—but interesting for a couple of very different reasons. First, I think it is interesting because our society tends quite easily toward “chronological snobbery”—the assumption that people in ages past were far more ignorant than we are. I will freely grant that we are far more informed than they, but as any teacher will tell you, information and intelligence are nowhere near the same thing. We have a far greater stock of information—details about the world, laws about how it works, records of what has occurred—but I find it difficult to believe that we are any more intelligent as a whole than people of Jesus’ day. (See the dreck that passes as entertainment through most of our society for proof of this.) If for no other reason, the fact that they understood life well enough to ask the same question of God that we do lends itself quite strongly in this direction.

Second, I find it interesting that the Jewish leaders asking this question actually had God there in front of them in physical form to answer the question. We ask each other these questions, but they actually got to ask God himself. And what was his answer? “I’ve already told you.” That’s kinda frustrating, but it fits. He’s saying, “Look, I’ve already shown you enough to believe on—if you don’t want me on this basis, then you won’t want me regardless of what I show you.”

Once again, I see that it is not a question of knowledge or understanding, but one of desire. It’s not , “Do I know enough?” but rather “Is this what I really want?”

Better off Being Blind

Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”
--John 9:39

So we return to the question that I posed yesterday—is it worth it? Jesus heals the man who had been blind from birth, shows the religious leaders for the self-absorbed, power-hungry tyrants that they are, and causes a complete uproar in the town. Yet, is all of this worth it? Is showing the religious leaders for who they really are worth years of suffering by the blind man? Is this all there is, or is there more yet to the power of God that Jesus speaks of?

This leaves us to return to the man in question. After all, he is the one that has not only endured a lifetime of blindness “so that the power of God might be displayed in him,” but also has now had to endure the scorn, derision, and abuse of his community’s religious/social leaders. Is all that he has been through worth it?

I say yes.

In John 9:35, it says that after he was cast out, Jesus tracks him down and asks if he believes in the “Son of Man”—in other words, if he believes in Jesus as the promised Savior of his people. The man says that he does, and then worships Jesus.

Is he not better off now than he would have been had he not been blind at all? What we must recognize is that not only has he been cured of his blindness, but also has had the opportunity to intimately connect with God. He has been healed of a spiritual blindness as well as a physical one. He now is able to see in ways that those who have had physical sight their whole lives remain blind to; the power of God has been made real in his own experience.

This whole story leaves me with an interesting thought. We in American society tend to see suffering and hard times as things to be avoided at all costs. Without saying that we should embrace suffering, is it possible that our view of suffering lacks a bit of perspective? That perhaps it is more of a blessing than we realize?

Two Kingdoms

“Teacher,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it the result of his own sins or those of his parents?” “It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “He was born blind so the power of God could be seen in him.”
--John 9:2-3

As was mentioned yesterday, this is a difficult idea, a difficult picture of God to wrestle with. At face value, this not only depicts God as vain and capricious, but also extremely callous and self-serving. At any rate, it is definitely a far cry from the image of God that gets tossed around in religious circles of any type. So what is to be done with the quandary at hand?

In thinking about this whole issue, the conduct of the religious leaders struck me as not only curious, but equally callous to what Jesus seems to be saying of God. Not only are the religious leaders upset at what Jesus has done, but they are also mad enough to throw the man out of the community completely (keep in mind that there was no division in Jesus’ day between religious community and social community—to be an outcast in one is to be an outcast in both). And why are they so angry? In their own words, “This man is not from God, because he does not keep the Sabbath.” By healing this man on the Sabbath, Jesus violated their long-kept religious tradition; not the command of God, mind you, but their religious tradition. Think of it—these men were the leaders of the community and should have been celebrating the healing of a man who has been blind since birth, rejoicing at the end of his suffering. Instead, they react with anger and self-justification, laying on him a new kind of suffering caused by their desire for power and control.

And then it clicked for me. By their reaction, they displayed the difference between the kingdom of God and the religion of man. The kingdom of God seeks to ease the suffering in the world and rejoices in that healing, where the religion of man counts nothing more important than the preservation of its rules. The kingdom of God is driven by grace and mercy where the religion of man seeks power and control.

Yet the question that I am left with (which I will dwell on tomorrow) is the following: Is it worth it? Is showing the religious leaders for who they really are worth years of suffering by the blind man? Is this all there is, or is there more yet to the power of God that Jesus speaks of?