In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Common wisdom says the most important things are priceless, that you can’t buy love, you can’t buy happiness, and you can't buy even a second of time. These are all true sayings in their right context. We might immediately shun the idea that the greatest and most important things can be bought, and I would even argue the reflex is a good one. After all, we cannot live thinking enough earthly wealth is going to earn us that which is most meaningful in life.

But what about salvation, or the Kingdom of Heaven itself? Can you buy salvation? Is there a price? Let’s consider it.

Today is Zacchaeus Sunday and according to the Gospel lesson, Zacchaeus is a very wealthy man. He is a tax collector, tantamount to a traitor in his day because 1) the taxes, he collected mostly went to the occupying Roman Empire and 2) a tax collector garnished their wages (and sometimes more) from the hard-earned money of the people. This will explain their response later on when we refer to them later. But basically, if something can be bought, it’s on good authority that Zacchaeus can afford it. But we learn something important about Zacchaeus (apart from his short stature) by his interaction with Christ, something not apparent to those around him.

Christ spots Zacchaeus in the Sycamore tree, which he climbed in the desperate fear that he would not be able to see Christ, afraid that he would miss Him. This tells us something important about Zacchaeus already.

Christ then says to him “Zacchaeus, make haste, come down; for today I must abide at your house.” That Christ would immediately invite Himself to Zacchaeus’s house tells us something else important about him; that Zacchaeus is already prepared to receive Him. At times, Christ showed great care not to over-invite, not to over-expose Himself to those not ready for Him, lest His very presence cause them great agony. He would often leave a place as soon as there was rejection and instructed his disciples to do the same. We see the agony of the Pharisees and those who did not have the ears to hear, but not Zacchaeus: Zacchaeus is prepared for Christ.

Then after he comes down from the tree, the people around him began to murmur. The people disapprove, somewhat passively in their grumbling and half-complaining. Most likely, they are using concern for Jesus and His well-being to mask their disapproval of Zacchaeus, from whom we find out something very important. Zacchaeus responds to the Master, and the crowd, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” Zacchaeus is actually a generous man, to the willful ignorance of the crowd, and more generous than the law requires already. And Christ responds “Today salvation has come to this house,…” 

Now we see the truth, that salvation CAN be bought, and Zacchaeus has already obtained it.

St. Maximus of Turin, a Bishop from the 5th Century, supports this. He says to us:

“Zacchaeus must be praised. His riches were unable to keep him from the royal threshold. He should be greatly praised because his riches brought him to the threshold of the kingdom. From this, we understand that wealth is not a hindrance but a help to attaining the glory of Christ. While we possess it, we should not squander it on wild living but give it away for the sake of salvation. There is no crime in possessions, but there is crime in those who do not know how to use possessions.”

Further, a following of the Gospel tells us in several places that Christ has no issue with us considering the Kingdom of Heaven as a possession, nor that it can be bought. He gives us parables showing this very fact: in the parable of the pearl of great price (Mt 13:45-46), a man goes and sells all that he has to buy it, and the same in the parable about the man who finds a great treasure in a field (Mt 13:44), selling everything he has to purchase that field.

And so the Kingdom of Heaven can be both bought and obtained. But the trick is realizing that there’s no worldly price; the wealthy have no advantage over the poor (perhaps even the other way around). Simply put, to obtain it, the Kingdom of Heaven has to be worth everything to us. Nothing we have can be considered truly ours and the more we give or serve others from what we have, however much or small it is, the more of the Kingdom is obtained. It takes the heart of Zacchaeus to begin.

And recall when we learned the first important thing about Zacchaeus: He was afraid that he would miss Christ, that Christ would pass him by. He acted out of a desperate fear of not seeing Christ, leading him to behave with abandon. That’s a fear we’re called to share, to be afraid of not seeing Christ every chance we get, leading us to consider that time with Christ as non-negotiable. Our gift today from St. Zacchaeus, who would go on to be an Apostle and Bishop of the church, is the knowledge there’s wealth enough to each one of us if we would be brave enough to use it for the glory of God. 

And you know, another piece of wisdom says that money doesn’t grow on trees. It would appear though that the Kingdom of Heaven might be found up in one. For Zacchaeus, it was a Sycamore that day; for us, it is the Tree of the Cross.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

- Rev. Fr. William Bennett, Pastor