Healings in Jericho.

Luke 18.31-19.10

I.

            Jesus and his disciples have resumed their journey to Jerusalem.  But they decide to swing down to the left, into the mostly barren Jordan valley, and south towards the ancient city of Jericho.

            I get the impression that Jesus is trying to get through to his disciples the fact that he will be arrested, and abused, and killed in Jerusalem, and then rise from the dead on the third day.  It is possible that he repeated this often and the gospel writers only give us a few instances.  Whatever the case, the disciples famously don’t get it.

            Maybe they think he is just being negative and even cynical; maybe they think he is trying to pump them up so they will prevent this catastrophe from happening; maybe they think he is telling a worst-case-scenario, so that if anything better happens it will seem even more wonderful.

            Their response is confusion.  And that is a bit more honest than ours because, of course, we have heard the spoiler, we know how the story turns out.  So while the disciples kind of disregard this as Jesus being all mysterious and incomprehensible, we too are not particularly worried by these predictions of his suffering and death. 

            What we fail to realize is that these predictions are a completely consistent part of his ministry.  Giving his life is not something that Jesus only does on the cross; the giving of life has characterized his whole career so far.  When he blesses, when he heals, when he liberates people from bondage to demons, and when he teaches, the message is the same message we will receive when he is killed.  That is, that our life is about giving.  It is about giving our all.  It is about pouring ourself out in love to others.

            For the things Jesus talks about and does are revolutionary.  They will be seen as a threat to the established order.  Last week he advised the wealthy and powerful man to sell all that he has and give the proceeds to the poor, as a precondition of following Jesus.  That is not a message that makes any sense to us.  It is not something we want to hear.  It is a threat to those who have dedicated their lives to gaining things, and those are the people who have the authority in this world.

            So the healings and teachings of Jesus anticipate his murder.  They are all summed up in his death.  In his death we see that all of his life is about giving.  In his ministry Jesus is the perfect conduit, channel, vessel, and medium of God’s love.  But these all look ahead to his ultimate blessing, which is the final demonstration of the depth, height, breadth, and width of God’s love for us and for creation.  His shed blood represents the very life of God flowing through him and into our world.  It is not something new and contradictory or out of character that Jesus says here.  But even so, the disciples do not understand.

II.

            The entourage enters Jericho.  Jericho is an oasis at the center of which is a spring though which people were enabled to live in what is otherwise a desert.  It has already been a trading city for 8 thousand years before Jesus arrives.

            And Jericho is the scene of one of the great battles of what is called the conquest of Canaan by Joshua.  You remember the rudiments of the story.  The Israelites, after crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land, come to Jericho.  They walk ceremonially and silently around the city several times until Joshua gives the order and the priests blow their shofars, and the walls of the city come “tumblin’ down,” as the song goes.  The inhabitants of Jericho, except for Rahab and her family who helped the invaders, are all killed.

            Without making this a sermon on the fall of Jericho, I suspect we may have misread the conquest stories.  There is historical and textual evidence that what may have been really happening was an uprising of peasants and poor people of the land against the exploitative and violent, wealthy tyrants who walled themselves into these city-states in Canaan.  The local people, inspired by story of the Israelites’ defeat of Pharaoh, and by the egalitarian, decentralized Law that God gave them, join them when they invade, and overthrow the kings who had been oppressing them.

            In any case, in the time of Jesus, Jericho remained as a living reminder of the liberation of Canaan, of God’s power to bring victory, and of how God’s people need to maintain their trust in God to do justice.  Jericho stood as a perpetual warning about what happens when idolatry and injustice pervade a land; eventually you get confronted by God and God’s people.  Eventually there is a reckoning.

            Neither would it have been lost on anyone that the instrumental figure in the Israelites’ victory was Rahab, a prostitute, exactly the kind of exploited, victimized, abused, and marginalized person Jesus himself associates with.  This is the class of people for whom Jesus was a blessed way out of their tragic predicament.  These are the ones the rulers – of Jericho or New York – assume are defeated, wasted, objects of desire and violence, commodities to be bought and sold, and discarded when the rulers are finished with them.  They are too weak and insignificant for the rulers to even notice them… and yet it was Rahab whose information enabled the Israelites to gain the victory.

            Jesus knows and preaches that it is the weak, the gentle, the persecuted, the hungry, and the grieving who are the victors in God’s world.  Jesus chooses to launch his movement into Jerusalem from Jericho for a reason.

III.

            As Jesus and his group approach Jericho, they approach a blind man who is sitting by the roadside, begging.  He asks what all the commotion is, and when he is told that it is “Jesus of Nazareth” he immediately starts shouting at the top of his lungs, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 

            Even though people tell him it is “Jesus of Nazareth” passing by, the blind man calls Jesus, “Son of David.”  This reference to King David as Jesus’ ancestor is a political affirmation.  So Jesus’ reputation is not just as a healer but as a potential new king, and the blind man calls out to Jesus by this title. 

            Calling someone Son of David could have easily been taken by the rulers as an affirmation that Jesus is the new, true king, and thus a threat to them.  But maybe if you’re blind you get away with stuff like that.  It is the blind man who correctly sees who Jesus is, while the people with 20/20 vision only perceive Jesus as someone from Nazareth... not a complement.

            The people watching Jesus and his group come into the city tell the blind man to be quiet.  Was it because he was making a political statement that could get them all in trouble?  Or was he just too noisy and obnoxious, even though the crowd was surely pretty loud?  In any case, he only yells louder.

            Over the commotion, Jesus hears him and stops.  He has this man who has been yelling that he is the “Son of David,” brought through the crowd to him.  This finally shuts him up.  And when he is delivered to Jesus, Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

            That, of course is a loaded question.  What do any of us want Jesus to do for us?  This man knows what he is lacking, health-wise, and he asks for his eyesight back.  Our problem is that we often don’t know what we lack, so we ask for the wrong things, if we bother to ask at all.  The blind-man’s trust in Jesus is based on his affirmation of Jesus as king, and not an earthly monarch, few of whom developed reputations for healing or liberating anyone.  The blind man, because of what he calls Jesus and what he asks of Jesus clearly understands that Jesus is a different kind of king.  He is not the kind that lives in a palace and hands down laws; he is the king of the universe who has come to set things right and restore the creation to wholeness.

            Jesus recognizes this, and says to him, “Receive your sight; your faith has saved you.”    

IV.

            The crowd goes wild, as they say.  They are praising God, as the formerly blind man dances along.  They come into the city.  As they are walking along, under the trees, Jesus looks up and sees… a well-dressed man clinging to the branches up in one of the trees.  Recognizing him as Zacchaeus, a tax- collector, Jesus stops and calls to him.  “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”

            And the crowd, which had been jubilant, now turns sour.  Tax-collectors were hated functionaries of the empire, who made their living stealing from people, while being protected by the Roman army.  Jesus has made his reputation hanging around with sinners – “tax-collectors and prostitutes” describes his usual company.  This is the first time the people of Jericho get to experience Jesus’ scandalousness in this regard.  And they’re not pleased.

            He has just healed a man who practically hailed him as a new king.  Now he is socializing with a notorious collaborator.  The people are confused.  They expect Jesus to respect the usual political lines and boundaries.  Is he for Rome or against Rome? 

            Jesus doesn’t care at all about what the crowd thinks about him.  He has no regard for the usual political lines and boundaries.  He is actually far more revolutionary than merely wanting to overthrow Rome.  He wants to overthrow the reign of sin and evil in our hearts.  He cares about people, mainly people who are hurting. 

            Certainly Jesus has achieved a major buzz along the tax-collector gravevine.  Zaccheaus knows about him, and Jesus apparently knows about Zacchaeus.  When Jesus invited himself to his house, Zacchaeus climbs down, pushes through the scowling, grumbling crowd.  And he leads Jesus to his house, probably one of the nicest houses in all of Jericho. 

            Jesus probably has a long conversation with Zacchaeus over dinner.  After the meal, Zacchaeus stands up and addresses his friends, probably the wealthy and well-connected people of the city.  And he publicly says to Jesus, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”  That little “if” is a potential problem, but Jesus takes it.  Since defrauding people was the way tax-collectors made their living, we may assume that Zacchaeus is giving away almost everything he has.

            And Jesus says to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”  Remember last week, the rich man who comes to Jesus, but Jesus tells him it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle?  Well, here is a rich man who has entered the Kingdom of God.  He has done something impossible… but what is impossible for humans is possible for God.

V.

            The Son of Man has come to seek out and save the lost.  And it’s a good thing, too.  Notice that Jesus refers to himself here not as being from Nazareth or even as “Son of David.”  He uses the term which we traditionally render as “Son of Man.”  In Greek it’s more like “Son of Humanity” or “Human One.”  It could have been used just to mean anyone, a person, a human being.  But for Jesus we know it means the truly human One, the One who realizes in full the humanity we all share.  It is his way of saying that he is the truly awake and alive version of what we all are.

            In other words, what Jesus does in terms of healing, liberating, reconciling, forgiving, blessing, and welcoming is not something that only some supernatural being can do.  It is what we are all called to do in the life of discipleship.  We too need to seek out the lost, the losers, the broken, the failures, the confused, and even those whose souls are corroded by remorse and guilt over sins committed, like Zacchaeus.

            And we too need to save people by bringing them to the saving love of God revealed and given to us in Jesus Christ.  We save people as Jesus does, by gathering them into community, by welcoming, accepting, forgiving, and blessing them. We save people by bringing them into the Presence of the Lord Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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