Daily Reflections ...

Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree: a comic, slightly pathetic, figure. He’s rich and should command a more dignified position at the crowd’s forefront, but as a tax collector he’s also an outsider: he can’t compensate for his short stature with social status. 

Moreover, his perch is appropriate to—even symbolic of—his existence. Suspended between heaven and earth, Zacchaeus is drawn to Jesus but weighed down by reality: by many other desires, especially for money, that have bound him to his squalid life. A life of “necessary compromises” which nevertheless fails to deliver the status he craves, far less provide access to that possibility of transcendence that he has glimpsed in Jesus. 

So too for most of us, I imagine. We desire success but our standards are shaped by the world around us, so attainment doesn’t deliver contentment. The goals towards which we were climbing turn out to be illusory, and we are left looking foolish in the foliage. In a strange inversion, then, Jesus calls us to come down—and to hurry up about it! We need to climb down from our false dreams of personal achievement and self-importance, and instead be grounded in what Jesus desires for us: that he may stay with us, and we with him. On this memorial of Mary’s Presentation, her self-dedication to God, we are urged to be like her: to seek the humble path of her Son, who alone can empower us to stand against the grumbling crowd’s judgement—the world’s false expectations—and find our ground in him. 

By Chad Hargrave