There is a certain ambiguity in the story of Zacchaeus. It is possible to read Zacchaeus’s declaration, ‘Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold’, not as a promise of future behaviour but as a description of his current and customary practice, and thus as an answer to the grumbling crowd which complains that Jesus has ‘gone in to be a guest of a man who is a sinner’ (Luke 19:7).

To read the story as involving the recognition of the piety of one who was considered a sinner, rather than as a sinner’s conversion, seems to neglect, however, the narrative context and the very urgency with which the story unfolds.

The sense of urgency in the encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus, represented in Christ’s peremptory summons (‘make haste’, ‘come down’, ‘I must stay with you today’), and in Jacopo Palma il Giovane's picture by the onward moving figure of Christ, has to do with who these two are. The ringing statement that the ‘Son of man came to seek and save the lost’ (v.10) rounds off not only this incident, but both the saying and the incident together round off a long section of Luke’s Gospel. In chapter 15 Jesus tells the parables of the shepherd going after the lost sheep (vv.3–7), the woman hunting for the lost coin (vv.8–10), and the father who looks out for the lost, prodigal son (vv.11–32). And amongst the lost, the rich are, we might say, especially lost—in chapter 16, for example, Jesus tells the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and encounters the ruler who goes away sorrowful when he is told to sell all he has and give to the poor.

The salvation of the rich Zacchaeus (evidenced in his lavish giving to the poor and his determination to right any wrongs by which he has been enriched) manifests the nature and efficacy of Christ’s ministry. It is as if Christ is urgently set on realising in this one case what he will achieve for all in Jerusalem, which he now approaches and to which he hastens on.

And achieve it he does—the walls which the rich erect against the needy come tumbling down as surely as the walls of Jericho fell at the sound of the trumpet.

According to Peter Brown, Christianity, in effect, invented the poor, meaning that under Christianity the poor became a distinct and worthy object of charity (to wealthy Greeks or Romans, the poor made no obvious or compelling claim; Brown 2002: 8). Of course, Christian practice emerged from Jewish roots (and Jewish thought about the poor itself developed in the early common era): the injunction ‘open thy hand … to the poor’ (Deuteronomy 15:11) recurs in the Law and the Prophets, and Zacchaeus, giving half of his goods to the poor, proves himself ‘a son of Abraham’ (even if his generosity exceeds the 20% which rabbinic commentators judged a prudent maximum for such gifting; Bock 1996: 1520). And yet Zacchaeus not only gives to the poor, but undertakes to right the wrongs by which he has been enriched himself, making fourfold reparation to those he has defrauded. His actions, which Jesus welcomes as the expression of his salvation, respond to the claims not only of need, but of justice, and therefore open a wider vista of necessary social action.

In Dorothea Lange’s photograph of the overseer and ‘his’ workers, it is the precarity of the workers which seems to the fore—even the building on the steps of which they sit teeters on the brink. And yet, ethically speaking, the overseer occupies the more precarious position, since his rests on the wrongs they suffer. His workers are not just the poor—supposing they are poor—but those whose unfree labour and history of oppression is turned to his advantage. He hangs in the balance—as, with added irony, does the man in the picture by Quinten Massys, who even as he is weighing is himself being weighed.

References

Bock, Darrell L. 1996. Luke, vol. 2: 9.51–24.53 (Grand Rapids: Baker)

Brown, Peter. 2002. Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press)