(Luke 19:1-10)

1Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. 4So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. 5When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." 6So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. 7All the people saw this and began to mutter, "He has gone to be the guest of a 'sinner.' " 8But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, "Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount." 9Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."

Zacchaeus is fabled as someone who was rich, avaricious and greedy and with a king size chip on his shoulder due to him being so small of stature; he needed to climb up a tree in order to be able to look over the heads of the crowds and see Jesus as he went past. The truth is more likely that he was a courageous man willing to risk making a fool of himself in order to follow through his curiosity in the figure of Jesus.

He was a brave man because he also had a sense of himself as not being the person that he would like to be. He was willing to confront the unanswered questions in the shadows of his mind and wonder at how he was living his life. Tax Collectors were unpopular figures and it would have been hard for him not to absorb the negative perceptions that someone might have of you but to maintain that God given sense of self in all of us. The oppressors are victims in their own way.

Jesus spots him in the tree, invites him down and goes back with him to his house for a meal. Zacchaeus was a brave man because he was prepared to do something about his new convictions. Zacchaeus was so overwhelmed by Jesus’ response that he pledged to give away half of his money to the poor and to pay fourfold to anyone he had cheated. In order to do this he would need to identify the victims of his dishonesty, hear their story and apologize for what he had done (There is no guarantee over the reaction that he will get).

This is an example of restorative justice – victims get a chance to tell offenders the real impact of their crimes, to get answers to their questions and to receive an apology. It holds offenders to account for what they have done. This does not need a big canvas such as the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa to be effective. A true apology is something stronger than a vague expression of regret – next time that you feel that you have done something wrong then apologize to the person directly.

Volf’s (2005) suggests that memory and forgiveness run close together. It is remembering what has been done that then allows for forgiveness. He says that to forgive is to blame not to punish…to name the wrong doing and condemn it…the gift is not counting the wrong doing against them…. to forgive is to blame not to punish  (Volf 2005:129 & 130 & 170). I went to a conference this week entitled ‘Is there still a legacy of slavery among young people’. Some people wanted to deny any connection between what happened 200 years ago and young people’s cultural consciousness today. Other people felt the issue very strongly and were angry if they felt that people thought that there was no connection – naming is neither denial nor blame but acknowledgement.

One of the speakers at the conference talked of political correctness a cheap alternative to justice, instead of negotiating social dislocation – people don’t have a place to belong. Sorry has become a vacuous word used as an expression of feeling without any responsibility for action – people apologize for mismanagement and feel that they have done enough of what needs to be done (no one resigned from Northern Rock). We grow at the point of failure - transformed through saying sorry