Our You Version Plans are based on our weekly lectionary reflections called Word from Below.

As we enter the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, we see in this week’s reading how Jesus affects the life of Zacchaeus, a wealthy tax collector whom the community despises. We also see how this encounter impacts that same community in tangible ways.

In the early days of my faith journey, I heard songs about Zacchaeus and his encounter with Jesus. We sang, “Zacchaeus was a very little man, and a very little man was he; he climbed up into a sycamore tree for the saviour he wanted to see. But when the saviour passed that way, he looked into the tree – and said, ‘Now Zacchaeus, you come down, coz I’m coming to your house for tea.’”

Here we are, once again, in Luke’s gospel, where the writer places those that have little political power or religious clout – social outsiders – at the center of the story. This usually happens to the dismay of those that consider themselves righteous and worthy of being at the center…

I have a dear lifetime friend, gifted and brilliant. The headwinds of life have resulted in her employment being menial at best, and degradingly exploitative at worst. After a stretch of sex work that dangerously devolved into coercion and trafficking, a few of us who loved her hatched a plot. Her escape involved a ransom, so that she would not be hunted and harmed by her employer due to lost income. In the frantic fray of flight, she grabbed for her Bible, which was hidden under her negligee. It’s a small image that will always be with us from that night – an image that inspired the poem below that I wrote for her. From her, and from others, this congenital rule-follower has learned to faithfully transgress…

To follow Jesus, you have to hate everybody, be ready to die, and give away all your stuff. If you don’t think you can do it, you shouldn’t even try. 

Really, Jesus? Really?

When I’m dealing with the harder things Jesus said, there’s something I try to remember before I start interpreting it: 

“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” 

It’s kid stuff, I know, but those things we learn early stick with us. I believe Jesus is always loving us and seeking to heal, liberate, and save us. So, if I remember that,  the question becomes: how could these absurdly hard sayings heal us, liberate us, save us?

I work with men in American prisons. Mostly gang-affected guys, often spoken about as savages, animals, less than human. 

Our work at Underground Ministries is to empower communities to befriend and embrace precisely these neighbors of ours: men and women sacrificed to the criminal legal system who have been released from prison cages and are re-entering our communities. 

So, while this story is about Jesus physically healing a woman in a public space, his choice of words — “untie,” “set free,” “bondage,” “eighteen long years” — speaks to me on another level.