Faith and worship

The Lord is everything to me. He is the strength of my heart and the light of my intellect. He inclines my heart to everything good; He strengthens it; He also gives me good thoughts; He is my rest and my joy; He is my faith hope and love.

St. John of Kronstadt

Recent sermon

2nd February 2025

The Meeting of the Lord, and Zachaeus Sunday

This Sunday has two special commemorations. It so happens that they fit together very well.
We are celebrating a the great feasts of the Church, when we commemorate Jesus being brought to the Temple as a baby forty days after his birth. (We are already forty days after Christmas!)

And we are also getting ready for Lent. This Sunday is Zaccheus Sunday, the first of the Sundays when we think about a story from the Gospel which especially shows what repentance is like – and repentance is what Lent is all about.

Let’s start Zaccheaus. We’ve just heard the story from the Gospel about him climbing up a tree to see Jesus because he was short. There’s a tendency to imagine Zaccheus as rather a sweet little old fellow climbing a tree. But we need to be clear. The one Zaccheus was NOT, was sweet! In the eyes of other people, he was mean. He was an extortioner, (in other words, if you’ve seen the film “What a Wonderful Life” he was like Mr Potter, but worse). He was a traitor.

How do I know that? The Gospel tells us that he was a tax collector. He was a chief tax collector. In Jesus’ time, tax collectors were not respectable law-abiding citizens, but traitors who worked for the occupying forces, the Romans. They voluntarily became agents of oppression and humiliation. In addition to this they became rich at the expense of the very people they were oppressing. In Jewish society to be a tax collector was shameful and hateful.

Jesus knew all about tax collectors. He was often criticized for being their friend. He already had a former tax-collector as one of his 12 disciples. It must have been hard for the other disciples to accept Matthew. Maybe because we’ve already seen Jesus break convention in this way, we don’t realise how shocking it was that Jesus stopped, called Zacchaeus down from the tree saying: ““Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.”

And the result of Jesus being in the house was a complete change! Zaccheus says to the Lord: “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.” And Jesus says: “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Now without forgetting to Zacchaeus, let’s think about the feast of the Meeting of the Lord, which we are also keeping today. As we see in the icon of the feast, Jesus is brought as a baby into the Temple and is welcomed by the elderly Simeon and the prophetess Anna. In many icons of the feast the prophetess Anna is holding a scroll on which are the words: “By this child heaven and earth were established.” This is a good way to talk about the mystery of God becoming a human being. A tiny baby is also the God who created the universe. Mind boggling! Today I’d like to take advantage of the fact that we are also thinking about Zacchaeus and think about this feast in the light of Jesus’ words “I must stay at your house today”.

Christians believe that Jesus became a human being so that he could share and make holy our human lives. In that sense we can all say that Jesus has “come to my house” – he’s come to the place where I live – he’s come to be with me.

I’d like to mention three ways in which the Meeting of the Lord shows us what it’s like when Jesus comes to our house. First of all, he shows us that we need to be part of a community of prayer. Joseph and Mary brought the baby to the Temple, to fulfil requirements made in the Law of Moses. Although Jesus was strongly critical about ways in which religion had gone wrong, he never, ever separated himself from the praying community. In other words: if we want Jesus to come to our house – we need to be at home in his house.

The second thing that the Meeting of the Lord shows us about Jesus coming to my house, is that it doesn’t necessarily stop bad things happening to me. When Simeon blessed Jospeh and Mary he said something very important to her: “a sword will pierce your heart also”. He was foretelling how she would suffer when Jesus went to the Cross. Sometimes, staying close to Jesus can be very hard indeed.

But this brings me to the third point. Once Jesus had come to Zacchaeus’ house, Zaccheus became joyful and a new person. The presence of Christ inspired and enabled him to be generous in a way he couldn’t be before. As Jesus said: “Salvation has come to this house.”

God comes to meet us. He came to meet his people in the Temple as a baby and he comes to meet us in all the circumstances of our lives. He comes to stay in my house today. At the prayers of the holy and righteous Simeon and Ann, may we joyfully welcome him too.

Amen.