Proper 26 (Oct. 30-Nov. 5)
Texts: Luke 19:1-10;
Isaiah 1:10-18
YouTube: https://youtu.be/VLmmjH42uBc
Sermon Take-Home Notes
FINALLY, A RICH MAN WHO REPENTS . . . BY GIVING UP HIS WEALTH
Then Jesus said to Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
At last! On the sixth and final encounter with a rich man in the middle section of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 12-19), there’s a positive outcome. Salvation! We see that it’s not impossible for a wealthy man to enter into God’s reign. He simply needs to repent and not be wealthy anymore. Wait, what? Not be wealthy anymore? Is that what Zacchaeus did? Is that the only way for wealthy people to enter into God’s reign? By giving up their wealth?
We’ll get back to exactly what it is that Zacchaeus did in a moment. First, I think we need to give a recap of where we’ve been the last several months, as we’ve traveled with Jesus to Jerusalem through this middle section of Luke Gospel, which has featured Jesus teaching us about the danger of wealth.1 In your Sermon Notes, I’ve outlined the previous five encounters Jesus has with wealthy men. I encourage you to take it home and read them. Here, in the sermon, I want to glean the main principles of why wealth, in our typical human civilizations, is dangerous.
In short, wealth in our human kingdoms goes against God’s intentions for us. This has been going on for a long time. We see glimpses of it in our First Reading this morning, where the prophet is saying, ‘You’ve got it all wrong. It’s not about your worship assemblies. It’s about justice to the poor — to the widow and the orphan.’ We need to see in our journey with Jesus through the middle of Luke as the fulfillment of this kind of prophecy.
God’s plan for creation is that it will someday come into a harmony where all life flourishes. The Jewish faith is at heart a faith in a God who made this world good, with an abundance we might all share. But, rather than being stewards of those intentions, as God created us to be, we have become the greatest obstacle and threat. We have created our own gods, idols, who command that we serve them as lesser beings, creating hierarchies of human servitude. It’s no longer about a mutual service of one another in furthering the gift of God’s creation. No, it’s about a hoarding scarce resources in economic systems which unequally distribute those resources according to merit — a view that we human beings are inherently unequal and so deserving of either more or less, according to our merits. And it’s a merit determined by the wealthy and powerful at the top of the pyramid, so it’s circular and self-perpetuating. Rather than being equals as God’s children, we become perpetually divided along lines of division given to us by our supposedly god-appointed leaders. There are thousands of ways our wealthy leaders divide us against each other, but the most persistent and pernicious gap is that between rich and poor.
These things become most clear in the two parables of Luke chapter 16, where the conclusion after the first parable is that we can’t serve both God and wealth. You can’t do it! They are incompatible for the reasons I’ve just outlined. We are to be about a mutual sharing of the gift of creation.
And the second of those two parables makes clear the perpetual results of serving wealth: there’s always a grossly unjust gap between rich and poor, a great chasm created, whereas God’s intentions are the opposite. That’s the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. The rich man can’t see the great chasm he has created between himself and Lazarus until the afterlife. Kind of like that story by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge cannot see the chains he is forging without the help of Jacob Marley’s ghost from the afterlife.
After the two important parables of Luke 16, Jesus has a real-life encounter with a very rich ruler who comes thinking in terms of merit, how he might inherit God’s reign. What does he need to do to deserve it? Jesus has just told everyone what they need to do to receive God’s reign simply as a gift, to receive it as a child. Along comes this rich man who simply cannot think in those terms. He thinks in terms of doing something to deserve it. So Jesus tells him: ‘OK, then sell everything, give it to the poor, and follow me.’ The man walks away sad.
But Luke does not leave us without at least one encounter with a rich man that doesn’t result in salvation. Following on the heels of the rich ruler who walks away sad, Zacchaeus does do what is required. He gives up his wealth altogether. I have some particulars about this story in the Sermon Notes which we need to understand.
First, not all tax collectors were wealthy. They were considered sinners because they were collaborators with the Roman Empire’s oppressive economics over them as indigenous people. But it says that Zacchaeus is a “chief tax collector,” so he’s near the top of the wealth pyramid — he is “rich.”
Second, contrary to our Sunday School songs, the Greek text (badly translated) says that Zacchaeus is of “young age,” not “small stature,” so as a young chief tax collector he likely has inherited his position from his parents. He has ‘generational’ wealth.
Third, Zacchaeus does not simply become charitable. He recognizes that he has “defrauded” people to gain wealth, and so his giving away wealth are reparations — a righting of the wrong.
Finally, his actions would likely lose him his position. The Roman Empire would not tolerate someone who makes reparations. He was giving up his wealth and taking his place once again as a child of Abraham. It’s important to understand here that Zacchaeus is giving up his wealth completely!
Next week, Jesus will have more to say about the cost of what Zacchaeus is doing. This will conclude our time with the six rich man encounters in Luke’s Gospel. This morning I’d like to ponder if we’ve seen anything quite like what Zacchaeus is doing in this morning’s Gospel. Are there any wealthy, powerful men who have given up that wealth and power to pursue the path of equality and mutual flourishing of God’s reign?
I honestly can’t think of examples. Perhaps you can. It’s not surprising, really, since the dominant story of our typical human cultures would consider it crazy. It’s not the kind of story we like to tell. Well, what about stories that might approach it?
We might consider someone like Bill Gates. He’s one of the wealthiest billionaires, who has also become famous for his generosity. He gives a lot to others. But I’d like to distinguish between charity, simply giving some wealth away, and the kind of reparations that I think Zacchaeus is making. Could Bill Gates recognize that he got a lot of his wealth wrongly? By using armies of lawyers to make sure that no one else gets into the business of making software like his. He used the rules of the game to very much create a monopoly, pushing all his competition out of business. What would it mean for him to make reparations? I think it might mean something like contributing startup funds for other software developers to get into the market. And to advocate for breaking up the tech monopolies right now?
I have a few brief thoughts in another direction: Is Franklin Roosevelt, and his response to the great suffering of the Depression, an example of a rich man making right? He was a wealthy man who even consulted with the Democratic Socialists who ran against him to understand how we might more generously share the wealth as a nation in order to create a “New Deal” for everyone. Many of the other rich people hated him for it. And they finally got their revenge on him in the 1980’s by convincing us to move back to a less equitable form of capitalism.
I want to end this morning by simply lifting up and celebrating that it can happen. That wealthy people can repent and enter into God’s reign. Another example might be Luke himself. There’s a tradition that Luke himself was a doctor, placing him in a class above the poor. And he’s the only one to address his Gospel to a specific person. In Luke 1:3, he explains that he is choosing “to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus . . . .” Who is thought to be a person of greater wealth, too, like Luke. Lo and behold, Luke is the one among all the Gospel writers who focuses on the issues of wealth the most. How much had he taken that Gospel message to heart and repented, like Zacchaeus?
Next week, we will move to consider what the message of Luke’s Jesus on wealth means for us. We aren’t billionaires, but we live in the wealthiest nation in history. What does it mean for us today to repent of our wealth? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, November 9, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/VLmmjH42uBc
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Note
1. Our guide through this section, featuring the “Six Rich Men Sequences,” has been Ched Myers and his book Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress, 2025).
