Today, salvation has come to this household because he too is a son of Abraham. The Human One came to seek and save the lost. (Luke 19:9-10, The Common English Bible)
My boys are fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. During the pandemic, they’ve watched them multiple times and there’s a line from the third film, At World’s End, that sticks with me.
The set-up: at the end of the previous film, Captain Jack Sparrow has been devoured (along with his ship, the infamous Black Pearl) by an enormous sea monster known as the Kraken. But the rest of his crew has come to learn that he is able to be rescued from the afterlife (known as “Davy Jones’ Locker”), but only if they travel to a mysterious spot off the edge of the map known only as “World’s End.” It is a place nearly impossible to find, and the pirate crew travels far into the unknown reaches of the world.
At some point, Captain Barbosa, leader of the expedition, looks around at the sea and the stars and declares “Aye, we are good and lost now!” Speaking as though getting lost was the point of the endeavor.
Elizabeth Swann, a governor’s daughter-turned-pirate, is surprised and exclaims: “Lost!?”
Barbosa replies, in his usual matter-of-fact way: “For certain you have to be lost to find something that cannot be found, else everyone would know where it is.”
I think of this this morning after saying Morning Prayer and reading the appointed lesson from Luke’s gospel, where we encounter the famous “wee little man” Zacchaeus. Zack, aside from being a champion sycamore tree climber, is also described as “a chief tax collector.” This means that he oversees the people who collect the taxes for the Roman government. He is also a Jew and this creates difficulty for him.
See, Jews in Ancient Rome were not happy with their imperial overlords. In many cases, the Romans had taken ancient, family-owned farmland and conscripted it for more large-scale production to feed the wider Empire. Then they’d also require those families to work that land and also exact a tax from them for the privilege. Not only that, but Roman money also carried “graven images” of the Emperor (worshipped as a god”, which made handling the money something that warranted someone ritually unclean. So Zack was seen by the religious leaders as someone who not only betrays his own people, he also surrounds himself with idolatrous images. He is loathed and unclean, deemed a “sinner” by the pharisees—a term often employed to refer to fellow Jews who were not living up to their standards.
But Jesus recognizes something else going on with wee Zack. The fact that he has ascended a tree in order to see means that Zack is looking for something. Jesus sees the spiritual thing happening beneath the practicality of the sycamore tree climb. Think about it. The text tells us that Zacchaeus is rich. You’d think that a rich man would stride right up to a local celebrity, not burdened by the people. But Zacchaeus doesn’t tell the crowd to move aside. Instead, he climbs a tree, just curious to see what this guy is all about.
And then Jesus invites Himself over for dinner.
After Jesus is reprimanded by the pharisees for making His way to share a meal and maybe even find lodging at the house of a notorious sinner, He tells us a little bit more about Zacchaeus: the man is lost. And it’s those that are lost that Jesus is there to “seek and save.”
What does it mean to be lost?
In my background in Evangelicalism, the “lost” is a synonym for “non-Christians.” And we were taught to see them as a pitiable lot, people completely miserable because they haven’t asked Jesus to come into their hearts. But I don’t know if I completely agree with that notion anymore. Mostly because, as a hiker, I’ve encountered plenty of people who weren’t lost, they were just on a different trail. I’ve met plenty of non-Christians who didn’t seem all that lost—in fact they are usually quite sure of where they are on the map! So I’m not sure that it’s appropriate to apply that term to them, at least universally.
To be lost is more of spiritual/emotional state of being. One is lost when they have everything, but have no sense of direction or location. One is lost when they take stock of their surroundings and have no idea where they are, or where to go, or what to do.
This is fairly easy for us to see in our current context. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been so piecemeal, lacking clear, overarching direction, that many people feel lost trying to navigate things. People are looking for leadership in this—someone who can communicate in clear and empathetic language what it is that we need to do to live in this reality until the nebulous time that it’s deemed “over.” Some of us read the recent science and take stock of what has worked in countries like Taiwan and Japan and apply it to ourselves, frustrated when we see others flouting the guidance of experts—but they only flout it because they’ve been allowed to select the information that suits them, rather than the information that has been proven to work. As a result, people are sick and dying in record numbers all over the country—while other parts of the world are beginning to relax restrictions even more (or others, like Taiwan, that never had to really enact them in the first place).
As a result of this, and if the things I read in the news and other media are any indication, this sense of being lost has resulted in a more acute sense of a collective spiritual lost-ness in our societies.
Which brings us back to Captain Barbosa. See, his wisdom is a kind of creative interpretation of the sort of stuff that Jesus taught in His sermons. In Matthew’s gospel we read “Happy (or, Blessed) are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (Matthew 5:3, Common English Bible). Jesus’ meaning is a bit murky when we read it in English—we tend to read Him as saying something transactional, like “don’t put your hope in this world if you want to see the kingdom of heaven.” But, in Greek (and the Common English Bible does a great job with the translation here), the thrust of Jesus’ teaching is indicative. Hopelessness indicates the presence of the kingdom of God. To put it into Barbosa’s words: being lost is the destination, is the point. “Happy are the lost,” we might say, “because they are being found.”
Consider wee Zack again. Clearly his wealth and status were lacking something. If he were on Instagram, people would say that he was “#blessed.” But it didn’t satisfy. If it did, then he wouldn’t have been in that tree trying to see Jesus, trying to get a look. He had reached the right destination—he was good and lost now. And it was only in that space of being lost that he was able to be found by Jesus.
In this regard, the pandemic (by which I mean the whole social sphere that has emerged in the wake of the virus’ advent) has been a blessing. It has caused us to be aware that we are, many of us, lost. But getting lost is precisely where we need to be. Because it is only when we are lost that we can be found.
My boys are fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. During the pandemic, they’ve watched them multiple times and there’s a line from the third film, At World’s End, that sticks with me.
The set-up: at the end of the previous film, Captain Jack Sparrow has been devoured (along with his ship, the infamous Black Pearl) by an enormous sea monster known as the Kraken. But the rest of his crew has come to learn that he is able to be rescued from the afterlife (known as “Davy Jones’ Locker”), but only if they travel to a mysterious spot off the edge of the map known only as “World’s End.” It is a place nearly impossible to find, and the pirate crew travels far into the unknown reaches of the world.
At some point, Captain Barbosa, leader of the expedition, looks around at the sea and the stars and declares “Aye, we are good and lost now!” Speaking as though getting lost was the point of the endeavor.
Elizabeth Swann, a governor’s daughter-turned-pirate, is surprised and exclaims: “Lost!?”
Barbosa replies, in his usual matter-of-fact way: “For certain you have to be lost to find something that cannot be found, else everyone would know where it is.”
I think of this this morning after saying Morning Prayer and reading the appointed lesson from Luke’s gospel, where we encounter the famous “wee little man” Zacchaeus. Zack, aside from being a champion sycamore tree climber, is also described as “a chief tax collector.” This means that he oversees the people who collect the taxes for the Roman government. He is also a Jew and this creates difficulty for him.
See, Jews in Ancient Rome were not happy with their imperial overlords. In many cases, the Romans had taken ancient, family-owned farmland and conscripted it for more large-scale production to feed the wider Empire. Then they’d also require those families to work that land and also exact a tax from them for the privilege. Not only that, but Roman money also carried “graven images” of the Emperor (worshipped as a god”, which made handling the money something that warranted someone ritually unclean. So Zack was seen by the religious leaders as someone who not only betrays his own people, he also surrounds himself with idolatrous images. He is loathed and unclean, deemed a “sinner” by the pharisees—a term often employed to refer to fellow Jews who were not living up to their standards.
But Jesus recognizes something else going on with wee Zack. The fact that he has ascended a tree in order to see means that Zack is looking for something. Jesus sees the spiritual thing happening beneath the practicality of the sycamore tree climb. Think about it. The text tells us that Zacchaeus is rich. You’d think that a rich man would stride right up to a local celebrity, not burdened by the people. But Zacchaeus doesn’t tell the crowd to move aside. Instead, he climbs a tree, just curious to see what this guy is all about.
And then Jesus invites Himself over for dinner.
After Jesus is reprimanded by the pharisees for making His way to share a meal and maybe even find lodging at the house of a notorious sinner, He tells us a little bit more about Zacchaeus: the man is lost. And it’s those that are lost that Jesus is there to “seek and save.”
What does it mean to be lost?
In my background in Evangelicalism, the “lost” is a synonym for “non-Christians.” And we were taught to see them as a pitiable lot, people completely miserable because they haven’t asked Jesus to come into their hearts. But I don’t know if I completely agree with that notion anymore. Mostly because, as a hiker, I’ve encountered plenty of people who weren’t lost, they were just on a different trail. I’ve met plenty of non-Christians who didn’t seem all that lost—in fact they are usually quite sure of where they are on the map! So I’m not sure that it’s appropriate to apply that term to them, at least universally.
To be lost is more of spiritual/emotional state of being. One is lost when they have everything, but have no sense of direction or location. One is lost when they take stock of their surroundings and have no idea where they are, or where to go, or what to do.
This is fairly easy for us to see in our current context. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been so piecemeal, lacking clear, overarching direction, that many people feel lost trying to navigate things. People are looking for leadership in this—someone who can communicate in clear and empathetic language what it is that we need to do to live in this reality until the nebulous time that it’s deemed “over.” Some of us read the recent science and take stock of what has worked in countries like Taiwan and Japan and apply it to ourselves, frustrated when we see others flouting the guidance of experts—but they only flout it because they’ve been allowed to select the information that suits them, rather than the information that has been proven to work. As a result, people are sick and dying in record numbers all over the country—while other parts of the world are beginning to relax restrictions even more (or others, like Taiwan, that never had to really enact them in the first place).
As a result of this, and if the things I read in the news and other media are any indication, this sense of being lost has resulted in a more acute sense of a collective spiritual lost-ness in our societies.
Which brings us back to Captain Barbosa. See, his wisdom is a kind of creative interpretation of the sort of stuff that Jesus taught in His sermons. In Matthew’s gospel we read “Happy (or, Blessed) are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (Matthew 5:3, Common English Bible). Jesus’ meaning is a bit murky when we read it in English—we tend to read Him as saying something transactional, like “don’t put your hope in this world if you want to see the kingdom of heaven.” But, in Greek (and the Common English Bible does a great job with the translation here), the thrust of Jesus’ teaching is indicative. Hopelessness indicates the presence of the kingdom of God. To put it into Barbosa’s words: being lost is the destination, is the point. “Happy are the lost,” we might say, “because they are being found.”
Consider wee Zack again. Clearly his wealth and status were lacking something. If he were on Instagram, people would say that he was “#blessed.” But it didn’t satisfy. If it did, then he wouldn’t have been in that tree trying to see Jesus, trying to get a look. He had reached the right destination—he was good and lost now. And it was only in that space of being lost that he was able to be found by Jesus.
In this regard, the pandemic (by which I mean the whole social sphere that has emerged in the wake of the virus’ advent) has been a blessing. It has caused us to be aware that we are, many of us, lost. But getting lost is precisely where we need to be. Because it is only when we are lost that we can be found.
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