The sheer joy of radical Christian conversion

Some years ago, singer-composer Randy Newman wrote a mean-spirited song which went straight into the hit parade

Some years ago, singer-composer Randy Newman wrote a mean-spirited song which went straight into the hit parade. Called Short People, it repeated the line: "Short people got no reason to live." Tomorrow's Gospel reading is precisely about one of those vertically challenged people who find life difficult, for not all have the ability to go up in the world along with Danny de Vito.

To add to the enduring appeal of the story, Jesus's words which end it are a concise summary of his great rescue mission on which his Father sent him - "the Son of man came to seek and to save what was lost."

Jesus's certainty in Luke's Gospel 19:1-10 about the purpose of his coming to Earth seems to spring from the determined exhilaration he observed in the changed heart and consequently the changed behaviour of the stunted Zaccheus.

A citizen of no mean city, the trading centre and winter tourist resort of Jericho, famous for its balsam groves, Zaccheus is introduced as a wealthy chief tax collector in the employ of the occupying Roman administration.

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According to the Judaism of the time that employment excluded him from membership in the people of God who would benefit from the coming of Messiah. It was not only that he was not tall enough to see over people's heads that might have excluded Zaccheus from seeing Jesus, but also religious ostracism.

Famously, he clambered up into a sycamore tree, perhaps driven by the gossip that said this extraordinary rabbi dealt kindly with tax collectors - he even had one of them, Matthew, in his immediate entourage. With all due respect to the revenue service, the rest of the populace hated the members of that profession like poison. Alas, plus τa change two millennia later! In a dramatic moment, Jesus halted under the tree and peering up informed Zaccheus that he would be glad to come and take tea at his house.

Amid outraged murmuring from the crowd, the quite bizarre pair made their way to Zaccheus's villa and during their conversation the taxman suddenly announced he was giving half his possessions to charity and would repay all the people he had swindled, plus 300 per cent interest. The law of the day only required him to add a 20 per cent penalty to the capital sum involved.

Jesus brought to Zaccheus acceptance with God and "the expulsive power of a new affection" gave him what he had sought in vain for years from wealth. The compulsive drive to make money had gone.

How brief would be the business of the present interminable tribunals investigating the mysterious to-ings and fro-ings of vast sums of money if those who pathetically try to hide their own years of main-lining on the drug of avarice manifested this kind of heart conversion.

The instant and astonishing transformation in Zaccheus finds its theological locus in St Paul's exposition of what happens in the hearts of sinners when they are transformed by God's renewing grace. In a moment of time, he says, they become "a new creation" (Second Letter to the Corinthians 5:17).

Small wonder, then, after the tea and cakes, that Jesus could declare the despised and outcast Zaccheus a true, spiritual son of Abraham. In terms of his mission, this was precisely why Jesus had come, "to seek and save the lost" and this would be achieved shortly on a cross outside the city wall of Jerusalem.

The account of Zaccheus's conversion sets out the offer of the Gospel for all who have paid the harsh price of sin which isolates and instils the barrier of fear. Surprise, surprise, the Lord Jesus breaches all the barriers and invites personal relationship. He knows our name, our need - indeed the very worst about us - and yet smiles upon us in love.

This writer is no Zaccheus in stature, being over six-foot tall, yet he can still remember the day it dawned on him that his Maker loved him and was prepared to give him a complete makeover.

That was a day for surging, uninhibited happiness, nothing less than the discovery of the meaning of life itself and the buzz is still there every morning.

G.F.