Come down from your tree

‘Today salvation has come to this house,

because this man too is a son of Abraham;

for the Son of Man has come to seek out

and save what was lost.’

Luke 19:10

There are occasions when there are extraordinary reversals, when the anticipated outcome of a particular encounter is turned on its head. There is the element of surprise!

The Lucan story of Zacchaeus is one such story. The tax collector Zacchaeus joined the townspeople of Jericho to welcome Jesus. Being short, he couldn’t see him, so he ran ahead and climbed a tree. Jesus saw him and called out to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down. Hurry, because I must stay at your house today.’ Zacchaeus welcomed Jesus and took him to his home while the crowd muttered about Jesus being hosted by a sinner. When Zacchaeus heard this he told Jesus that he would give half his wealth to the poor and for those he had cheated he would repay them four times what he took.

There are, in this story, a number of marvellous and clever reversals. Zacchaeus, the one most keen to see Jesus, is indeed a sinner, certainly for his contemporaries – after all he collected taxes for his Roman overlords. His lack of height meant he had to climb up to see Jesus, and it is he who looked down on him. And it is not Zacchaeus who invited Jesus to his home, Jesus invited himself. Now the one who was so honoured with providing hospitality is condemned by his neighbours. And so like many of the Gospel healing stories, the turn around is that the focus is not really on Zacchaeus but on the complaining townspeople – for it is they who have yet to be converted/healed/transformed. And so we ask ourselves, who is the story for?

In the end, the story is about you and me. Luke lets us know what it takes to be become a disciple: humility, acceptance of who I am, with all my faults and failings, but remaining open to Jesus in whatever way he comes to me and allowing him to make a home with me, to become an integral part of my life – and then ultimately, allow myself to be taken up and transformed so that my life mirrors the person of Jesus. I reconcile myself with my community and make amends.

But you and I are also those complaining townspeople, crying ‘What about me, it isn’t fair!’ We are very interested in what is happening, but we just can’t take the next step – letting go. It is so much easier to stand with the crowd and crow about those who are publically known sinners.

But the real surprise is this: Jesus chooses me and you and all we have to do is climb down from our tree and accept his invitation.

Peter Douglas

Woe to those who punish the poor        

Barry Gittins

I have known times in life when three-minute noodles were the only option I could afford to eat for weeks. When I strung along payment plans for bills to ensure the rent got paid. When I couldn't buy petrol for a car, let alone have it repaired, or replace bald tyres.

 

But my relative poverty at those times was nothing compared to those with no dietary options, no roof over their heads, or clothes or heating or cooling, or a place where they can be safe. Those who lack what we see as 'basics' are largely invisible to our political masters or dismissed as dealt with by Newstart and other means of starvation.

It's a vote winner, this business of punishing poor people for being poor. Poverty is seen as their fault, and agitation over their plight by godbotherers and social workers as damned cheeky.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (known to his mates as Seneca the Younger) famously declared that 'it is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor'. Well, I'm inclined to bracket that with Marie Antoinette's call for cake, and Malcolm Fraser's truncated quoting of George Bernard Shaw, 'Life wasn't meant to be easy…'

It sounds grand and noble, and so remarkably unaware for a member of the empire that gobbled up much of the known world of its day while riding a fiscal pony named slavery. It is probably worth remembering that Seneca was a satirist and dramatist, as well as a philosopher and statesman.

Poverty goes well beyond questions of mindsets or attitudes to Maslovian imperatives of shelter, sustenance, inclusion and meaning, which are hard to come by if you are skint.

If the opposite of poor is dirty stinking rich, do you care to hazard a guess as to where the richest of the rich live, per capita? If you nominated Trump's US of A, that postmodern Rome, you'd be right. It's number one on a list floating around business realms, followed top ten-wise by China, Japan, Germany, Canada, France, the UK, Hong Kong, Italy and Switzerland.

Oz is not without its plutocrats and billionaires, of course. The average net worth (2017-18) for Australian households is a mere $1 million, pumped up to that height by 'rising property values'. But Aussies with harbour views across multiple properties are relatively rare compared to the battlers.

ACOSS says there are more than 13 per cent of us — more than three million Australians — living below the poverty line; that includes 739,000 children. One in eight adult Australians, and one in six Aussie kids, are mired in poverty. Those of us doing it the toughest 'unsurprisingly [are] those relying on government allowance payments such as Youth Allowance and Newstart'.

What's the impact when you don't have a home? When you are hungry and thirsty, when you can't afford medical and dental care? How are you viewed, treated or neglected by those with cash? As John Falzon once said, Australians living below the poverty line are made to feel 'hopeless, lazy and stupid'.

We live, still, in a democracy. In the face of abysmal policies we can pressure elected governments to change the status quo. This year's Anti-Poverty Week is stressing the need to 'Raise the rate' by 'increasing the rate of Newstart and associated allowances by $75 a week'. There are a million of us that rely on these paltry, inadequate payments, doled out begrudgingly, without being topped up adequately for more than a quarter of a century.

The National Council of Churches in Australia reckons more than 90 per cent of us agree that in Australia 'no one should go without basic essentials like food, healthcare, transport and power'. We are an affluent nation, but we do not share our toys. We allow our elected officials to live like lords while the poor starve.

Francis Bacon is credited with the observation that 'money is like muck — not good unless it be spread'. Raising the rate would be a good start in not making our neighbours feel lazy, hopeless and stupid.

If our PM's theological name dropping rings true, as with his 2008 maiden speech, his life is guided by the life, teaching and leading of Jesus Christ. That unemployed Jewish tradie turned rabble rouser made this apocalyptic observation: 'Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.'

Who would Jesus screw over?

Barry Gittins is a Melbourne writer.

This article was published in Eureka Magazine on 11 October 2019