Up a Tree, and Into the City

Jericho was a warm green town down in the valley, full of palm trees and balsam gardens, and it stood on the road where the trade came through — which made it a very good place to be a tax man, and a rich one. The chief tax man there was called Zacchaeus. He worked for the Romans, he had grown comfortable on what he took off his own people, and there was probably not one family in that town who would have sat down to a meal with him. He wanted to see Jesus. Not to ask him for anything — just to see which of the men coming up the road he was. But the street was packed solid, and Zacchaeus was a very short man, and all he could see was the backs of everybody’s coats.

So he did a thing that no grown man in that country would ever do, because it made him look ridiculous: he picked up the front of his robe and ran. He ran on ahead of the whole crowd, to where a sycamore fig leaned out over the road, and he climbed it, and sat up there among the leaves like a boy, waiting for Jesus to pass underneath. And Jesus came to that place, and stopped, and looked up into the tree. “Zacchaeus. Hurry up and come down — today I have to stay at your house.” He knew his name. Zacchaeus came down out of that tree so fast he nearly fell out of it, and took him home, delighted. And everybody who saw it started grumbling. “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.”

They were right about him, too. But something happened inside that house, and when Zacchaeus came out of it he stood up in front of the whole street and said this out loud, so that there would be witnesses: “Look, Lord — half of everything I own I am giving to the poor. And if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I am paying him back four times over.” Four times over was the punishment the law gave a man for stealing another man’s sheep. He was sentencing himself, out in the road, in front of the people he had robbed, and by the end of that week he would not be rich any more. And Jesus said, “Today rescue has come to this house — because he is a son of Abraham too.”

Six days before the Passover he came to Bethany, the village on the far side of the Mount of Olives, where Lazarus lived — the one he had called out of the tomb. They made him a supper there, in the house of a man called Simon. Martha was carrying the dishes, the way she always was. And Lazarus was sitting at the table eating his dinner, alive, which was a thing half the country had come out to look at. And in the middle of the meal Mary, Martha’s sister, came in with a jar. It was alabaster, sealed shut, and it held about a pint of pure nard — a thick, sweet, heavy-smelling oil that came from the mountains beyond India, further than anybody at that table had ever traveled. It was worth three hundred denarii, which is a working man’s pay for a year. It was the kind of thing a family owned and never used, the way people keep one good thing put away for one great day. She broke the neck off the jar. You cannot mend a jar you have broken; once it is open there is nothing to do but pour. And she poured it over his head, and then knelt down and poured out the rest of it on his feet, and wiped his feet with her hair. The whole house filled up with the smell. Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Judas said what several of them were thinking. “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred denarii, and the money given to poor people?” He was the one who carried the money bag for them, and he had been helping himself out of it, so it was not really the poor he had on his mind. But it sounded sensible, and the others took it up and began scolding her, kneeling there with her hair full of oil. And he stopped them. “Leave her alone. Why are you giving her trouble? She has done a beautiful thing to me. You have the poor with you all the time, and any day you want to you can do something good for them. You do not always have me. She did what she could. She has poured the oil over my body early, for my burial. And I tell you the truth: wherever the good news is told, anywhere in the whole world, what she has done will be told as well, and she will be remembered for it.” Nobody at that table understood the part about the burial. It was six days away.

The next day he sent two of them on ahead. “Go into the village opposite. The moment you go into it you will find a colt tied up, one that nobody has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. And if anybody says to you, ‘What are you doing that for?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it, and he will send it straight back.’” They found it exactly like that, tied at a door out on the street. And while they were untying it the men it belonged to came out. “What are you doing, untying our colt?” And the two of them said, “The Lord needs it.” And the men let them take it, which is not the way that conversation usually ends. They brought it to him and threw their own cloaks over its back for a saddle, and he sat on it and started down the hill toward the city. It was a young donkey, and his feet cannot have been far off the ground. And the crowd went out of its mind. They pulled off their coats and threw them down in the road in front of him, which is what people did for a king; and they cut leafy branches out of the fields and palm fronds off the trees and laid those down too; and the ones walking in front and the ones coming behind all began shouting at once: “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David, that is coming! Hosanna in the highest!” Hosanna is not a cheer, although they were using it like one. It is a prayer in the old language, and what it means is: save us, please. They were shouting it the way you shout at a boat that has come to get you off a rock. Some of the Pharisees in the crowd could not bear it. “Teacher — tell your followers to stop.” And he said, “I tell you — if these ones keep quiet, the stones will shout.”

The road comes over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, and there is one turn in it where the whole of Jerusalem appears at once, all together, right across the valley: the walls, the roofs, and the temple standing in the middle of it with its white stone and its gold throwing the morning sun straight back at you. It is one of the great views of the world. He came round that corner and saw it, and he stopped, and he cried. Not quietly, either; he cried out loud, so that everybody heard. Behind him the singing was still going on. And he said, to the city: “If only you had known, today, you as well — the things that would have brought you peace. But they are hidden from your eyes now. Days are coming when your enemies will throw up a wall of earth all round you, and shut you in on every side, and bring you to the ground, you and your children inside you — and they will not leave one stone standing on another in you, because you did not know the time when God came to you.” Forty years later a Roman army did that to Jerusalem, stone by stone, and there were old people watching it happen who had been children in that crowd.

He rode in through the gate, and the whole city was shaken by it; people were asking each other who this was, and the crowds around him kept saying that it was Jesus the prophet, the one from Nazareth in Galilee. And he went up into the temple — and then he did nothing at all. He walked round the courts and looked at everything, quietly, the way a man walks round a house he has come to inspect. It was getting late. Then he walked back out of the city to Bethany with the twelve, and went to bed. In the morning, coming back down the road, he was hungry. He saw a fig tree a long way off with leaves all over it. A fig tree in leaf is advertising: the little early figs come before the leaves do, and men walking the road ate them. He went over to it, and there was nothing on it at all but leaves. And he said to it, out loud, and his followers heard him say it: “May nobody ever eat fruit off you again.” And then he went into the temple, and turned it over. The great outer court was the only part of the temple that foreigners were allowed into, and it had been turned into a market. There were pens of sheep and cattle, and cages of doves for the offerings poor people brought, and rows of tables where the money-changers sat — because the temple would only take one particular coin, and the changers took their cut of every exchange. People were using the court as a short cut as well, carrying their pots and their bundles across it to save walking round the outside. He threw the sellers out, and the buyers with them. He turned the money-changers’ tables over, with the coins going everywhere across the paving, and knocked over the benches of the men selling doves, and then he stood in the way and would not let one more person carry a pot through. And he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robbers’ cave.” And then, in the cleared-out court, the blind and the lame came to him, and he healed them there; and the children who had come up for the feast started running about under the colonnades shouting the same thing the crowd on the road had shouted — Hosanna to the Son of David! — until the whole court rang with it. The chief priests and the teachers of the law were furious about that, and they came to him and said, “Do you hear what these children are saying?” And he said, “Yes. Have you never read: ‘Out of the mouths of little children and babies at the breast you have got yourself praise’?” They heard about the tables as well, and from that morning on they were looking for a way to destroy him. They were frightened of him at the same time, because the whole crowd was hanging on everything he said. The next morning they came down the same road, and there was the fig tree, dead — dried up from the roots. Peter remembered. “Rabbi — look. The fig tree you cursed has withered up.” And Jesus said, “Have faith in God. I tell you the truth: if somebody says to this mountain, ‘Get up and throw yourself into the sea,’ and has no doubt in his heart, but trusts that what he is saying is happening — it will be his. So I tell you: whatever you pray for and ask for, trust that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand there praying, if you have anything against anybody, forgive it — so that your Father in the heavens can forgive you the wrong you have done too.”

After that he was in the temple every day, teaching, and the important men walked round him all week and could not get near him, because of the crowds. And on one of those days he did something odd. He sat down on a bench in the court where the collecting chests stood — thirteen of them, big, with brass mouths shaped like trumpets — and he watched people putting their money in. Rich people came and put in a great deal, and you could hear how much, because of the brass. Then a poor widow came along and dropped in two lepta. A lepton was the smallest coin there was; the two of them together were worth about a fifteenth of a day’s pay. Nobody heard them go in. And he called his followers over, as though something had happened. “I tell you the truth: this poor widow has put in more than everybody else who is putting money into the treasury. They all put in something out of what they had spare. She, out of what she did not have, put in everything — the whole of what she had to live on.”