There are some pretty exclusive clubs in the world with highly restrictive conditions that prevent the majority of people becoming members. It may be you have to earn a certain amount of money, be successful in some area of life, be related to a member of an important family or have to be invited by an existing member and approved by a committee. The purpose is simple, it’s about keeping out the “wrong” sort of person. The members want other members to be just like them. So these private clubs remain simply that, private. They are off limits to certain people who don’t match up to the criteria being applied. There are those who are excluded from the club.
We are looking at the encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus this week. Zacchaeus would fall into the category of an undesirable person as far as Jews were concerned. As a tax collector who clearly took more than the minimum required, he was disliked. He has enriched himself at the expense of his fellow Jews. Yet for reasons never made clear to us, he really wants to see Jesus. What he doesn’t know is that Jesus really wants to see Zacchaeus because of His mission to seek and rescue the lost. Jesus never insists Zacchaeus changes his ways or lifestyle as a pre-condition to them meeting. Jesus insists on meeting Zacchaeus as he is, where he is. The result of this encounter is that Zacchaeus is a transformed person.
If this is how Jesus behaves, then it is how His church must also behave. But I fear that the church is too ready to apply pre-conditions to people before we will show them God’s love. We think that such a person is “unsuitable” for “our” church, that they’d need to change something before we could accept them. But how can we seek and save the lost if we won’t go to those who are lost? How can we show people God’s great love for them if we refuse to go to them because they don’t match up to our ideal of how people should behave? Have we made our churches private members clubs with restrictive admission procedures? There is no one unsuitable for “our” church because it is not “ours” but “His”. And because He has no preconditions for showing God’s love, neither can we.