• Nobody in Jericho did anything wrong
• What he does, and what he does not do
• The teaching this text will not support
• The first thing Christ does is look up
• A row of people sliding down
• The building falls down and the feast survives
• The murmur, and the fourfold
• Where this leaves us

Luke gives us the reason in the same breath as the desire, and it is not the reason anyone would guess.

And he sought to see Jesus who he was, and he could not for the crowd, because he was low of stature.

Read it slowly. A man wants to see Christ. He could not for the crowd. And the clause Luke attaches to explain it is about the measurement of a body. Eleven words to say he could not for the crowd, and not one of them accuses him of anything.

There is no sin anywhere in that sentence. No hardness of heart, no refusal, no unbelief, no unworthiness, no failure of desire—the desire is the first thing stated. Luke could have written that he was too proud to push through, or too hated to be let past, and Luke wrote neither. He could not for the crowd, because he was low of stature, and that is the entire diagnosis the Gospel offers. Every other explanation for why he could not for the crowd is one we bring with us.

Nobody in Jericho did anything wrong

Now look at the crowd, because the crowd is us.

They are not a mob. Not one person in that street set out that morning to stop a short man from seeing anything. They came to see Christ, which is exactly the right thing to want. They stood in the road, which is where you stand. They stood at their own height, which is the only height anybody has.

Every person in that crowd was behaving well, and he could not for the crowd. That is the hardest kind of exclusion to see from the inside, because it has no author. Nobody decided it. It is simply what happens when a space fills up with people who all happen to fit.

And here is the part I want to be honest about: a crowd like that will never notice. It cannot. The information that somebody at the back can see nothing is precisely the information a crowd is built not to carry. Nobody in that street knew he could not for the crowd, and nobody had to lie about it.

What he does, and what he does not do

Watch his solution, because it tells you what he had already ruled out.

He does not grow. That is not available and he does not waste a second wishing for it. He does not ask anyone to move, which tells you something about how long he has been living in that town. He does not appeal to his rank, and he had rank—Luke says he was chief of the publicans and rich, so this is a man with standing who has evidently learned that standing does not buy a sightline. He has worked out already that asking will not change the fact that he could not for the crowd.

What he does is run ahead and get above it. He could not for the crowd, so he leaves the crowd entirely, goes down the road to a place nobody is standing yet, and climbs a tree. The tree is not a symbol. It is the only place in Jericho from which he could see, and he could not for the crowd anywhere else.

Count what that cost him. He had to leave the spot where everyone else was allowed to stand. He had to work out the route in advance, which means he has done this arithmetic before, in other streets, for other things. And he had to be undignified in public, a wealthy man running and climbing in front of the whole town, because the alternative was seeing nothing at all. Everyone who could not for the crowd pays that surcharge, and nobody in the crowd is ever billed for it.

That is a workaround. Every person who has ever needed one recognizes it instantly. It works, and it costs, and it has to be invented again tomorrow, because he could not for the crowd yesterday and the crowd has not changed.

The teaching this text will not support

Now the hard part, and I am not going to step around it.

There is a teaching that takes a man who could not for the crowd and makes him the problem. It says: he should have tried harder, spoken up, asked properly, had more faith, made more effort. It locates the failure in the person who cannot see rather than in the arrangement that prevents seeing. And the moment you say it out loud beside Luke 19:3 it falls apart, because Luke has already told us where the obstruction was, and it was not inside him.

I am naming who this is aimed at, because the verse names it first. This teaching lands on disabled people, and it lands hardest on people whose bodies simply do not match the rooms that worship gets held in—the step at the front door, the pew that does not move, the sanctuary you reach by stairs, the microphone nobody thought to switch on. Every one of those is a way of saying could not for the crowd in the language of a floor plan. Told often enough that the barrier is a personal shortfall, a person stops going. That is the fruit, and by the fruit-test it is the only evidence that matters.

Yesterday I stood on a Collect that asks to be delivered from present sorrow and spoke about duration—about a sorrow that does not lift, and the lie that says persistence proves you did not try. Today the claim is a different one and I want the difference on the record. That was about time. This is about architecture.

Yesterday’s harm says you should have healed by now; today’s says you should have been able to reach it. They are not the same sentence and they do not get the same answer. One is answered by patience; the other is answered by moving the furniture, and a man who could not for the crowd needs the second one.

The first thing Christ does is look up

And when Jesus was come to the place, looking up, he saw him.

Before a word is spoken, a sightline gets reversed. The man who could not for the crowd is the man who gets seen, and Christ has to lift his eyes to do it, because by then Zacheus is above the whole street.

Then: make haste and come down. Notice that the workaround is not praised and it is not left in place. Nobody who could not for the crowd should have to be clever forever. He does not have to keep being ingenious, keep arriving early, keep finding the one branch with a view. He can come down and stand in the road like everybody else, because the thing he was straining to see has stopped and is now addressing him by name.

And then the sentence that decides the day: for this day I must abide in thy house. Not may. Not would like to. Must. On the feast of the grandest church in Christendom, the Gospel’s holy place is a private house down a side street in Jericho, and Christ says he is under some necessity to stay there.

A row of people sliding down

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who came back to church after a long absence, and not because her faith had come back.

Her mother had died in the spring and by autumn she had run out of places to sit with it. So she went on a Sunday morning to the nearest church with its lights on, arrived late, and stopped in the doorway at the back, where what she could see was the backs of about two hundred heads and a strip of ceiling. She had not come to follow the service. She had come to be in a room where somebody else was doing the talking.

A man in the last pew noticed her standing there. He did not hand her a book, and he did not lean over to explain what page they were on, which she said afterwards she had been braced for. He slid along the bench. Then the two people next to him slid along, and then the row did what a row does once it has started, and by the end of it there was a gap at the aisle end with a clear line to the altar.

Nobody asked her what she believed. Nobody has asked her since. She could see, and that was the whole of what was done for her, and she has told the story for years as though something enormous happened, because something did.

That is the entire remedy the Gospel is interested in. Not a lecture for the woman in the doorway. A crowd that moves. She could not for the crowd, and the crowd repaired it without ever once discussing it.

The building falls down and the feast survives

Then set the Lesson beside all of it.

The church we are keeping the anniversary of is the cathedral of Rome, and its own walls carry an inscription calling it the mother and head of all churches of the city and the world. It was raised on ground Constantine handed over to the Church around the year 311. An earthquake in 896 brought it down from the altar to the doors. It burned, and was rebuilt. It burned again in 1360, and was rebuilt again.

So the most senior building in Latin Christianity has been a heap of rubble more than once, and the feast kept going anyway. Which is what the Lesson has been saying from the beginning: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. Not among the stones—with men. The dwelling is portable, and the stones never were. And if the dwelling is people, then a man who could not for the crowd was shut out of the dwelling itself and not merely out of a room.

If you take nothing theological out of this room, take the plain version: a group of people is the thing that is holy, and the building is a tool. Tools get judged by whether they work for the person using them. A church that a man could not for the crowd get into is a tool that is failing, however old it is and however beautiful.

And the Lesson goes further, into the only promise that would matter to somebody carrying real grief: God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more. Six days ago we prayed eternal rest give to them over the whole company of the dead. Today the same hope arrives from the other end, as an announcement rather than a petition: Behold, I make all things new.

The murmur, and the fourfold

And when all saw it, they murmured.

Look who is murmuring. The same crowd. He could not for the crowd, and now that same crowd is unhappy that Christ found him anyway—and the objection is not about the man’s trade, it is about where Christ has chosen to stay the night. They can accept a Jericho where a short man sees nothing. They cannot accept a Jericho where the house on the side street is the one that gets the guest.

And then Zacheus stands up and says something nobody asked him for. The half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have wronged any man of any thing, I restore him fourfold. He is not buying the visit, which has already happened. He is releasing every claim he holds on everybody in that street, including the ones who stood in front of him.

Last Sunday we sat with a servant who was released from an unpayable sum and then went out and would not release a hundred pence, a man who could not recognize have patience with me coming out of somebody else’s mouth. Here is the photograph negative of him. Zacheus is a creditor too. Nobody has demanded a thing. He opens his own ledger and tears it up in the street, and the man who could not for the crowd is the only person in the chapter who gives anything away.

Where this leaves us

So here is what I would ask you to carry out.

You are in a crowd this week. Several of them. A meeting, a queue, a kitchen, a group chat, a pew. In every one of them there is someone who could not for the crowd, and the odds are very good that you will not be able to see who, because that is the nature of the problem.

So do not try to identify them and then help. Just make the room bigger than it needs to be. Leave the seat on the aisle. Slide down the bench before anyone asks.

Say the thing out loud that everybody in the room already knows, in case one person does not. Ask where the door without the step is, even on a day when you do not need it, because asking on an easy day is what makes it possible to ask on a hard one.

On the first of this month we heard about a multitude which no man could number, and I said then that heaven does not run a gate that counts people. This is the same claim, standing on the ground: the Collect this morning asks that whosoever shall come into this Thine house to ask good at Thine hand be rejoiced in obtaining all his request. Whosoever. The prayer contains no clause about height.

Christ looked up. He could not for the crowd, and so the Lord of the house raised his eyes. That is the posture the whole feast is recommending. Not stooping, not reaching down—looking up, at a man who had gone to a great deal of trouble to be visible, and calling him by his name and going home with him.

↑ The order resumes below.