Going Out of Our Way to Be with God

Ok, sure—maybe I added a couple of details to the description of the guy in Luke’s gospel. But don’t you think the name Zacchaeus gives off a cartoony vibe? Like: mean short guy in a stripey gown up a sycamore, with a white-robed, red-sashed Jesus heading his way. As I said, Zacchaeus is on my mind. But this is not because I’m hanging out for a re-run of the Sunday School flannelgraph rendition of Luke 19. When the good doctor recounted the story of Zacchaeus and Jesus, I’m sure he wasn’t thinking, “This will be a great one for the kids”. Despite the situational comedy of crowds and tree-climbing, Luke’s narrative is getting at something significant. So often, the gospel stories invite us to identify with one or other of the characters in a given narrative. Here, we find ourselves confronted with a two-character drama of Zacchaeus and Jesus—and it’s pretty clear which part we’re invited to identify with. Much as I’d like to hold the treed tax-collector at arm’s length and laugh at him, I’ve not only been finding that Zacchaeus is on my mind, but that his troubled life is speaking to mine.

Twelve years ago, I found myself stuck. Not stuck up a sycamore but stuck in life—and profoundly so. Several years earlier, I’d set out to pursue an academic career, commencing on a PhD. Equipped with a generous scholarship, we shipped off to Scotland for three very good years. I returned with a well-minted thesis (soon to be a book), and began pitching for a permanent position, fired by self-belief and not a little naive optimism. Nearly three years on, as the wake of the global financial crisis widened, I found myself routinely working three adjunct positions simultaneously, and across two or three institutions. I was on ambition’s ladder and climbing, but somehow there were always more rungs (or did I keep slipping?), and at some point I found I couldn’t lift my arms. I was deeply stuck: stoical, anxious, and uncharacteristically angry. Cycling home one day, feeling the cars (too close!) push by me, leaving me behind, I was flooded with fear and rage. With a weird detachment, I noticed myself saying The Lord’s Prayer over out loud as a way of keeping back the profanities that were rising like vomit in my mouth.

It was an acute moment in an important failure. Like many studious, ambitious people, I had become quietly self-focussed, secretly entitled, critical and anxious. Mercifully, the experience helped me to acknowledge that I was stuck. The longer telling of this story concerns one of the more excruxiating relinquishments and griefs I’ve tasted so far: I gave up the ambition of becoming a tenured academic, and slowly, by strange and God-given turns, I fell more truly into step with Providence. More immediately however, my moment of road-rage received an answer (or, perhaps, a rebuke) in the form of a magazine article that a friend happened to mention. In that article, a theologian reflected on her experience of silent, submissive prayer. I know: not a catchy name. Nevertheless, I was brought up short by the theologian’s reflection that this way of praying—this simple way of keeping company with God—not only changed how she felt about her life and her work, but changed her life and her work full stop, engendering a profound change of heart and mind. Desperate as I was, I decided to call her bluff. I locked myself in to my university office, pulled the curtains, and got down on my knees in the centre of the room.

Nothing happened. Or at least, nothing happened in the terms set by my ambition: there was no “answer” to my situation, no prospective employer’s knock at the door, no sudden email notification in response to one of the many job applications I had floating out in the ether. It was all spectacularly unsuccessful. I was a desperate man who, in sadness and difficulty, surrounded by the flotsam of my success and effort, had gone out of his way to adopt a classically desperate posture, kneeling on the carpet tiles, for ten minutes or so, in hopeless silence. Even so, I was strangely comforted. Perhaps because my pain at life was so present, most potential distractions held little power, and a great, simple stillness settled over me. Something about the posture—becoming small, kneeling down, becoming inactive, not being powerful—was commensurate with my situation in general. Insofar as it was a way of praying that fitted the realities of my life, I was at last being honest. In a sense, with my body, I was saying to God: “Here I am, a sad and helpless man.” And so—as is always the case when we are willingly honest—to pray like this was good, and therefore comforting.

If that had been all that there was to it, I don’t think I would have stuck at it for more than a week. But there was more going on in this way of praying than feeling comforted. Something deeper was stirring, a kind of appetite. Throughout the rest of the day, as I wrote and researched, taught and talked, I found my mind wandering to those ten minutes of after-lunch silence keeping company with God. Despite a steep learning curve in the classic challenges of silent, listening prayer—distractions, daydreaming, inner fears and preoccupations—my longing to be with God only grew, to let my helplessness take shape before him. Ten minutes extended, became twenty, or longer. It became a space where I sought God on his terms, not holding out for my wishes, or shrinking back in my fear. Nothing in my outward situation changed immediately. The more important change was happening in secret. I was learning just how good, how deeply comforting, and how profoundly enabling, keeping company each day with God can be.

There’s much in Luke’s story of Zacchaeus that remains tantalisingly unexplained. As is typical of ancient texts, we’re not told of Zacchaeus’s state of mind, or exactly what life circumstance set him on a collision course with Jesus. We’re only told that “he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy”. None of that directly explains why he was so desperate to get a view of Jesus, though the story’s remarkable conclusion suggests Zacchaeus’s arboreal adventure did ultimately have something to do with his line of work. Somewhere at the centre of Zacchaeus’s life was not God but a nexus of money, power, and violence, and the fear that so readily plays host to these. There’s something sad, dirty, and desperate about him. All we’re told directly is: “He wanted to see who Jesus was” (Luke 19:3). For reasons he himself does not understand, Zacchaeus is drawn to this rabbi. Perhaps, there’s something self-seeking in his tree climbing: maybe he wants to see Jesus without the risk of being seen, without the danger that his wealthy life might be opened up to God’s power. But maybe Zacchaeus is already desperate enough to risk this: maybe climbing the tree is a deliberate act of humbling himself. Either way, he goes out of his way to see Jesus. He goes out of his own way, and thus, as is often the way of things, he strays into the path of God.

Come near to God and he will come near to you. So says the apostle (James 4:8). And so much is true of Zacchaeus: having humbled himself and gone out of his way to find out who Jesus is, he finds himself drawn into a life-changing rapport. And already Jesus is revealing himself: he is the one who somehow already knows Zacchaeus by name: “When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today’” (Luke 19:5). Zacchaeus wanted to have a good look, had a strange urge to put Jesus at the centre of his life. But now we’re finding out, along with Zacchaeus, who is this. Jesus is the one who, when we draw near, steps into the centre: into our wealth-strewn lives, our selfish, complacent lives, our angry, indignant and wounded lives. Indeed, he makes himself at home. He sits down and eats with us. After dinner, he extends the welcome and starts doing the dishes. Something here touches on my own experience, kneeling day after day, letting God draw me deeper into rapport with him.

Tantalisingly, we’re not let in on all that passes between Zacchaeus and Jesus. What did their conversation touch on, as they sat and ate and talked, all the while surrounded by the material signs of Zacchaeus’s corrupt and exploitative work? What deep need in Zacchaeus was understood and answered as he let himself be seen by this strange rabbi? What uncomfortable truths were laid bare, and in what manner, so that the conversation only continued to deepen? We’re not told. What we are shown is the stunning transformation that emerges: a man, whose life and identity had been given over to oppressive power and wealth, turns himself over to the mercy of God. Zacchaeus freely offers the whole of who he is as a kind of living sacrifice, beginning with those areas of his life where things are most disordered: “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount” (Luke 19:8).

For me—for us—there’s a pattern here, a point of self-recognition, and an invitation. Now, the analogy is imperfect: I’m not suggesting that you’re engaging in tax extortion. But perhaps you recognize a pattern of a person who, having developed a certain identity through work, and accrued a certain kind of recognition from the world, goes out of their way to see Jesus—to reckon with him as he is: the crucified and now living one, risen from the dead and thus able to draw near to us. And perhaps you sense the goodness for your own life of what it might mean to do just that: to go out of your way to see Jesus, to let Jesus step into the middle of your life, to answer the cry of your heart and transform the work of your hands. Perhaps like me, you’re hungry for God, and you’re tired enough of your own ways to sense the goodness of being still before God—of going, like Jesus himself, out into solitary places to be alone with God. Perhaps you sense, too, that there is a way of being in the world where our actions—our activism, our social justice, our works of mercy and works of endeavour, our culture making and community building—arise not just out of human ingenuity or visionary dreaming or even pragmatism, but out of the transforming, indwelling power of God’s Spirit. Perhaps you intuit the truth of what Sr. Mary Totah means when she writes:

Prayer is not just a part of a Christian’s life; it is the structure of his or her life, and after a lifetime, it becomes the very structure of his or her being. Prayer is not just an activity added to other activities; it is the condition of his or her being out of which all his or her actions spring.

Surely, that is a good invitation.

At the same time, it might seem strange that something as deeply relational and deeply transformative as this might require solitude and silence. Certainly, a full accounting of Christian prayer extends to many important ways of praying which don’t entail solitude. But, as Luke Fenwick explores more completely in this edition, silence and solitude are important for deepening our life—all of our life. Here’s how Ruth Hayley Barton puts it in her leadership book Pursuing God’s will Together:

Solitude is the foundational discipline of the spiritual life; it is time set aside to give God our full and undivided attention. In solitude we withdraw from our lives in the company of others and pull back from our many distractions in order to give God complete access to our souls. Devoid of the normal interruptions, silence deepens the experience of solitude. It enables us to withdraw not only from the noise and distraction of the external world, but also the “noise” of the inner compulsions that drive us. In solitude and silence, we become quiet enough to hear a voice that is not our own. This is the Voice we most need to hear.

This is my story. Understood in its fundamentals, it’s the story of Zacchaeus too, who gave Jesus his full and undivided attention, and thus heard the Voice he most needed to hear. All that came after—and all it meant for Zacchaeus’s wider community—sprang from this.

The practice

How then shall we keep company with God each day? How shall we go out of our way to see who Jesus is? And how can we learn to do this? What might this look like? Good questions. Well, let me venture three steps, with a final thought.

1. Firstly: at a time and in a place where you are unobserved by others, and free from external distractions, go out of your way to be with God. Adopt a posture that enables you to simply be before God. More crucially, adopt a heart posture of simply becoming available to God. There’s a kind of detachment, self-denial, and honesty in this. Here’s how Romano Guardini wisely puts it:

This restless being wants to pray. Can he do it? Only if he steps out of the stream of restlessness and composes himself.  This means discarding roaming desires and concentrating on that thing along which, for the time being, is the only one that matters. He must detach himself and say, “Now there is nothing which concerns me, except prayer. The next ten minutes” (or whatever time one may have allocated to it) “are reserved for this. Everything else is excluded; I am completely free and dedicated to this one task,” and he must be completely honest in this, for man is an artful creature and the artfulness of his heart asserts itself in religious matters.

In going out of our way to be with God, we expect to feel the discomfort of own inner “noise”, and honest about how readily we entertain external distractions. We’re not surprised by these things. We are paying attention to our hearts, which are saying “Seek God’s face!” (Psalm 27:8a). And we are resolved to join in on the response the Psalmist gives: “Your face Lord I will seek” (Psalm 27:8b). And so, unperturbed by our inconstancy and distractibility, we simply set aside uninterrupted time and space to keep company with God on a regular basis. We say: “Lord, here I am”, and “Holy Spirit, help me to pray now”.

2. Secondly: we assume a listening posture, taking up Scripture. Through Scripture, God speaks to his people. In this way, Scripture opens up a conversation with God in which we listen, and then respond. We read a psalm aloud; we linger with prayerful imagination in a story from the gospels; we listen to Jesus, and observe his actions. If prayer is the living room where we tarry with God, Scripture is the door to that room. This is not so much a matter of bible study, as of simply listening for God’s voice.
3. Thirdly, we wait on the Lord, trusting that he will be to us as in fact he will be, not as we wish or fear he may be. As we linger before God, worries and concerns float to the surface of our minds. The to-do list burns in the pocket. We find the silence uncomfortable, and welcome certain distractions; other distractions just seem to buzz around us, like flies. None of this should surprise us, and it need not distress us—none of it, after all, is surprising to God, or ultimately an impediment to his purposes.

Christians have learned that the best response to such distraction is not to tackle the troubles and noise head on, trying to iron out every wrinkle before you can put on the garment of prayer, but simply to return your attention to God. Certain things can help us in this. I’ve mentioned the role of Scripture. Physical reminders, like holding crosses, prayer ropes, or candles, can also help. Sometimes praying a simple prayer like “Come, Lord Jesus” or “Come, Holy Spirit”, or “Jesus is Lord”, can still the mind and anchor attention.

This kind of lingering prayer can be hard. Certainly, I didn’t seek out silence and solitude in earnest until I was deeply hungry. And perhaps we need to discern whether this is the right season to pursue God in this way. But if you are in such a season, and you still find solitary prayer difficult, please bear with the difficulty—it takes time and some training as well as much persistence. Please resist the temptation to say, “That’s not for me”.

Often, in the midst of our work and activity, in our efforts to make a difference to this troubled world, we feel the most important question is: “What should I do?” But if the gospel is true, the most important question is: “Who is Jesus Christ for us, here and now?” The invitation, then, is to go out of your way to see who Jesus is. Perhaps, like Zacchaeus and so many others, you’ll hear him speak your name. May you find yourself, despite yourself and all the pain of the world, welcoming Christ into the living room of your small, dusty, everyday life, letting his presence throw everything else into relief.

May it be so. Come, Lord Jesus.