Mutual Recognition
Rev. JT Smiedendorf
July 13, 2025
Text: Luke 19:1-10
CENTRAL FOCUS:
That mutual recognition of our humanity and human needs is the necessary prelude to just and healing relationship and community.
Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through town. 2 A man there named Zacchaeus, a ruler among tax collectors, was rich. 3 He was trying to see who Jesus was, but, being a short man, he couldn’t because of the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed up a sycamore tree so he could see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. 5 When Jesus came to that spot, he looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, come down at once. I must stay in your home today.” 6 So Zacchaeus came down at once, happy to welcome Jesus.
7 Everyone who saw this grumbled, saying, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”
8 Zacchaeus stopped and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated anyone, I repay them four times as much.”
9 Jesus said to him, “Today, salvation has come to this household because he too is a son of Abraham. 10 The Human One[a] came to seek and save the lost.”
May the words spoken and the words heard become your Living Word in us, among us, and beyond us.
AMEN
Last Sunday we engaged with the image that the apostle Paul gave to the church at Corinth that of the body and its parts that of many members in one body. Paul reminded them that all parts and all gifts are needed for the whole body to be and do well. As I mentioned last Sunday, the reason I am focusing on this for several Sundays is that I believe we can only meet the great challenges of our nation, world, and church by bringing together the many parts into our collective body’s efforts to meet those challenges. That doesn’t mean we will all see things exactly the same way, but that we will be in covenant relationship in the body serving the same broad mission of Love.
And we simply cannot do our whole body’s mission simply as a part, as an individual. We must come together. Love is inherently relational. Even within ourselves, we are made-up of many internal parts, internal family systems, if you will. So, bringing the many members into one body is a project for us individually as well as collectively. Our healing, our liberation, our empowerment, our joy and justice or lack thereof is all entwined with this dance of the parts and their integration into the whole body.
This morning, I would like to offer one core intention that can get us a long way toward a sense of the many parts working together as one body: mutual recognition. Below the conflicts and the arguments and the discord and the issues is a deeper reality where the healing medicine is mutual recognition.
Our Sacred story this morning shows us an example. Found only in Luke, the story of Zacchaeus illustrates a common theme in Jesus’ ministry, opening the circle of community to those casted out. The tax collector Zacchaeus would have been an outcast since he was a Jewish collaborator collecting taxes for the occupying Roman Empire. Such collectors were not only collaborators, but often understood to be taking more than their fair share for services rendered. And Luke adds he is short of stature and has to climb a tree to see Jesus, yet another characteristic that keeps Zacchaeus on the outside.
Yet, Jesus recognizes Zacchaeus, recognizes humanity in him, recognizes human needs and aspirations and possibilities. The one recognized only as a label, a collaborator, a bad person, is the one with whom Jesus will dine and lodge. People don’t like it. Those people who grumble are engaged in what Christian origins scholar Marcus Borg would call the politics of purity. There is in the history of ancient Israel the call to be ‘holy as God is holy’. This can be and was construed as the necessity to have a place for everything and everything in its place, in terms of food, clothing, and social hierarchy. Anthropologist Mary Douglas documented the importance of such cultural norms in her book Purity and Danger where she shows that in an attempt to manage fears of external threat, cultures resort to a focus on purity.
In contrast to the politics of purity, Jesus comes with the politics of compassion. Also, a part of the wisdom of Israel is the command to “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” This politics of compassion is what Jesus takes as his cue, and it allows him to recognize Zacchaeus as a human being worthy of connection. Zacchaeus apparently also recognized at some level that Jesus was someone to be known so he made sure to climb up a tree to see Jesus and to be seen. Mutual recognition.
But things get in the way with us humans recognizing each other in a way that allows us to recognize each other. One powerful way to prevent mutual recognition is to be stuck in trauma, stuck in one’s own story only.
Loaay Wattad is a Palestinian who grew up in Israel and in the Israeli education system. He learned all about Jewish and Israeli history on Israeli television where he learned to speak Hebrew. His Palestinian parents and grandparents never spoke to him when he was young about the trauma of the Palestinian people, the nakba, the catastrophe of expulsion when so many Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the coming of those who wished to establish a Jewish homeland there in the 1940s.
Yochi Fischer Is a Jewish woman, an Israeli citizen, who grew up as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors one of whom would never speak of it and the other who always spoke the same scary stories of it to her even though she was then only a little girl.
Through the Van Leer Jerusalem institute, these two sit together and bring groups of Israelis and Palestinians together to engage and to wrestle with the struggle for mutual recognition. As both will attest, there is something about the trauma of each people that prevents them from seeing the trauma of the other people. There is a kind of defensive posture that is magnified and even rigidified by the commitment to protect one’s own people and their difficult story.
Yochi Fisher reported that when she asked her father how it is they came to occupy an empty house in their town in Israel so many decades ago, he simply said we had suffered, and we needed a house. He could not contemplate or recognize the Palestinians who had fled in fear from what used to be their house. He could only see from the standpoint of his great suffering only his and his family’s need for housing. Trauma will often block access to compassion in this way, blocking the recognition of another story, of another’s perspective. One is unable to imagine and feel what it might be like to be someone else with a different story. One’s own suffering and one’s own vulnerability will get in the way of mutual recognition and therefore in the way of seeing and moving into a bigger whole together in relationship.
In his book, Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self, the late law professor Peter Gabel says,
True mutual recognition of each other’s full and vulnerable humanity, if we could begin to more fully realize it in the world, would begin to dissolve the false self that keeps us sealed off from one another and would allow us to move more decisively toward the moral redemption of the loving impulse that is already at the heart of our social existence.
Gabel (who once taught at the University of Minnesota) cites fear of the other as the root opposing force to mutual recognition. That’s why he talks about attending to the spiritual dimension of our social existence as an essential part of transforming the world. Mutual recognition, the kind that builds and heals relationships and communities, is a psychospiritual capacity to dissolve the false self’s distorted perceptions, fears, anxieties, and separations and to experience our deep identity together. Only then can we truly see below our stories into our own and each other’s humanity.
Next Sunday, I will invite us further into the depth of working this out, but for now it may be helpful to conclude with two examples with some support from a mentor of my wife and me. Dr. Barry Johnson, who teaches about polarities and the importance of AND, says simply that seeing is loving, that is if we see deep enough into another, deep enough to recognize the humanity in the other, compassionate love is the result.
Let’s start in the shallow water. During our current summer experiment of one blended worship service, each of us might have moments when some element of worship is not our preference: the music or spoken prayers or ritual style. This is a moment to recognize the other, to know that the element which is not our preference is for someone else. That other person is being given their preference in that worship moment and connecting more easily with Spirit. The recognition on our part involves honoring their particular preference, being happy for that other experiencing Spirit, knowing how we also like having our preferences in worship.
In the deeper waters of polarization in our nation, it is easy to see the other only in terms of their behaviors and the negative labels that follow. We judge them as other, as wrong, as bad like Zacchaeus. Let me be clear, I see the MAGA movement as pursuing a path that will result in more inequity, more injustice, more violence, more national debt, more suffering for humanity and for the planet. I don’t agree with most of their perceptions of the world nor policies of government. Yet, that is not an excuse for me to not try to recognize the humanity of those who are identified with that movement, to recognize the human needs below those policies and slogans.
Political columnist and commentator David Brooks said last year,
I think I detest Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.
Deeper even than these values is the human need to be seen, to be recognized, to have dignity, to be included. When we are polarized in our parts, our faithful invitation is to look deeper, below the stories and beyond the fear, to recognize the humanity and the human needs of the other.