St Bede, the great English Orthodox interpreter of the Scriptures and Church historian made this wonderful comment about the story of Zacchaeus at the beginning of the 8th century:

See here, the camel is relieved of his hump, passing through the eye of a needle, that is, the rich man and the publican abandoning his love of riches, and loathing his dishonest gains, receives the blessing of his Lord’s company. It follows, “And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully.”

St Bede is, of course, referring to Christ’s teaching in Matthew 19:24 :

Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

So Zacchaeus loses his hump as it were, he abandons his love of money because, above all, he has sought and found the riches of Christ his Saviour. That hump on his back, which had for so long prevented him from passing through the narrow opening of a liberating faith, now hinders him no more.

Something to learn from this story is that we all have “humps.”  We all have burdens of accustomed sin which we find very difficult to offload. We are all sons of Abraham, but we find ourselves unable to enter into his promise, the promise of universal blessing, because of those burdens. The reason is simple. Those burdens carry with them false promises to which we get rather attached, even when they do not deliver on the happiness that we all seek. These false promises of riches, but also of fame, of glory, of public recognition, of approval by our friends, of fleeting human pleasures; all these and more are obstacles to the true joy which is to be found in Christ alone. The first and indeed every subsequent step toward salvation is to allow the bitter taste of these false promises, concealed beneath the deceptive sweetness of our passions, to be unmasked for what they truly are: a deception of the devil.

The devil deceives us by taking something which is good in itself and getting us rather attached to it but then using that attachment to detach us from our proper union with God. The pathetic figure of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, you will recall, was for ever fretting over his precious ring, the ring of power. The ring could make him invisible and this is how he first got addicted to his own particular hump. Once the demonic power of the ring, however, had got him firmly in its grasp he could not let go of it in his mind. It prevented his happiness, led him into all sorts of deceptions with his fellows, isolated him and made him bowed down, wizened and ugly. In order to avoid Gollum’s fate, we need to learn from Zacchaeus how we might deal with our own humps.

First, be aware of them. So many people carry around burdens of sin that they are not even aware of these as being sinful. The devil may have deceived them to the point that they think that these humps are normal, natural, even, God help them, “good.” However, in every darkness, no matter how dark, there is always a chink of light. Those of us who know the Light, which is of course Christ the Light of the world, must allow that Light to penetrate all the rooms of the soul so that we can discover there what is to be rejected and discarded and what is to be valued and kept. Those who do not know Christ need our help, at the right time and without any sense of judgement, to begin to see into their own condition with this Light. However, (allow me to mix biblical metaphors here), we must take the plank out of our own eyes before having any right to attend to the blindness of others.

Okay, let us assume now that we have some awareness of a particular hump which is hindering our spiritual growth and rendering us unable to pass through the next eye of the next needle. How do we get rid of the hump? We need to recognise that it is doing us no good and, maybe with others also, actual harm. Zacchaeus realised that his ill-gotten gains, while giving him financial security, did not ease his conscience which remained accused and especially when his fellow countryman detested him for his greed and collaboration with the Romans. It accused him perhaps when he saw the faces of despair and the families of those whom he plundered. To quote from the parable of the prodigal son, at some point he must have “come to his senses.” (Luke 15:17). In respect of our own particular hump, therefore, we need also to come to our senses and accept honestly the witness of our conscience concerning the harm that has been done and if our conscience does not accuse then, more generally, we need to listen to the Gospel, to our spiritual father, to the Church.

The next step is to do whatever we can (the equivalent of climbing the sycamore tree) to see Jesus, to connect with him. This is repentance, to bring our hump to Christ and to leave it there. Christ will then by the power of his cross take upon himself the burden of our sin and, being sinless Himself, destroy it completely by the power of his resurrection. We shall then be able to pass, without our hump, through the eye of the next needle and so on repeatedly until each and every hump and deformity of sin is removed.  At the end, we shall pass to glory unhindered through the eye of our own death.  If, as is likely, there are any deformities still remaining at our death, then we can hope that the prayers of the Church will deliver us. Our salvation in Christ is indeed sustained and brought to perfection in love by our prayers for each other both before and after death.  As Hebrews encourages us:

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.