THIS WEEK'S PASSAGE: LUKE 19:1-10
PREPARATION: You will need: a ball for the ‘crowded out’ activity, coats or cushions for the ‘Endurance test’, a prize, The Internship trailer and a slideshow of the images for the ‘how much do you want it?’ activity.
CROWDED OUT
10 mins
Choose a volunteer who is quite outgoing and possibly a bit short! Send them out while you explain briefly to the others what will happen. You are going to show the group something – perhaps a funny video on your phone – and they must all crowd round you so tightly that the volunteer cannot see what you are looking at. No one should say exactly what it is that you are looking at, other than it is absolutely amazing / must-see / incredible / not to be missed. Encourage the volunteer to try to see by saying things like. ‘You’ve GOT to see this!’ But at the same time don’t make any room for them to get into your circle to see. Invite the volunteer back in. Hopefully they will go to great lengths in order to see what it is!
READ THE PASSAGE
10 mins
Stay in a really tight huddle. Ask them why this story is in the Bible? Why does God want us to know about this story? Who is it about: Zacchaeus, Jesus, the onlookers or us? (There’s no wrong answer.) The passage challenges our judging attitude of others, questions our self-worth and pokes our assumptions of Jesus.
Ask: What do we know about Zacchaeus from this passage? Write their answers around a stick figure on a whiteboard or flip chart. Help them discuss and discover key point 1, and unpack them until it makes sense and you have worked out why he would be climbing a tree. Zacchaeus seemed very aware that Jesus had something he needed and he would go to great lengths to find out what.
KEY POINT 1
Zacchaeus was a chief, a man with a top-level job and was very rich. So you might think this would make him a person of influence; yet the strange thing is he seems to have no influence (outside of tax-collecting). Not only was he not highly regarded, he also didn’t consider himself above climbing trees in order to see this famous Jesus! What kind of figure was he? Can you think of an equivalent? Perhaps a rich porn producer? Or a chief traffic warden? Can you imagine them giving their wealth to the poor and turning to Jesus?
ENDURANCE TEST
5 mins
Have four young people stand with their arms straight out in front, palms down. Place a heavy cushion or stack of coats on their arms. The winner is the last one to be holding their arms out and gets some kind of prize. The point is to demonstrate how your motivation and ability to put up with hardship increases the more you want what is on offer. Zacchaeus really wanted to see Jesus and when he heard the good news he really wanted to be part of it, to the extent that he was willing to not only climb a tree to find out more but also to give away all his hard-earned (hard-conned) money as a result. What was it that he thought was worth doing that for?
THE INTERNSHIP
15 mins
Watch the trailer for The Internship (found here). Choose a young person to interview ‘for a job at Google’ using questions that have actually been used in Google interviews. Google is notorious for having the hardest, most cryptic interviews ever in order to find the very best of the best candidates. Ask these questions:
- How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
- You are shrunk to the height of a penny and your mass is proportionally reduced. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds.
- What do you do?
- How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
- How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
- You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
- Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. What can you do to organise your shirts for easy retrieval?
- Why are manhole covers round?
- A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT IT
5 mins
Show them a series of pictures and ask them what the connection is:
- A long queue waiting for the release of the new iPhone / Harry Potter book / January sales.
- A world record for a tower made of playing cards.
- A honeymoon prank: 14,000 post-it notes covering a couple’s flat.
- The Marathon de Sable: a 156-mile race over six days across the Sahara desert!
The answer is that these people are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the thing that they prize most highly. What do you really want? You can tell by your behaviour, not your emotion. Ask them to think about what they have put most effort into achieving: grade eight piano? Brown belt karate? Top marks in SATS?
Out of ten, how would the young people rate their desperation to meet with Jesus and have that connection with him? Would you be willing to give half of all your money to the poor?
If it was easy to achieve what we’re after it would be less special to get it.
KEY POINT 2
Zacchaeus gave up everything to make things right after he encountered Jesus. Jesus didn’t ask him to, he wanted to. Professional sports stars give up a lot to reach the top – do you think they mind? Succeeding is more important to them. I could ask you what would you give up for a better relationship with Jesus, but that’s the wrong question because when you really want something you are happy to sacrifice all else for it; it’s not a hard decision.
Perhaps this is a lesson we can transfer to our faith? Instead of praying, ‘Lord make us full of you’, we should pray, ‘Lord make us hungry for more of you, help us to want you more so that we won’t be as bothered about giving up other things for the sake of spending time with you and doing the right thing about social justice and other issues of conscience.’
Joel Toombs has spent more than 10 years in youth work and has an MA in Christian mentoring. See here for his booklet, Mentoring and young people.
