Zacchaeus Comes Down

A crowd fills the street. Somewhere in the middle of it walks Jesus. And up in the branches of a tree, clinging on and trying not to be noticed, is the most disliked man in town.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and he's passing through Jericho, a wealthy town of palm trees and gardens near the Jordan. There's a man here called Zacchaeus. He's a chief tax collector, and he's rich. In Jericho everyone knows how tax collectors got rich. They collected money for the Roman authorities, and many took extra for themselves. People saw them as cheats and traitors. So Zacchaeus has money, but not many friends.

Zacchaeus has heard about Jesus, and he wants to see who he is. But there's a problem. The crowd is thick, and Zacchaeus is short. He hops and stretches and sees nothing but shoulders. Nobody is going to make room for him. So he does something no rich, important man would normally do. He runs ahead of the crowd, picks out a sycamore fig tree by the road, and climbs up into its branches. Imagine the sight: a wealthy man in fine clothes, perched among the leaves like a schoolboy. Now he can see. And he waits.

The crowd comes closer. Jesus comes closer. And when he reaches the tree, he stops. He looks up. “Zacchaeus,” he says. He knows his name. “Hurry and come down. I must stay at your house today.” Zacchaeus nearly falls out of the tree. He scrambles down as fast as he can, and he welcomes Jesus gladly, beaming from ear to ear.

But not everybody is smiling. A grumble runs through the crowd. “He's gone to be the guest of a sinner.” Of all the houses in Jericho, Jesus has picked the one nobody else would enter. Some of these people have paid Zacchaeus more than they owed. Some of them have gone without because of him. To them, sitting at his table looks like saying that everything he's done is fine. You can almost hear the doors closing up and down the street. But Jesus walks through Zacchaeus's door anyway.

And then Zacchaeus stands up. Maybe it's at his own table, with Jesus as his guest. “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of everything I own to the poor. And if I've cheated anybody out of anything, I'll pay them back four times as much.” Nobody told him to say it. Being welcomed has changed him from the inside out. And Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

The tree Zacchaeus climbed wasn't the sycamore you might know from a British or American park. It was a sycomore fig, a broad, sturdy tree common in the warm Jordan valley, with a short trunk and wide, low branches spreading out near the ground. That made it about the easiest tree in town for a grown man to scramble up, and a fine place to hide among the leaves.

Zacchaeus Comes Down. You'll find it in Luke chapter 19, verses 1 to 10. Zacchaeus went looking for Jesus, and found that Jesus had come looking for him. So here's a question to carry with you. Who is up a tree in your life, waiting for someone to call them by name?