Isaiah 1.10-18; Psalm 32.1-8; 2 Thessalonians 1; Luke 19.1-10
IT IS no fun being short. Time and again, you might be at some performance or event, but are seated behind someone blocking your view. There are not any handy sycamore trees in a theatre. In a football stadium, when people in front of you arise to get a greater view, you arise, too, passing the misery backwards.
Zacchaeus is brief. But he desires to see the identical spectacle as everyone else; so he climbs a tree. The proven fact that it’s a sycamore is a factual detail, just like the mention of Jericho because the setting for this episode, and the unique personal name. This type of detail makes us trust the narrator of the story, since it proves that he has mastery of specifics.
Zacchaeus is brief. He is a tax-collector. He is wealthy. His name suggests that he’s Jewish. There is an obvious parallel with Levi (one other tax-collector) in Luke 5. That episode likewise included a meal, and a warning about judging Jesus adversely for his readiness to combine with “sinners”.
What makes Zacchaeus unique is the outline of his appearance. Four centuries later, when Jerome the Bible translator described the heretic Pelagius as walking “like a tortoise” and “fat on Scottish porridge”, it marked history’s first physical description of a British person. Such descriptions are unusual: nobody thought to record for posterity the looks of Jesus or Paul — or Jerome, for that matter.
Luke will not be directing his readers to make judgements about Zacchaeus based on his lack of height (not in the way in which that Jerome does when he spits his venom about Pelagius): Zacchaeus’s stature is only functional. The climbing of the tree happens for one reason: to enable him to see Jesus. By Gospel irony, it has the reverse effect: enabling Jesus to see Zacchaeus.
Perhaps that is the primary time that anyone has looked properly at Zacchaeus, or has really seen him for who he’s. People have seen the role, the work, the tax-collector. They have seen, and have turned away in disgust, in much the identical way as we would, if we were concurrently revolted and fascinated by some gruesome sight on television.
This doesn’t faze Zacchaeus. He is unquestionably well accustomed to being an object of other people’s hostility and disgust. His attention is all on the thrill of Jesus’s having noticed him in a way wherein he isn’t often noticed. This may explain why he’s so comfortable on the considered Jesus’s coming, not simply to eat with him, but to stick with him, too. He is actually happier than I might need been if some stranger, even a star stranger, were to ask himself into my home.
His happiness at having been “seen”— for once in his life affirmed, as an alternative of spurned — brings us to the center of the story. Two options are before us: treating people as outcasts, rejecting them, sends them a message that they might be welcome inside society’s fold only once they have modified, repented, and reformed their lives in conformity to social norms and expectations. That is Zacchaeus’s situation in verse 2.
Then there’s the second option: the instance of Jesus. He notices a sinner. He talks to a sinner. He asks the sinner to ask him in. And, when people turn their hostility and judgement upon Jesus as an alternative, he shakes it off and declares to Zacchaeus that “today, salvation has come to this house.”
Zacchaeus’s eagerness to see Jesus suggests that his transformation began long before it became visible. It then unfolded in stages, in a dialogue between Saviour and saved. Naturally, this attracted the hostility of those that believed in repentance first and forgiveness afterwards.
It is central to Luke’s message that Jesus is the seeker-out of the lost, and Zacchaeus proves it by taking immediate motion. He offers restitution — and compensation, too — as concrete signs of what the Lord’s welcome means to him. His transformation began together with his eagerness to see Jesus; it blossoms since the Lord treats him in a well mannered way and heat.
Zacchaeus reminds us first of Levi, but he makes a good higher pairing with the prodigal son. Both are unique to Luke. Both have made themselves social outcasts by their very own behaviour and selections. Both encounter divine love that they never expected and knew that they didn’t deserve. Both, in other words, are us.
