Zaccheus’s Reality – Luke 19:1-10

A text – Luke 19:1-10

19 He entered Jericho and was passing through it. ² A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. ³ He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. ⁴ So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. ⁵ When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” ⁶ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. ⁷ All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” ⁸ Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” ⁹ Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. ¹⁰ For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

A reflection:

We all know this story if we sang about it in Sunday School when we were young. It looks like a kind of instant conversation story of a wicked chief tax collector who changes his ways upon meeting Jesus. But many Bible scholars are quick to point out that the tenses of the verbs in verse 8, Zaccheus’s descriptions of what he is doing, are in the present or continuous tense. He is giving to the poor and is repaying folks he has defrauded. He is (and also will be) making things better for those he deals with and is no longer continuing to enrich himself. So what if, besides climbing the tree because he wanted to see Jesus, Zaccheus discovers he is in that tree because Jesus wants to find him and declare him a Son of Abraham worth saving?

Zaccheus is a man on the mend. He is ostracized by his neighbors because he collects exorbitant taxes for a foreign government and has become rich doing that traitorous work. He is a nothing to his neighbors, despised, little in more than one way. But he gets to announce, in the crowd that is following Jesus, that he is changing. Jesus pronounces him a son of Abraham (just the way Jesus says the bent-over women he healed is a daughter of Abraham), not someone to be denigrated by the neighborhood but someone to be embraced as one of their own clan.

Of course Jesus stayed with Zaccheus. He and his followers required a dozen sleeping places wherever they went, and rich persons who became believers in Jesus supported his ministry by sharing their homes. One wonders if Zaccheus might not have become the leader of the Christians in Jericho after this noteworthy visit, and perhaps if he used what was left of his fortune to help those in need when Jesus’s followers were being persecuted. Jesus surely saw the potential of this person before anyone else did. How many people do you guess that we overlook or disregard or even disdain because we don’t know their whole story? Which one of those people are you going to get to know better this week?

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for sending Jesus to us. Thank you for Luke’s story of Zaccheus and his salvation and acceptance by Jesus. Help us to be generous with others as Zaccheus became, and help us to give others a chance as Jesus did.  Amen.