Zacchaeus the Tax Collector
1 Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." 6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.
7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, "He has gone to be the guest of a sinner."
8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, "Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount."
9 Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."
Dig Deeper
By the time that I had got married and had a son, I was working as a high school history teacher and living in a fairly large city. My usual routine after school was to go home, play with my son for awhile, see my wife off to work for her third shift nursing job, and then get my son to bed. This would leave me with several hours a night for my two favorite activities at the time, being alone and reading history books. After studying the Bible with some disciples and becoming a Christian myself, my mindset of wanting to be alone as much as possible didn’t change a whole lot. I enjoyed spending time with my wife and son but beyond that, to be honest, I wanted to be a Christian but didn’t really want to be around other Christians all that much. My problem in this area was twofold. The first was that I was selfish and enjoyed being alone and saw no problem with that instinct.
My second problem was that I had a fundamental flaw in my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. I sincerely thought that becoming a Christian was some private spiritual endeavor that I took to restore my personal relationship with God and that was it. At best, I saw the role of other Christians in my life as people with whom I could practice some of the commands of the Christian life, as a group of people who shared my beliefs, and as an environment which could foster my own spiritual growth so that I could have a better relationship with God. What I was missing was the true nature of salvation. Although there is an individual aspect to salvation, our Westernized modernistic societies generally miss the deeper truth of salvation. It is not solely an individual event but a community-creating event. It is, as Jesus will make clear to Zacchaeus, a matter of being accepted into the family of God. Fellow Christians are not just a group of people who share common beliefs but are members of our new family, the family that God promised to Abraham. The family through whom the entire world would one day be blessed.
As Jesus was going through Jericho, a town about 20 km (12 miles) from Jerusalem, it was obvious that there was quite a stir going on around the movements of Jesus. People had heard that something was unique about this man and were coming from all around, and quite willing to go out of their way to see this Jesus, and see what he was up to. Jesus was attracting crowds, including a man named Zacchaeus.
Luke doesn’t give us many details about Zacchaeus but based on his description of Zacchaeus as a chief tax collector and a wealthy one at that, we can know a few things about him with relative certainty. Tax collectors in Israel were not well liked. They generally worked, at one level or another, for the Roman Empire and were thus seen as traitors to their people. They basically had freedom to collect the taxes that Rome required of each person and additional taxes that they added on as their own fee. This is how they could get quite wealthy in a short period of time. They literally grew rich at the expense of their own people while working for the hated enemy. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how everyone else in Israel would have felt about them. But Zacchaeus wasn’t just a tax collector, he was a chief tax collector which meant that he oversaw other tax collectors and, no doubt, took an extra cut from each of them as well. Tax collectors were well off but were reviled and ostracized by most Jews. In fact, many Jews believed that tax collectors were such obvious sinners that they would not even allow them into their home in the belief that their mere presence made the entire home unclean and in need of purification.
Most of us know of Zacchaeus from Sunday School and from songs about the wee little man but there is at least one detail in this passage that is a bit ambiguous and may not be quite what we have always thought. Luke tells us that Zacchaeus could not see past the crowd because he was “short.” The word, “helikia,” though literally means “of little stature” and could refer to height, age, or even status. Just as possible as Zacchaeus being short, is the possibility that he was quite young or was so reviled that the crowd intentionally pushed him to the back so that he could not see. Either way, Zacchaeus climbed up a nearby tree because he was determined to see Jesus. The action of a wealthy man climbing a tree would have been unseemly in that culture, so it’s obvious that Zacchaeus really wanted to see this man.
When Jesus saw this hated man that was straining to see him, he knew that this was the kind of lost person that he came to seek so he told Zacchaeus that he would be coming to Zacchaeus’ house to be treated with hospitality. That would have been an acceptable and deeply symbolic action in that culture and would have been to accept Zacchaeus in a way that was shocking to those that saw him as a sinner. In fact the crowd began to mutter and grumble immediately (bringing to mind the grumbling and complaining of the Exodus generation) that Jesus would dare go to this man’s house. To accept hospitality from a known sinner who had been firmly rejected as part of the people of God, the true family of Abraham was outrageous and just unacceptable in the eyes of the crowd.
Verse 8 is a bit of mystery. The typical understanding of this passage is that Zacchaeus really was a terrible sinner who, after spending an evening with Jesus, humbly declared that he was going to repent and make right what he had done. Although that is the popular view of this passage, commentators and biblical scholars are split. That could be the meaning of this passage but others argue that nowhere does this passage confirm that Zacchaeus was guilty of doing what others thought of him and nowhere does it explicitly state that he repented. The statements in verse 8 are actually all in the present tense (the TNIV and other translations add “will” before “pay” to make it a future event in the attempt to help clarify otherwise ambiguous language) so some argue that Zacchaeus is simply declaring what he already does and that perceptions of him are false. This view then says that Jesus accepts his actions and declares him in the right. Although that is a tempting theory with some credibility to it, I tend towards the traditional view of this passage and would argue that Zacchaeus was so desirous of being part of Jesus’ people that he was declaring that he would make amends for his past actions immediately, that this was now who he was. To further add to this view is the fact that Jesus declared that “today” salvation had come to his house, as though something was now different based on what Zacchaeus had said and done.
If the traditional view is correct then it is of note that the repentance of Zacchaeus was seen in his desire to make restitution for his previous actions of defrauding his fellow countrymen. Repentance was not a matter of just thinking differently, although that was certainly part of it, but Zacchaeus’ repentance was demonstrated by his desire to live by a whole new reality. He was willing to go far beyond the normal standard of restitution laid out in the Old Testament.
Because of this desire to live differently, Jesus declared that restoration, salvation, had come to Zacchaeus. But it was not limited to some individual event. Zacchaeus, said Jesus, was truly a member of the family of Abraham. He had been rejected by the people of Israel as just such a member of the covenant family, but Jesus was declaring that membership into the promised family of Abraham was not based on being born into the right ethnic family but was now based on association with Jesus. Jesus was radically redefining the promised family. Salvation then, was not some vague spiritual experience where one could start to have a personal relationship with God (a phrase that never appears in the Bible) but was the reality of repentance, turning to Jesus, and the being received into the family of God with open arms. God had promised Abraham that he would bless the entire world through a family of many nations (Gen. 17:3-8). As we have seen throughout the Gospel of Luke and in the other Gospels, Jesus was clear that part of his ministry was to bring the fulfillment of that promised family (Mark 3:31-35; Lk. 11:27-28; 9:23-26; 14:25-27; Mark 10:28-30, etc.). Speaking of Jesus, Paul declared that “He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near . . . Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household” (Eph. 2:17, 19), and that “the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children” (Rom. 8:15, 16).
Jesus was telling Zacchaeus that he really could be part of the promised family of God, despite the fact that those who clung to that distinction the most had rejected him as hopeless and were quite sure of their own status. Jesus had made clear the very thing that Paul, writing a generation later, would remind the Galatians of: “those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: ‘All nations will be blessed through you’” (Gal. 3:7-8). Zacchaeus had found the path to entering that promised family and was being welcomed into it. The Son of Man, as the three parables in chapter 15 made clear, truly came to seek and save what was lost. He had come to gather up God’s lost children and bring them back into the one family of many nations. He did it for Zacchaeus and he wants those of us who have already been found and adopted as sons and daughters to do the same for others. This doesn’t mean inviting people some new religious experience but showing them what it means to truly be adopted into the family of God.
Devotional Thought
One of the most memorable aspects of this account for most people is the great lengths that Zacchaeus went through to be able to see Jesus. Are you willing to go through similarly extreme measures to spend time with Jesus each day or can the slightest little things keep you from spending time with God? Why do you think Zacchaeus was so determined to see Jesus. What can you learn from that to apply to your life?
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