Up the Sycamore

A grown man is up a tree. Not a boy—a rich man who has gathered up his robes and scrambled into a sycamore like a child, because he is too short to see over the crowd and cannot bear to miss the one who is passing through (Luke 19:3–4).

The money is not incidental. “He was a chief tax collector and was rich (Luke 19:2)” is not, in Luke’s mouth, a compliment; he had grown rich working for Rome and skimming his own neighbors, and everyone in that crowd knew whose money had become his. It was not merely his income. It was his standing, a self he had bought because nobody in Jericho was going to hand him one, and those of us holding more respectable portfolios know the arrangement.

Jesus reaches the tree and looks up, and he already knows the name. “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today (Luke 19:5).” Not may. Must.

He does not stand under the branch and read out terms. He gives the welcome first—Zacchaeus “received him joyfully (Luke 19:6)”—and only afterward, undone at being wanted, does the little man promise half his goods to the poor and fourfold repayment to everyone he has cheated (Luke 19:8).

What I cannot account for is the tense. His verbs are present—I give, I restore—so he may be defending what he already does rather than promising something new.

Either way, Luke never says Zacchaeus was forgiven. He says Jesus invited himself to dinner, and that afterward salvation had come to that house. The fortune that had been holding his name up is suddenly only money, half of it gone before the meal is over, because the standing it was buying has walked in and sat down.¹ It was the kindness of God, not the threat, that turned him—the kindness Paul says “is meant to lead you to repentance (Romans 2:4).”

“Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:9–10).” The man the town had struck from the family register is named a son of Abraham by the Lord of the family. They grumbled, of course—he has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner (Luke 19:7). We would have grumbled with them, because we assume there is a record that gets a man into the house and ours is cleaner than his. Neither his money nor our record opens that door. Only being sought does. Within the week Jesus himself would be up a tree, outside the city, and nobody had to climb to see him. Paul reaches for the same word: “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree (Galatians 3:13, quoting Deuteronomy 21:23).”

For two years I sat in the back row of a church large enough that nobody would learn my name, which was the point, and I assumed that what he wanted from me first was the list—what I spent, the way I talked about people who were not in the room—and that the welcome came after. I had the order backwards. The good news is not that we have found him; it is that he knows our name before we reach the branch, and still invites himself in. Come down. He means to come to the house today.