For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.— Luke 19:10
Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, not just a tax collector but the one who supervised the others. In first-century Judea, that meant he worked for Rome, extracting money from his own people, taking his cut along the way. In the eyes of his neighbors, he was in the same category as a thief. Rabbinic law classified tax collectors alongside robbers: their money tainted, their testimony inadmissible in court, their very presence in a home a source of ritual concern.
Luke adds one more detail: Zacchaeus was short. To us it reads like simple description. But in the first-century world, where a person’s appearance was widely read as a window into their character, small stature carried a verdict. Scholars of the period note it was commonly associated with greed. Luke’s first readers would have nodded: of course he is. Short, greedy, corrupt. The whole package. Everyone in Jericho had already decided who Zacchaeus was, down to his body.
The text says Zacchaeus could not see Jesus because of the crowd (Luke 19:3). We tend to read this as a simple logistical problem: short man, tall people, blocked sightline. But consider who that crowd was.
These were the people Zacchaeus had spent his career extracting money from. His neighbors. His former friends. The ones who refused to eat with him, walk beside him, acknowledge him in the market. They were not simply standing in the way. They were the wall. The rejection was the obstacle.
There is something else worth noticing. Luke tells us Zacchaeus could not see Jesus because of the crowd — not just around Jesus, but between Zacchaeus and Jesus. And the crowd was not only people. It was everything those people represented: the religious expectations of who deserved access, the theological disputes about what the Messiah should look like, the accumulated traditions and interpretations and gatekeeping that surrounded Jesus wherever He went. The crowd was tall not because the people were physically large. It was tall because everything it stood for — respectability, qualification, the right credentials — loomed larger than the man at the center.
We still have this crowd. Different names, same function. Some people think their vantage point is a title. If I become an elder, a pastor, a theologian, surely I will see Him more clearly. Others think it is a book, a degree, a position in the church. But the crowd does not shrink with status. Ask anyone who has spent years climbing the ladder of religious achievement and still feels that Jesus is somehow far off, glimpsed through leaves rather than seen face to face.
And yet Zacchaeus did not argue with the crowd. Luke tells us he ran ahead, getting out in front of the procession, finding his angle before Jesus arrived (Luke 19:4). That running is not the movement of a curious bystander. It is the movement of someone who has decided that whatever it takes, whatever it costs in dignity, he is going to see. He did not wait for the crowd to clear. He went around it.
I once heard a seminary student pray something I have never forgotten: Lord, let the theology I am learning never become the tall crowd that stands between me and Jesus. Let it be the thing that helps me see through, not the thing that blocks my view. That is the prayer for all of us. The crowd is not the destination. Jesus is. And the way past the crowd is not to argue with it. It is to find another angle, and refuse to let what is in between become the final word.
The sycamore-fig tree has large leaves. Broad, dense, layered: the kind of canopy that conceals more than it reveals. Zacchaeus did not climb into an open perch with a clear sightline. He climbed into cover. He could see through the leaves, but he could not easily be seen. Whatever his reasons — shame, fear of being recognized, the instinct of a man who had learned to stay on the edges of things — he was hiding while looking.
Hidden in the leaves, he watched for Jesus. And Jesus, passing through the crowd, saw what no one else could see: not a tax collector hiding in a tree, but a longing that had climbed as high as it could go.
He stopped directly below him, looked up through the leaves, and said his name.
*Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today. * — Luke 19:5
He did not say there is a tax collector up there. He did not call for someone to bring the man down. He said his name. The name that had become, in Jericho, a synonym for betrayer and thief. And here is what his neighbors had long since stopped hearing: Zacchaeus — from the Aramaic zakkay — means pure one. Clean. Innocent. It was the cruelest kind of irony in Jericho. A man whose name meant purity, whose life had become a byword for corruption.
But in the mouth of Jesus, that name was not an irony anymore. It was a restoration. Pure one. Come down.
Because He had been looking. The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). Zacchaeus thought he was the one doing the searching. He had climbed the tree. He had made the effort. But the text pulls back the curtain on what was actually happening: the seeker had been sought. Jesus was not simply passing by. He had come to Jericho with this tree, this man, this moment already in view.
He came down immediately and received Jesus joyfully (Luke 19:6). The word Luke uses — hypedexato (ὑπεδέξατο) — is the word of someone who opens the door to a person they have been waiting for without knowing it.
Picture it for a moment. The most hated man in Jericho, breathless from climbing down a tree, standing at his own door, and the Savior of the world walking across his threshold as a guest. This is the shape of grace. Grace that arrives before we deserve it, before we are ready, before we have cleaned the house.
And before the day was over, Jesus looked at him and said: “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9).
What did Jesus see when He looked up?
Not a corrupt tax collector. Not a man whose name had become a synonym for betrayal. He saw the longing. He saw a man who had everything the world could give and had refused to pretend it was enough. He saw someone who had run ahead, climbed a tree, hidden in the leaves — all because something in him would not stop wanting what money could not buy.
That wanting was the beginning of his salvation. Not his virtue. Not his record. His longing.
And here is the question that cuts the other way: we who consider ourselves devout, who know the Scriptures, who have sat in churches for years — have we kept the longing? It is possible to become so settled in the forms of religious life that we lose the thing that drove Zacchaeus up the tree in the first place. We stop running ahead. We stop climbing. We manage the ache into something more dignified, and without noticing, we lose the very hunger that opens the door to grace.
He was not a righteous man. He was a desperate one. And Jesus stopped for the desperate one.
He is still passing through. And He is still looking for the same thing: not credentials, not a clean record, not years of faithful attendance. He is looking for the one who cannot stop wanting to see Him. Even faintly. Even buried. Even hidden in the leaves where no one else would think to look.
If that wanting is still alive in you — even as an ember, even after years of disappointment — He knows. He has already stopped beneath your tree. He is looking up through the leaves. And He is saying what He said to the man who thought he was hiding:
Come down. I must stay at your house today.
That is where salvation begins. Not in the resolution of all our questions. Not in the perfection of our lives. Here, in the moment we stop hiding and come down. When we open the door, He walks through it. And that is what we were made for: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” (1 Cor. 6:19). We were built to be inhabited. We were made to be His home.
Come down. Open the door. He is already there — and He already knows your name.
This is the first of two entries on Zacchaeus. Next: how close is close enough — and the last step most of us never take.
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