Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus in the Tree
He was rich, he was hated, and he was short. To get a look at Jesus walking through his town he did something a wealthy grown man in that culture simply did not do. He ran, in public, and then climbed a tree.
What was the name of the tax collector who climbed a tree to see Jesus?
👉 Zacchaeus.
Everyone in that town had a reason to hate him
The story is in Luke, chapter 19, and it happens in Jericho.
To understand it you need to know what a tax collector actually was, because “works for the tax department” does not begin to cover it.
Israel was occupied by Rome. Tax collectors were locals who took the job of collecting money from their own neighbours and handing it to the occupying army. That alone made them traitors in most people’s eyes.
It got worse. Rome told them what it wanted, and anything they collected above that figure they kept. There was no published rate and no way to appeal. So the job was legalised extortion, carried out on your own people, on behalf of the army occupying your country.
Zacchaeus was not just a tax collector. Luke calls him a chief tax collector, which means he had others working under him and took a cut of theirs too. And Luke adds, flatly, that he was wealthy.
So when Jesus came through Jericho, and the whole town turned out, nobody was making room at the front for Zacchaeus.
He was short, and the crowd was not going to let him through. So he ran ahead of everybody and climbed a sycamore-fig tree.
That detail is easy to skip past. In that culture, a grown man of status did not run. It was undignified, and dignity was most of what a man like him had left to buy. Then he climbed a tree, in his good clothes, in front of a town full of people who already despised him.
Jesus reached the tree, stopped, and looked up.
Then he used his name. They had never met.
“Zacchaeus, come down. I need to stay at your house today.”
The crowd’s reaction is recorded and it is not warm. He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.
Zacchaeus stood up and announced that he was giving half of everything he owned to the poor, and that anyone he had cheated would get back four times what he took. Four times was the maximum penalty in Jewish law for deliberate theft. He chose the harshest option available.
And here is the bit worth noticing.
Nobody asked him to. There is no sermon in this story. Jesus never mentions his job, never lists his faults, and makes no conditions. He invites himself to dinner, and Zacchaeus volunteers the lot.
What we can take from this
Nobody argued him into changing. He changed after being included, not before.
The order of events in this story is the entire point of it, and it is the opposite of how most people assume these things work.
The usual expectation is that you sort yourself out first, and then you get to belong. Fix the behaviour, then you are welcome. Zacchaeus got the invitation while he was still, by everyone’s account including his own, a crook. The change came afterwards, and he came up with it himself.
There is something else in it about being named.
He had spent years being a category. The tax man. The traitor. The one whose house you would not enter. Then someone came through town, stopped under his tree, and used his actual name in front of everyone who only ever used the other word.
He gave away half his fortune about four minutes later.
Being wanted turns out to do something that being told off does not.
One thing worth sitting with
The crowd was not wrong about him. He really had been cheating them for years, and he admitted it himself.
So who was being fair here, the crowd or the guest? People land in different places on that one.
Something on near you
Most people are more likely to change somewhere they are already welcome than somewhere they have to earn it first.
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