Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’
Luke 19:9-10 NIVUK
Church can often be a sombre affair, particularly in Reformed churches. It often seems like spirituality is measured by the depth of our frowns.
But that is a pile of utter nonsense. Our culture has us wrapped around its little fingers. When Christians behave like cold, emotionless robots, the world believes that we are dour, uninteresting and have nothing to say to them that would bring them joy and happiness.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
After all the seriousness and dire warnings of other verses on repentance – and rightly so – we come to ten verses packed with joy that poke the eyes of dour and judgemental religion.
And what a joy this is!
Because a man whose sins would have stank all the way to heaven itself is utterly transformed.
What a wonderful testimony to grace and repentance and forgiveness!
Firstly, we see here a sinful man:
A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.
Luke 19:2 NIVUK
All the people saw this and began to mutter, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’
Luke 19:7 NIVUK
There is a theme for fancy dress parties in western culture called ‘Saints and Sinners’, where you either go dressed up as someone like a priest or a nun, or as a character representing evil such as a demon or a witch or wizard. It’s a little foolish and highly flippant, and makes fun of something quite serious: that in the Bible there is quite the contrast between good and evil. It is not a spectrum: you are either one or the other.
In Jesus’ day, their society believed that the religious leadership – Sadducees, Pharisees, scribes, teachers of the Law, priests and suchlike – had to be good. On the other side were thieves, robbers, Gentiles, prostitutes and tax collectors.
Tax collectors in those days were thought of with nothing less than disgust. They were ethnic Jews who collaborated with their Roman overlords, money-grabbers who betrayed their people to get rich by gouging them with more taxes than the emperor required and pocketing the difference, selling their identity and religion for cold, hard cash.
That was Zacchaeus. In fact, he was worse: he was a chief tax collector. He was boss of the betrayers.
Although the locals would doubtless have feared a small man like him due to his influence and his use of local soldiers to demand money, a man like him would not have cared. Not in the slightest.
His sin was brazen, determined and untouchable.
And the Bible is absolutely plain on what God thinks of this:
‘No-one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
Matthew 6:24 NIVUK
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
1 Timothy 6:10 NIVUK
This is idolatry. Plain and simple.
Worse, it is a gateway idolatry. It leads to other heinous sins. That much is clear.
I have to state this here, and this will not be easy to read. There are people like Zacchaeus in every culture. There are those who would squash their family and friends in a heartbeat, or sell out their country, or bankrupt businesses, just to get a little more money.
Worse, and this is most disturbing of all, there are those who abuse their own children for money.
It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, if you have money or you do not, the love of money is a sin. End of discussion.
It is this love of money, and the sin caused by it, that leads to Zacchaeus being labelled as a sinner.
But here is an interesting verse:
The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.
Luke 16:14 NIVUK
So take that in for a second. The religious authorities – the apparent ‘good guys’ – love money just like the tax collectors did.
They were guilty of the same sin as him!
So Zacchaeus was a sinner. No-one could ever disagree with that. But although his sin was public, there were many others who wore religious garb and committed the same sin in private. They may well condemn men like Zacchaeus, but to do so would be the height of hypocrisy.
But Zacchaeus is not just a sinful man, he is also a seeking man.
And there is something deeply profound and touching about his seeking.
Here is a man who would be very wealthy- perhaps among the most wealthy occupants of an already wealthy city. Yet something is clearly missing.
Why else would a man of his substance and permission seek to see (not to be seen with, or to seek an audience with, just to see) a travelling preacher from Galilee?
Buried among the ancient wisdom of Solomon, we have this verse which might explain why:
Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless. As goods increase, so do those who consume them. And what benefit are they to the owners except to feast their eyes on them?
Ecclesiastes 5:10-11 NIVUK
So this guy has piled up cash – and plenty of it – and has secured a good life for himself, yet he is profoundly unsatisfied.
Oh, how our culture needs to hear this!
And he is so not alone.
Famous tennis star and commentator Boris Becker – who was recently bankrupted and expelled from Great Britain for tax evasion – said these words in an interview: ‘I had won Wimbledon twice before, once as the youngest player. I was rich. I had all the material possessions I needed ... It’s the old song of movie stars and pop stars who commit suicide. They have everything, and yet they are so unhappy. I had no inner peace. I was a puppet on a string.’
The famous American author Jack Higgens was asked what advice he would give to his younger self, and he uttered these heart-breaking words, ‘That when you get to the top, there’s nothing there.’
The singer Freddie Mercury, a man who denied himself no pleasure, sung these painful words as he faced his own death from AIDS: ‘Does anybody know what we are living for?’
All people who had everything: fame, money, success, popularity. And yet they had nothing!
That is Zacchaeus. Except the popularity.
Here is a rich man, a powerful man, shut off from the privilege of seeing Jesus by his taller peers. I would imagine some of them may have taken delight at enacting petty revenge against him due to his smaller stature.
So this man, who bullies and threatens and connives and extorts, climbs a sycamore fig tree like a mischievous child just to get a better view.
Although it is not recorded in Scripture, I’m sure his fellow occupants of Jericho would have taken delight in the quite frankly ridiculous sight of a grown man sitting in a tree.
Yet we see here a man who is so utterly desperate to see Jesus that he is willing to kiss his dignity goodbye.
Why?
One commentator has a theory that should piece our soul: he would have heard that Jesus accepted men like him.
Because underneath all the trappings of wealth, success, power and influence, all this little man wanted was to be accepted. To be loved.
To have a friend.
And the one person who could full his emptiness was Jesus.
There is such an important lesson for us here. When we are climbing the ladder of our career or education or in sport or martial arts – or any of these things – there is a question we dare not ask ourselves:
What if the thing I want now is not the thing I really want?
What if I have everything I am working towards and still feel empty?
What if I get to the top and there is nothing there?
The solution, as Zacchaeus found out, is Jesus. Only Jesus. Nothing else.
I used to sing a really old hymn as a child – it was old then; it will be ancient now. However, it’s words ring so completely true:
All that thrills my soul is Jesus,
He is more than life to me;
And the fairest of ten thousand
In my blessed Lord I see.
That was what Zacchaeus discovered. That is what you will discover too, if you seek Him above all else, even your own dignity.
So we move on from a sinful man and a seeking man to discover something that would have completely shaken this city of Jericho to its core: Zacchaeus was also a summoned man.
When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.’
Luke 19:5 NIVUK
In our culture, we think nothing of this. Jesus felt He should go to Zacchaeus’ house. No big deal, right?
But in Jesus’ day, this was huge – even scandalous. Luke says that the people in Jericho begin to mutter and murmur about it:
All the people saw this and began to mutter, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’
Luke 19:7 NIVUK
But they had good reason.
Jericho was a wealthy town. Zacchaeus had become rich because of their hard work. More than that, he had cheated people, demanding more than was due. And, as chief tax collector for the city, he probably had men working for him who did the same. He was both a collaborator and a con-man.
Surely there were many people in Jericho whose house Jesus could stay in who were much better than Zacchaeus, more deserving that him!
You see, dining with someone, enjoying their hospitality, was quite an intimate act. It showed that you considered them as a friend. So Jesus isn’t simply asking Zacchaeus to feed Him – He is extending the hand of friendship to a friendless man, who had been far from a friend to others.
And that has to be a scandal.
You see, the truth is that if grace is not scandalous then it is not grace. If grace is not amazing then it is not grace.
Grace, by its fundamental nature, must reach out to an object that does not deserve it in any way, shape or form. Otherwise it is not grace.
The Greek word used here for ‘must’ has an aspect to it which implies that Jesus’ scandalous meeting with Zacchaeus was the will of God. Of course: because this man needed grace, and scandalous grace at that.
But why Zacchaeus?
I believe that here we have the crux of the matter, and where our modern culture has a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of grace and of Biblical Christianity in general, because now the sinful, seeking and summoned man becomes a saved man:
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.’
Luke 19:8 NIVUK
Zacchaeus repents. He is a changed man. And not only that, but he exceeds by a factor of two hundred percent the payment the law obliged him to make to make amends (Numbers 5:5-7).
And this is rather the point. Jesus accepts Zacchaeus and requires his hospitality not at all to condone or sponsor the evil he has committed, but to give Zacchaeus the chance to change. Zacchaeus, on perceiving this opportunity, grabs it with both hands and repents.
That is what scandalous grace it. It is the very heart of God, reaching down to the undeserving and giving them a chance to change, a chance to repent.
A chance to be converted.
But the story does not end there.
After seeing a sinful, seeking, summoned and saved man in Zacchaeus, Jesus goes on to tell us that He is a saving Man.
Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’
Luke 19:9-10 NIVUK
Do you see it here? Zacchaeus was a Jew. He was just a traitorous Jew. But Jesus saw him as someone who had lost his way. And Jesus came to save people like that. As He said elsewhere to those who questioned Him:
Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but those who are ill. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’
Luke 5:31-32 NIVUK
If we are ever to understand the true nature of Christianity, we must understand this key point: Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. He came to save lives. He came to lead sinners to repentance.
He came to convert people.
So if we are to follow Him and bear His name with honour, we must do the same. We must seek and save the lost.
Otherwise our Christianity is fake.
We see, then that repentance is a joyful, happy thing. It is a response to the scandalous grace of God that reaches out to the deeply undeserving, recognises their inner desire to change, and gives them the opportunity to do so.
It is truly a wonderful thing. There are fewer joys in this life that exceed the feeling of seeing the seeking God work His wonders in a life and watching it change right in front of you.
And this is the fundamental truth of Biblical Christianity. All are welcome. Of course they are. We should never shut the door on anyone.
But all are welcome to change.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, I love this wonderful story of a life transformed by scandalous grace. I long to be transformed too. I come to You right now to ask that You come into my heart and change me. Help me to repent of my sin and to make amends. And help me to accept others who are also being changed. Amen.
Questions
1. Do you see anything of yourself in Zacchaeus? If so, what?
2. Zacchaeus had done a lot wrong in his life, but he did get one thing right. What was it? Why did it make all the difference?
3. What is Jesus’ mission? Is it yours? Why / why not?
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