Luke 19
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Luke 19:1-10:
Then Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. Now behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. 3 And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd, for he was of short stature. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him, for He was going to pass that way. 5 And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up and saw him, and said to him, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” 6 So he made haste and came down, and received Him joyfully. 7 But when they saw it, they all complained, saying, “He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner.” 8 Then Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore fourfold.” 9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham; 10 for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” |
 Tullian Tchividjian
It’s easy to forget that Zacchaeus would have been a double-outcast in his time: hated by the Jews for collecting taxes for the oppressive Roman Empire, and hated as a Jew by his Roman employers. It’s safe to say, in other words, that Zacchaeus was likely not suffering from an overabundance of friends. Who knows when the last time (before hosting the Savior of the World) Zacchaeus had entertained a guest in his home?
Everyone knows the story: Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector (which means that even the other tax collectors didn’t like him – he was skimming extra money for himself off of their hard-won, pre-skimmed earnings), was a small man, and so had to climb a sycamore tree to see Jesus as he passed by on the road. Jesus, out of the large crowd that would have been following him, picked Zacchaeus out and said, “I must stay at your house today” (Luke 19:5). Not, “If you shape up, I’d be willing to spend some time with you.” Not, “If you clean up your act, I’ll grace your home with my presence.” Jesus was compelled to be with Zacchaeus. Jesus is compelled to be with sinners…it’s why he came. In Zacchaeus’ home, he says, “Today salvation has come to this house…for the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). The crowd, of course, is very disappointed in Jesus. “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner,” they mutter. Reading this passage now, as “mature” Sunday-schooled Christians, we know that the crowd is in the wrong. “How could they misunderstand Jesus so completely?” we think. “How can they be so mean to Zacchaeus?” We forget how nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying it is for us when someone in our lives gets something they don’t deserve or avoids some penalty that they do deserve. “That’s not fair!” we cry. We are just like that crowd surrounding Zacchaeus, despite our protestations to the contrary. Perhaps the most powerful thing in this passage, though, is Zacchaeus’ response to Jesus once the Savior is in his home. He says, “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.” His obedience flows naturally from him the moment Jesus enters his life. Jesus never tells him what to do. Just as Jesus doesn’t require a changed heart or lifestyle to enter his home, he doesn’t then demand charity and reparations (“Now that you’re a Christian, Zacchaeus…”). The Gospel, God’s one-way love for sinners, creates what the Law, God’s holy standard, can only require. And it creates more! --Tullian Tchividjian |
Dave Ferguson
The reason we need to pay so much attention to our language is that we are responsible for telling the most important story in human history: the gospel. This is the story of a redeeming God who came to live among us in the human form of Jesus before dying for our sins, coming back from the dead, and leaving his Holy Spirit with us to empower us to share this story widely and well. We are all responsible for telling this story in a way that makes clear the fact that all human stories lead back to Jesus’ story. We see Jesus articulate this in one simple statement in Luke 19:10: “For the son of man came to seek and save the lost.” That was Jesus’ mission. And that should be our mission, too. And, therefore it certainly should be the mission of his church. If that was his mission, we should ask ourselves: how did Jesus live out his mission in the story of his life? -Dave Ferguson