Luke 19:1-10
He entered Jericho and was passing through.
And there was a man called by the name of Zaccheus; he was a chief tax collector, and he was rich.
Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was and was unable because of the crowd, for he was small in stature.
So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree in order to see Him, for He was about to pass through that way.
When Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house.”
And he hurried and came down and received Him gladly.
When they saw it, they all began to grumble, saying, “He has gone to the guest of the man who is a sinner.”
Zacchaeus stopped and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I’ve defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much.”
And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham.
For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
Hosea 14:4
I will heal their apostasy, and I will love them freely
At the top of the list of outcasts among the Jewish people in the days of Christ were prostitutes and tax collectors. Zacchaeus was not just a tax collector; he was a chief tax collector and was very rich. The tax collectors worked for the Romans and were paid well by the Romans to collect the taxes from their own people, and they also padded their own pockets by asking for more money than the Romans required. Their fellow Jews truly hated them. Obviously, Zacchaeus had heard about Jesus, and there was something about Christ that called Zacchaeus to climb a tree just to see Him. I think it was likely because God had been dealing with Zacchaeus’s heart, and he heard how Jesus changed lives and how some of his followers were former tax collectors and prostitutes. Zacchaeus probably carried a lot of shame and guilt, plus he was experiencing the horror of being totally rejected by his own people. I think Zacchaeus was a very lonely and sad man.
It is so powerful to think that Zacchaeus was so desperate that he ran ahead of the whole crowd and climbed up a tree just to get a glimpse of Jesus. As Jesus came to the place where Zacchaeus was, He stopped and looked up and addressed Zacchaeus personally. Zacchaeus was probably as stunned as the crowd was that Jesus would stop and talk to someone like him. Not only did Jesus stop to address Zacchaeus, but he told Zacchaeus to hurry and come down, “for today I must stay at your house.” Can you imagine the shock when Jesus not only talked to Zacchaeus but told him that he wanted to stay in his home.
I love that verse I quoted from in Hosea 14, for it says that God freely loves. God said that about the unfaithful and fickled Jewish nation. When God says that he loves freely, He is not just saying that he loves unconditionally. He is saying that he loves wholeheartedly without reservation. Micah 7:18 says that God delights in unending love.
When Jesus stopped and spoke to Zacchaeus and invited Himself to stay at his house, for the first time Zacchaeus experienced the wholehearted love of God in Christ. Jesus knew who Zacchaeus was, and what he did for a living, but that did not stop Jesus from loving him freely. Jesus very intentionally expressed the love of God toward Zacchaeus in front of the whole crowd who all hated Zacchaeus because Jesus one of them to see the true nature of God’s love. The wholehearted love of God in Christ totally wrecked Zacchaeus’s world. It provoked him to give half of his possessions to the poor and promise if there was anyone he had taken advantage of financially, he would restore to them four times what he had stolen from. Jesus did not ask Zacchaeus to do that. He did not have to. Radical surrender is not something Jesus demands of us, but it is something that His love provokes in us. In Romans 12:1, we are challenged to present our bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, but that challenge is only in light of the mercies of God. When you encounter the wholehearted, freely expressed love of God it causes you to want to delightfully give away everything as a response to Him. A wholehearted response of surrender to the wholehearted love of God is the only reasonable service of worship that God will accept. God does not want or need our guilt offerings. He only wants our love offerings, and we love because He first loved us. It is so tragic how many Christian teachers and preachers try to manipulate people into a life of surrender before God by making them feel guilty and condemned. I’m sure Zacchaeus had plenty of people over the years hurl insults at him and try to make him feel guilty, but none of that accomplished what one moment of the lovesickness of God expressed toward him through Christ did. God is looking for a lovesick bride, not a guilt-ridden one.