In my last post on Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, we looked at the scene more or less from the perspective of the crowd. And what we saw was that from their perspective this whole scene takes a pretty nasty turn, one they don’t like. We’ll return to the crowd’s perspective again, but first, let’s see if we can get inside Zacchaeus’s head and understand this event from his perspective. And I have to say, this isn’t going to be easy.
There’s a lot about Zacchaeus’s actions throughout this story that are not easy to understand or explain. Luke doesn’t really give us any special insight into what Zacchaeus was thinking. In fact, Luke gives us much more insight into what the crowd was thinking and feeling than what Zacchaeus was thinking and feeling. He tells us what Zacchaeus did. He tells us what the crowd felt.
This last point may be a clue to us as to how we ought to apply this passage to ourselves. We’ll explore this point more in a later post. But here’s a little foreshadowing. Maybe Luke thinks it’s important that we readers first approach this passage by identifying with the crowd and not with Zacchaeus. We are all prone, I think, to ask ourselves, “What would it feel like to have Jesus invite himself to my house?” But maybe we should start by first asking ourselves, “How would I feel if I were part of that crowd and I saw Jesus walk right past us good people and approach a rat like Zacchaeus? Would I react the same way they did?” So, that might be one reason Luke tells this story the way he does, and it’s one we really should consider. And there may also have been another more practical reason why Luke tells the story the way he does.
Let’s step back for a moment and remind ourselves of what Luke tells us about how he went about writing his gospel. Luke, more than any of the other gospel writers, is very open about his methods.
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1-4 NIV)
Luke was a gentile, who came to faith a number of years after Jesus ascended to heaven. He was not an eyewitness to anything that he writes about in his gospel. He was very much an eyewitness to many of the things he writes about in Acts but not what he reports to us in his gospel. And yet, as we see in the verses above, he was a careful and diligent reporter. The implication of those verses is that Luke interviewed eyewitnesses of everything that he reports on.
So, why does he not tell us what Zacchaeus was thinking and feeling? Why doesn’t Luke tell us why Zacchaeus wanted so much to see Jesus? The simple answer to those questions might be that Luke was never able to interview Zacchaeus or anyone else who could tell him Zacchaeus’s point of view. We know that he talked to some or all of the surviving apostles. They could have told him what they saw there that day in Jericho. He may have visited Jericho and talked to some of the residents there who remembered the day that Jesus passed through town. But maybe he was never actually able to talk to Zacchaeus. We can’t know for sure.
In any case, we have to guess a bit about why Zacchaeus does what he does in this story. And I have to say Zacchaeus’s actions in this event are honestly quite strange and hard to explain. First of all, let me point out that Luke tells us about two particular actions that Zacchaeus takes which show us that Zacchaeus wasn’t just a little curious about this Jesus guy. Zacchaeus acts like someone who was desperate to see Jesus. Why? Why would a hardnosed, money-grubbing guy like Zacchaeus be the least bit interested in someone like Jesus?
There’s no reason to expect that a man in Zacchaeus’s position would have been at all “religious.” Tax collectors were excluded from synagogue worship, and they would not have been welcome in the temple. Only people who had no interest in the moral and religious life of the Jewish community would ever become tax collectors for the Romans. And yet, here we see that Zacchaeus was apparently desperate to get a look at this traveling religious teacher.
Luke tells us a couple of things that make that clear. As a tax collector, Zacchaeus would have been terrified of pushing his way into a crowd of locals. Why? Because he knew that they hated him. According to Luke, the narrow streets of Jericho were packed with people trying to get close to Jesus. Zacchaeus knew that if he tried to mix it up in a crowd like that, he could get hurt, maybe badly hurt, maybe even killed. In a crowd like that, elbows and sucker punches could be thrown. He could get tripped, knocked down, stomped on. In a crowd like that, someone could slip a knife between Zacchaeus’s ribs without anyone knowing who did it. No, Zacchaeus wouldn’t push his way into that crowd. He was desperate but not suicidal.
So, what does he do? Luke tells us that Zacchaeus ran down the road to get ahead of Jesus and the crowd. The experts are all pretty much in agreement that no adult man in the ancient Middle East who wanted to preserve his dignity would run in public. It just wasn’t done. Zacchaeus was already the butt of everyone’s disrespect. Ordinarily, he would never have wanted to give them more ammunition for jeering at him. And yet, here he went humiliating himself by running down the street.
Worse yet, like some grubby street urchin, he climbed a tree. If a dignified adult man in the ancient city of Jericho wouldn’t have run in public, he would certainly not have climbed a tree. Maybe he hoped no one would see him. In any case, up the tree he went. Yeah, there was something that lighted a fire of desperation in Zacchaeus. He wanted to see Jesus, even if he had to run and climb a tree to do it. Why? What drove him to such lengths?
Well, Luke doesn’t tell us. We have to speculate. In some way or other, God had stuck a burr into Zacchaeus’s conscience. Maybe all the money he had been raking in just began to leave him empty. Maybe he began to feel troubled by all the lives he was ruining by foreclosing on people’s homes, repossessing people’s businesses and the tools of their trade. Maybe the money and power of his position simply could no longer hide the hunger for God that was lying deep in his soul.
But of course, he couldn’t start going to the synagogue to seek God. That door was closed. They’d never let him in. But now this Jesus was coming through town, this rogue rabbi, this prophet who didn’t operate within the norms of proper religion. It was said that he spent time with the outcasts of society and welcomed those who weren’t clean and proper and religiously presentable.
To get more specific, Jesus was known to be willing to spend time in the company of tax collectors. In fact, a former tax collector was a member of Jesus’ inner circle. Zacchaeus probably didn’t know Matthew personally. Matthew’s former tax district would have been 60 or 80 miles away and was overseen by a different Roman governor. But surely, Zacchaeus knew about Matthew. Was the fact that a former tax collector had been received by Jesus one of the reasons Zacchaeus felt such urgency about seeing Jesus? Did Matthew’s presence among Jesus’ closest disciples represent an open door of hope in Zacchaeus’s eyes?
A few questions for you all to reflect on:
Has God ever stuck a burr into your conscience that spurred—or should have spurred—you into some uncharacteristic action on your part? How did he do that?
Maybe there is someone in your personal sphere of influence who could benefit by having a burr stuck into his or her conscience. If so, have you considered asking God to do that?
Is it possible that you might be a “Matthew” for someone else who needs to see an open door to approach Jesus? Can you be more transparent about your own past brokenness in order to show some other broken person that they too could be welcomed by Jesus?
© 2025 Gary A. Chorpenning
Related Posts:
Bible Note #60: Zacchaeus #4–Getting into the Story–Jesus Make a Lot of People Mad
Bible Note #59: Zacchaeus #3–Tax Collecting in Roman Palestine
Bible Note#58: Zacchaeus #2–Some Background
Bible Note #57: The Real Zacchaeus and That Terrible Children’s Song
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