Zacchaeus and the Sycamore Tree at Jericho

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A man is running through a town in the middle of the morning, in a good robe, with his belt slipping, and the children of the town have noticed.

They are delighted. They are keeping up with him, more or less, and one of them has already shouted something that I will not repeat, and another one has shouted something worse and is being told off by an older sister. The man does not care. He has important business. He is looking for something tall.

And he is, I should say, not a man who runs. He is a man with a very good chair.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start with the road.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter nineteen, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the smell of the town, the chatter of the crowd, what a man might have thought as he ran, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

The town is Jericho, and Jericho is a remarkable place to begin a story, because Jericho is remarkable.

It is one of the oldest towns anyone has ever lived in. People were building walls and drinking from its spring thousands of years before the time of this story, and you may remember that a different wall came down here once, in a different episode, with a good deal of trumpet. By the time of tonight's story, the old hill of Jericho is quiet and ruined, and the living town has moved a little way off, onto the plain, where the water is.

And the water is the point. The whole country around it is dry and stony and brown, and Jericho sits in the middle of it like a green coin dropped on a floor. There is a spring. There are palm trees, thousands of them, so that people called it the city of palms. There are gardens, and balsam, which is a sweet-smelling resin that was worth a great deal of money. It is warm there when the hills are cold. Rich people built winter houses in Jericho for exactly that reason, the way some people now go to the coast in February.

It is also, and this matters, an unusually low place. It is much lower than the sea, lower than almost any town on earth. And Jerusalem is about a day's walk away, uphill, all the way up, on a road that climbs and climbs and has, in its time, been the scene of a number of unpleasant adventures. So Jericho is a gateway. If you are coming from the east, from the far side of the Jordan, and you are going to Jerusalem, you come through Jericho first. And when a lot of people pass through one town on their way somewhere important, a lot of things pass through with them. Camels. Barrels. Bundles. Baskets of dates. Balsam in little jars.

And somebody has to count it all, and charge for it.

That somebody, in Jericho, was a man called Zacchaeus.

Now, the Gospel is very economical about him, as it often is. In the space of a single verse it tells us three things. It tells us his name. It tells us his job, and the job is a particular one: he was a chief tax collector. And it tells us that he was rich.

Let me say a word about the job, because it was not the job it sounds like.

When you and I think of a tax collector, we picture someone in an office, who works for the government and sends a form. That is not what this was. In the lands ruled from Rome, the tax on goods that crossed a road or a harbour was often sold, in a way, to a contractor. The contractor paid the government a sum in advance, and then he and his people collected whatever they could from the travellers, and whatever was left over after paying the government was theirs. A chief tax collector was the head of such a business. He had men working under him, standing at gates and crossroads with scales and tablets, and he was the one who had paid for the privilege.

You can see the trouble. The system rewarded a collector who collected more. Nobody was checking very closely how much more. And the travellers, who had a camel full of dates and a hundred miles still to go, could hardly argue with a man who had a Roman soldier standing a few paces behind him.

So the people of Jericho did not like Zacchaeus, and I want to be fair to them. They were not being petty. He worked for the foreign power that had taken their country, and he was good at it, and a good many of them had been charged more than they should have been. Their neighbours called him a sinner, and said it as a plain description, the way you might say a person was left-handed. When Zacchaeus walked down the street, I imagine the street got a little quieter.

And yet, hold on to this: his name.

Zacchaeus is the Greek way of saying a Hebrew name, Zakkai, and the name means something like pure, or innocent. Some father and mother, some years before, had held a baby and chosen that name for him, which is a hopeful thing to do. They did not know what he would turn out to be. Names are like that. They are said over us before we have earned them.

Now, Luke does not tell us that Zacchaeus woke up that morning with a plan. He tells us only that Jesus was passing through.

You will remember a little of the road behind him. He is on his way to Jerusalem, and he has been telling his friends for some time what will happen when they get there, and his friends, as friends will, have not quite taken it in. Just before he reaches Jericho, the Gospel says, there was a blind man sitting beside the road, begging, who heard the noise of a crowd and asked what it was, and when they said it was Jesus of Nazareth he began to shout. They told him to be quiet. He shouted louder. And Jesus stopped, and called him, and gave him his sight.

So the news is already running ahead. By the time Jesus comes into Jericho, everyone has heard something. A man who was blind can see. The teacher is coming. And the town turns out to line the street, ten deep, the way a town does for a parade.

And among those who have heard, somewhere in an office near the gate, is a rich man who has been wondering for a while what all the fuss is about.

Luke says only that he was trying to see who Jesus was.

I like that very much, because it is such a small, honest wish. He does not say he wanted to be forgiven. He does not say he wanted to be changed. He did not, I think, have the words for what he wanted. He just wanted to see. Whatever kind of man this was, who made the blind see and made the whole town stand in the street, he wanted to look at his face.

And here is the second thing the Gospel tells us about him, in four plain words, and it is one of my favourite sentences in all of Scripture. He was small of stature.

Zacchaeus was short.

Imagine the crowd. It has been standing there for an hour. It is a good crowd, a front-row sort of crowd, full of people who came early and brought stools. There are broad shoulders. There are children on fathers' shoulders. There are two large women discussing a cousin. And there, at the back, trying to see over the top of it all, is the chief tax collector of Jericho, in his good robe, jumping very slightly on the balls of his feet.

He can see backs. He can see a great many backs.

He tries to push in, and no one lets him. And do you see why? Because it is Zacchaeus. Every single person in that crowd knows exactly who he is, and not one of them is going to shuffle over. They have been waiting since dawn. They pay him enough, as it is. He can stand at the back.

I do not know whether you have ever been the smallest person at an event, and found that nobody was making room. It is a quiet and rather lonely feeling. And I think it is worth saying that Zacchaeus, who spent his days standing at a gate telling other people where to go, is now, for once, the one who cannot get through.

And so he does a thing which no man of his position would do.

He runs on ahead.

That is the exact word. He ran on ahead of the crowd. A man of dignity, a man of wealth, a man in a good robe with a belt, runs down the road past the people, in front of the whole town. This is the moment you heard about at the start, and it is worth pausing on, because it is so undignified. The robes of that time were long, and to run in one you had to gather it up in your hands like a bride crossing a puddle. His sandals slap. His belt slips. The children, and I am sorry about this, are running along beside him, shrieking with joy. Somebody laughs, and then somebody else laughs, and a small, scandalised voice says, "That's the tax collector!"

And Zacchaeus does not stop.

He has seen what he is looking for. A little way down the road, at a spot where Jesus will have to pass, there is a tree.

It is a sycamore. Now, you must not picture the sycamore of an English park. This is a different tree, a sycamore fig, which is a kind of fig that grows in warm places. It is a big, spreading, friendly tree with a short thick trunk and wide, low branches, and it bears little figs in clusters, which in those days were food for people who had nothing else. It is, as it happens, a very good tree to climb. It seems to have been designed for the purpose, with branches at just the right height for a man who is not tall.

And so the chief tax collector of Jericho, who has not climbed a tree in thirty years, hitches up his robe, and puts a foot in the fork, and hauls himself, panting, up into the leaves.

I should like to have seen that.

He gets himself settled on a branch, and arranges his robe over his knees, and tries to look as if this were an entirely normal place for him to be. Below him the crowd comes up the road, turning to stare. Somebody points. Somebody calls up, I suspect, something rude. And he sits there in the green shade among the figs, with his heart going, a rich man, a hated man, up a tree, and waits.

Now we come to the thing that happens next, and I should like to go slowly, because everything in the story depends on it.

The crowd arrives. Jesus is walking in the middle of it. He comes along the road, and he comes to the place where the sycamore stands, and he stops.

He does not walk past. He stops, under the tree, and he looks up.

The Gospel says that Jesus looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus."

His name.

I want you to think about that for a moment. In that whole street, with all the pointing and the laughing, Jesus has looked up into the leaves and he knows his name. He does not say, "You there." He does not say, "Tax collector." He says the one word his mother and father chose for him, the hopeful one, the one that means innocent. He says it as if it were simply the name of a man he was glad to find.

And then he says: "Hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house."

Today. Not some day. Not if you improve. Not once the debts are paid. Today. And not "I would like to," but "I must." There is no asking about the roads, or the worth of the host, or what the neighbours will think. There is only a plain thing that has to happen, and a man in a tree, and the word "today."

And I love what Zacchaeus does, because he does it so quickly. He hurried down. The Gospel's word is that he hurried, and I imagine he is down that trunk much faster than he went up, with his robe in a tangle, and bark on his hands, and one shoe half off. And then the Gospel says: and he received him joyfully.

Joyfully. Think of that. A man who has been called a sinner for half his life, standing under his own tree, with every neighbour watching, and the thing that comes up in him is not shame, or fear, or defence. It is joy. He is simply glad.

Now the crowd has things to say about this, and they say them. They are not quiet about it.

The Gospel puts it this way: they all grumbled. And I should think they did. They had been standing in the sun all morning, many of them, to see the teacher go by, and the teacher has just stopped, in front of everybody, and chosen the one man in Jericho whom they would all have passed over. "He has gone in to be the guest of a sinner," they mutter. In their hearts they might say: surely not him. Surely there are better houses. We have been good. We stood here the whole time.

I think it is worth being kind to the crowd. They are not villains. They have seen a good deal. They have been overcharged, they have been looked down on, and they have a feeling, which most of us would have, that a thing ought to be fair. If there is a guest of honour to be had, it should go to someone who earned it.

And the Gospel gives us no scene in which they are told off. It lets their grumble hang in the air, quite justified, quite human, and then it moves on, and the moving on is the miracle.

So let us follow them, the teacher and the tax collector, up the road to the house.

I would like you to see the house, because I think the Gospel wants you to.

It is not a small house. A chief tax collector can afford a good one, and this one has a courtyard, I think, and a well, and a doorway with a heavy lintel, and cushions. There are servants who have not been warned. There is a cook who has just been told, a few minutes ago, by a breathless messenger, that there will be a guest for dinner, and that the guest is the teacher, and that he is bringing his friends. There is a good deal of running about in the kitchen. Somebody drops a pot.

And Zacchaeus stands in his own doorway, and he is, for the first time in a long while, not quite sure what to do with his hands.

I think we have all had the experience of a guest who sees our house exactly as it is. Not the front room we tidy, but all of it. The cupboard we never open. The accounts. The ledger in the back, with the sums in it, and the names of the people who paid a little more than they should have. All of it is going to be seen by someone who knows his name.

It is a frightening thing, to be known. And it is the very thing that, in the end, sets him free.

For the Gospel does not tell us what was said over dinner. It does not tell us what the teacher said, or what the others answered, or how long the evening went on. But somewhere between the arrival and the end of the meal, something happened in the heart of Zacchaeus. And then comes the moment that every telling of this story has been moving towards.

Zacchaeus stands up.

That is how Luke puts it. He stood, and said to the Lord. He does not say he whispered. He does not say he took Jesus aside. He stands, in the middle of his own dining room, with the guests around him, and he speaks, and I like to think that the room goes quiet, the way a room does when someone has decided to say something.

And he says: "Look, Lord. Half of my possessions I give to the poor."

Half.

I want you to listen to how much that is. Zacchaeus is a rich man, and he does not say he will give a little, or a tenth, or a nice donation to a worthy cause. He says half of all he has. Not some later year, when it is convenient. Now, at the table, with the guests listening. No one has told him to do it. The teacher has not said one word about money. And out of a man who has spent his life weighing and counting, comes a number that has no weighing in it at all.

But he is not finished. He goes on. "And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much."

Four times.

Here we should stop and look at the law, because it makes this even more surprising. The law of Moses, in the book of Leviticus, says that when a man has taken what was not his, and confesses it himself, he must return the full amount and add a fifth part to it. That is a good, fair, generous sum. It is the law's own answer to a man who is sorry. Four times is the amount the law asked in the case of someone who had stolen and sold a sheep, which is a penalty, not a gift. Zacchaeus has not been caught. Nobody has taken him to court. He is offering more than the law requires of a man who confesses, and he is offering what the law demanded of a thief who was found out.

He has gone, as it were, well past the finish line without being asked.

And notice the little word "if." If I have defrauded anyone. It may be that Zacchaeus is honest about this in the way an honest man is: he knows that in his line of work there will have been some, and he does not intend to argue about which. He will make it up to whoever it was, and he is rich enough to do it.

It is a quiet moment, after that.

I can imagine the people who had grumbled, now looking at their feet. A woman in the doorway who had paid him more than she should, once, and remembers it, and has not mentioned it to anyone, and feels something go through her that she cannot quite name. A man at the back, who had been rehearsing a remark about what a scandal this was, and finds that he has forgotten it.

And the teacher answers him. And what he says is among the most beautiful sentences in the whole Gospel.

"Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham."

Today. He says it again. The word he used under the tree, he uses at the table. Today salvation has come to this house.

And look at the second half of it. "Because he too is a son of Abraham." Because he too. Do you hear the gentleness there? The crowd has been calling Zacchaeus a sinner, a man outside, a man to be kept at the back, and the teacher says: no. He is one of us. He belongs. He is a son of Abraham just as they are, which means he is a child of that long family of promises that began in the desert with a tent, and three visitors at an oak, and an old man who laughed. Zacchaeus has always been inside the family. It is only that he had been standing where nobody could see him.

And then comes the last line of the story, which is a sort of summary of everything.

"For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save what was lost."

Seek out. Do you hear it? Not wait for. Not hope that someone would find the way. Seek out. A man who had thought he was choosing to look, from the top of a tree, found that all the time he was the one being looked for. He had climbed up to see. And from the first moment, the one he came to see had been coming to see him.

Now the candle is low, so let us slow down.

The Gospel stops there. It says nothing more of Zacchaeus. We do not know what the dinner was like, or how long it lasted. We do not know whether he gave his half away that evening or in the morning, or how many people came to his door in the following weeks to be paid back, and what they said. We do not know what the other tax collectors thought, or whether his old friends stopped visiting. Luke leaves him standing in a lit room, with a guest, and a promise, and a heart that has been, in one afternoon, turned all the way round.

Later writers could not leave it alone, and I do not blame them.

There is an old tradition that Zacchaeus followed Jesus, and that in the years afterwards he became a bishop, the first bishop of the city of Caesarea, on the coast, which was a Roman port with a great harbour. It is mentioned in an old book of church order. It is a late source, and the old writers do not agree about the details, so we call it a tradition and not a history, and I would not stake a great deal on it. But it is a beautiful thing to think. A small man, who once ran down a road and climbed a tree to see a teacher pass, grows old as a shepherd of a whole church, a man who knew very well what it was to be at the back of the crowd, and who was especially kind to those who were standing there.

The Orthodox Church remembers him, and keeps a Sunday of Zacchaeus in the weeks before the Great Fast begins, as a way of getting ready for Lent. The story is read to say to the faithful: you may begin again, and it may begin today. And in parts of the Catholic world, too, people have loved him for centuries, and his story is one of the most often told to children, probably because of the tree, and partly because of the running.

And then, in some places, there is a sycamore tree.

In the modern town of Jericho there is a very old sycamore fig tree, and they will show it to visitors, and say that it is the tree. I cannot tell you that it is. A tree does not live that long, I think, or if it does, nobody can prove it. But I find that I do not mind. There is a tree in every place where someone has gone up to look. And I like to think that there is a branch, somewhere, at just about the height of a short man's foot, that is worn smooth.

And now, let us go back one last time, to the house.

The dinner is over. The lamps have burned down to short yellow flames. The guests have gone, or are going, and the cook is sitting on an upturned basket in the kitchen with her feet up, saying that she has never in her life been so surprised. The courtyard is quiet. The last of the warm air from the day is going out of the stones, and somewhere in the palm trees a bird is deciding whether it is yet time to sleep.

Zacchaeus is sitting on the edge of the well.

He has a ledger beside him, an old one, a heavy one, bound in leather, and he has opened it, for the first time in a long time, not to add a figure but to read. His finger is moving slowly down the names. He knows many of them. He remembers a good many of the faces. He is going to be very busy, in the weeks to come, and I suppose a little embarrassed, and probably a good deal poorer.

And yet, as he sits there, he is lighter than he has been in years. It is the oddest thing. There is less in the house and more in him. He is holding something he cannot count.

Somewhere in the house the teacher is resting, with his friends, in the room that has been made up for him. Tomorrow they will go on. The road goes up from Jericho to Jerusalem, and it is steep, and it is long, and what is waiting for them there is a different story, and not a bedtime one. But tonight there is a lamp in the window of a house that was shut for a long time, and a small man who sits by the well and looks up at the stars, which are very clear over the palm trees, and says, I think, only the one word, over and over, as quietly as he can.

Today.

Some notes for the curious. The whole story we have told comes from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter nineteen, verses one to ten, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. The town of Jericho, the chief tax collector who was rich, his wish to see who Jesus was, the crowd, his short height, his running ahead, the sycamore, Jesus stopping and looking up, the call by name, the word today, the hurried descent, the joyful welcome, the grumbling, the half given to the poor, the fourfold repayment, and the words about a son of Abraham and about seeking out and saving the lost are all in the text. The smell of the town, the talk of the crowd, the children running, the thoughts of Zacchaeus, the kitchen, the ledger and the well at the end, and most of the small jokes, are ours.

Three things are worth being careful about. First, the text does not say what was said over dinner, and we have not guessed at it. The Gospel gives us only what Zacchaeus said and what Jesus answered.

Second, the Gospel does not say whether Zacchaeus is making a promise for the future or describing what he has always done. Some readers take the verbs as a present habit, and some as a resolution made on the spot. We have told it the second way, which is the more common reading, and we have said that it is a reading. The laws about repayment that we described are in Exodus and Leviticus, and we have tried to report them carefully, not to claim that the Gospel itself compares them.

Third, the stories of Zacchaeus as a bishop of Caesarea come from much later writers, and the old church writers do not agree on the details, so we have said what they say and called it a tradition. As for the old sycamore at Jericho, we have told you only that it is shown to visitors, and that no one can say it is the same tree.

Zacchaeus is honoured as a saint in both traditions. We will not give a calendar date we cannot vouch for.

That's the story of Zacchaeus for tonight. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you be found tonight, wherever you are standing. May you be the smallest person in the room, and not mind it, and be seen anyway. May someone say your name as if they were glad of it. May you hurry down from whatever tree you have been sitting in, and receive what is waiting at the foot of it with joy. May you have a table to be a guest at, and a table to be a host at, and the grace to tell which one you are tonight. May the good you mean to do be done, today, and may the debts you cannot pay be forgiven. And may the God who knows you by name keep you and yours, tonight and always.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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