The Man in the Tree
There is a moment in Luke's Gospel that rewards close attention. Jesus is passing through Jericho, surrounded by crowds, and a wealthy tax collector named Zacchaeus wants to see him. He is short, can't see over the people, and so he does something that must have looked absurd for a man of his station - he runs ahead and climbs a sycamore tree. When Jesus reaches the spot, he looks up and says, simply, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today."
No prior repentance is required. No confession, no promise of amendment. The encounter precedes everything.
What's striking is the contrast between Zacchaeus and the crowd surrounding Jesus. The crowd is there too, pressing close, and they are appalled when Jesus invites himself to dinner with this known collaborator and extortionist. They represent respectable religious society - people who have maintained their standing, kept the right boundaries, avoided contamination by association with the wrong people. They present themselves. Zacchaeus, by contrast, has nothing left to present. His reputation is already destroyed. So he does the only thing available to him: he gets up in a tree and looks, without pretense, without a plan, without any claim on Jesus's attention whatsoever.
That unguarded quality may be precisely what Jesus sees. The respectable crowd is armored in its own virtue. Zacchaeus is all opening.
The theological sequence Luke records matters enormously. Jesus doesn't say "get your life together and come find me." He says "I'm coming to your house today," and Zacchaeus's transformation - the spontaneous, extravagant promise to give half his goods to the poor and repay fourfold anyone he has cheated - flows from the encounter itself. Grace moves first. The human response follows, and follows generously, because something real has happened.
This pattern runs through Luke consistently enough to look like a deliberate theological argument. Jesus is repeatedly most alive in encounters with people who are structurally excluded - by profession, ethnicity, gender, disease, moral history. The crowd's muttering, "he has gone to be the guest of a sinner," appears like a refrain, and that muttering is itself the spiritual diagnosis. Their discomfort is the symptom of exactly the condition Jesus keeps trying to address: the way religious boundary maintenance becomes the primary spiritual activity, replacing encounter with gatekeeping.
The Desert Fathers understood something related when they made compunction - the acute awareness of one's own poverty and need - the precondition for genuine prayer rather than an obstacle to it. The publican in Jesus's own parable can only say "God be merciful to me a sinner" and goes home justified, while the Pharisee's prayer is essentially a résumé. The Pharisee has closed the very gap that grace moves through. Zacchaeus, ridiculous in his tree, has inadvertently kept that gap wide open.
What Jesus seems drawn to, again and again, is not moral achievement but this quality of undefended availability. The people most armored in performed respectability are paradoxically the hardest to reach - not because God is uninterested, but because there is no opening. The encounter requires some nakedness of need, some admission, even wordless, that something is missing. Zacchaeus perched in his sycamore tree, a rich man made briefly absurd by simple curiosity, is that admission made visible.
The crowd wanted a teacher who would confirm their boundaries. What they got was someone who kept finding the most interesting person in the room was always the one who didn't belong there.
