(Zachée sur le sycomore attendant le passage de Jésus)
James Tissot (ca. 1886-1894)
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
Compare Matthew 18:11
There are at least two major points to draw from this brief passage:
(1) The Lord has no hesitation about working with people who are perceived as bad, and neither should we.
(2) Those who are perceived as bad sometimes aren’t. Zacchaeus was thought to be an evil man because he was both a “chief tax collector” (ἀρχιτελώνης)and “rich” (πλούσιος). But, in fact, he was giving half of his possessions to the poor, and, whenever he thought that had wrong somebody, he restored what he reckoned to have been unjustly taken four times over. I wonder how many of his critics, those who casually pronounced him a bad person, were doing anything even remotely comparable.
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