The Little Man Up the Tree

There was a man named Zacchaeus, and he was small. Small enough that grown-ups stood right in front of him and never noticed he was there at all.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

Zacchaeus took money. That was his job, and he took more than he should, and he tucked the extra into his own pockets. So when he walked through town, people turned their faces away. Nobody waved. Nobody said his name kindly. He was the little man everybody wished would go live somewhere else.

Do you remember the story Jesus told, about the two men praying, and the tax collector in the back who whispered for mercy? Zacchaeus was a man just like that one. Too small and too disliked to think he'd ever be picked, and he carried it around like a stone in his chest.

Then one day Jesus came walking down his road.

A crowd swallowed the whole street. Zacchaeus pushed and stretched and stood on his toes, but all he could see were the backs of taller people. Of course. He always saw the backs of people.

So he did something a grown man isn't supposed to do. He ran ahead. He grabbed hold of a tree and climbed, up and up into the leaves, until he was perched on a branch like a sparrow. From up there, at last, he could see.

And under that very tree, Jesus stopped. He looked up into the green branches, straight at the small man hiding in the leaves. And he called him by name.

"Zacchaeus," he said. "Come down. I'm coming to your house today."

By name. The name nobody said kindly anymore.

The crowd gasped and grumbled. Why him? they whispered. Of all the houses, why the cheater's house? Why the little man nobody likes?

But that is exactly the kind of person Jesus came looking for.

Zacchaeus scrambled down so fast he nearly tumbled, and his heart was so full it spilled right out of him. "I'll give it back," he said. "All of it. And more. I'll make it right." Nobody made him say it. When you are found like that, when you are wanted like that, something hard inside you finally melts.

And Jesus smiled. "Today," he said, "this whole house is safe. Today, joy walked in the door."

Then he told everyone why he had come. "The Son of Man came to find what was lost." The small ones up the tree, the ones the crowd walks past.

That's his heart, little one. He doesn't push through the crowd looking for the best. He stops under the tree where the forgotten one is hiding, and he looks up, and he says the name.

He came all this way to find you, too. And he means to walk you all the way home.