Well as Wiley mentioned, this morning we take the opportunity afforded by the Advent season to break from our ongoing studies in the pastoral epistles to which, God willing, we will return in the new year, and we’ll begin a short series focusing on the significance of the first coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You may recall back in 2022 – I know that all of my sermons are etched forever in your memories, so you won’t have forgotten! – but back in 2022, we did an Advent series entitled, “Christmas According to Jesus,” where we looked at the meaning of the incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus’ own words. But we only looked at a handful of those important texts, and so I thought it would be helpful to return to that theme again this year and look at some more of the great explanatory statements that Jesus Himself made about why He became a man in the womb of the virgin on that first Christmas more than 2 millenia ago.
Now I’ll grant that many of these texts are, at first glance, unlikely passages for an Advent sermon. There are no shepherds watching their flocks by night. The cattle are not lowing. The little Lord Jesus does not lay down His sweet head. In none of them do we meet a star guiding wise men to adore the infant Christ sleeping in His mother’s arms. Instead, these are all statements made by the mature adult Jesus Christ in the ordinary course of His public ministry. But they do each offer us crucial insight into the meaning of His first coming into the world. And that, I think, is part of their utility. While the elements of the Christmas story, I’m sure, are very familiar to us and do not really require me to rehearse them, these unlikely Christmas texts help cut through the artificial nostalgia that we try so hard to conjure up with tinsel and fairy lights and instead they bring us face to face with the wonder of the incarnation.
In the 11th century, Saint Anselm wrote a book entitled, Cur Deus Homo – “Why Did God Become Man.” Well we’re going to spend this Advent season listening to Jesus’ own answer to that question. And the first text to which I would like to draw your attention is found in Luke chapter 19. Luke 19, verses 1 through 10. So do please turn there with me if you would; page 878 in the church Bibles. Luke 19:1-10. It is, of course, the familiar story of Zacchaeus, the wee little man, who climbed the sycamore tree to catch a glimpse of Jesus over the heads of the crowds as He passed on His way to Jerusalem through Jericho. If you’ll look down with me, though, at the conclusion of the story, I want you to see clearly Jesus’ climactic declaration. This is what this whole episode with Zacchaeus is leading up to. This provides the explanation for everything that happens to Zacchaeus in the course of his encounter with Jesus. Verse 10, Jesus says, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” “The Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.” Cur deus homo – Why the God-Man? Why was the eternal Son of God made flesh in the womb of the virgin? What was God’s plan for the incarnation of the Christ? Jesus says here He came, it was all in order “to seek and to save the lost.” According to Jesus, the first Christmas was the beginning of a divine search and rescue mission. “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.”
Now in the story, verses 1 through 10 of Luke 19, there are two scenes, each climaxing with a statement by Jesus. And these two scenes map nicely onto the two parts of Jesus’ own declared mission in verse 10. So look at the passage with me. In verses 1 through 5, we have the seeking. And in 6 through 10, the saving. The seeking and the saving. “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” That is what Christmas is really about. And you miss it completely if you miss this. Before we look at each of these two themes, the seeking and the saving, let’s pray and then we’ll read the passage together. Let us all pray.
Lord Jesus, how grateful we are that You came to seek and to save the lost. You still seek and save the lost today by Your Word and Spirit, and we ask that You would do exactly that among us as Your Word is read and proclaimed. For we ask it in Your matchless name, amen.
Luke 19 at the first verse. This is the Word of God:
“He,” Jesus, “entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’ So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, ‘He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’ And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, ‘Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’”
Amen.
Well let’s look together, first of all, at verses 1 through 5 and consider the theme of seeking. Christmas remembers that God has come, seeking sinners in Jesus Christ. “The Son of Man came,” verse 10 says, “to seek the lost.” But of course this story doesn’t actually begin with Jesus seeking at all. Does it? Rather, the narrative begins with Zacchaeus seeking. Verse 3, “he was seeking to see who Jesus was.” Jesus was making His way to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover where the climactic events of His earthly ministry would shortly unfold. Along the way, quite a crowd has gathered around Him. They are all marching together in procession toward the city. Picture the presidential motorcade driving toward Capitol Hill for the inauguration. There are crowds lining the streets to see him on the way. Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem at this point has generated something of that kind of anticipation and excitement.
In Luke 18:35, we learn that His route will take Him through the city of Jericho. And chapter 19 opens with Jesus’ procession entering and passing actually right through the city itself. Jericho, at that time, was a prosperous city and it housed a community of priests who had made it their home. And so it was a likely place for a noted, religious teacher like Jesus to stop and spend the night before continuing on to Jerusalem for the feast. But verse 1 says that Jesus was “passing through.” Perhaps to the surprise of most of the spectators, it certainly looked like Jesus wasn’t going to stop. And so the crowds are lining the streets, all trying to catch a brief glimpse of the Lord Jesus before it was too late and He was gone.
And it is at this point that Zacchaeus enters the scene. We are told four things about Zacchaeus in the text. First of all, we know his name. It means “righteous one.” Zacchaeus means “righteous one.” Now Luke doesn’t do anything with that fact, but I think it’s worth our noting the irony in it given the second thing we learn about Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus, “the righteous one,” is a chief tax collector. He’s actually the only chief tax collector explicitly identified in the New Testament. The Romans would auction off the rights to collect taxes on their behalf and allow those who had purchased the franchise to supplement the required Roman levy with an extra charge on top from which the tax collectors would line their own pockets. That Zaccheaus is a chief tax collector suggests that he operated or possibly even owned the franchise in Jericho and its environs. And so he stood at the top of the Ponzi scheme pyramid with lots of junior tax collectors all reporting to him, each of them taking a cut before passing their levies onto Zacchaeus, who would take his cut, a much larger cut, before sending the taxes on to Rome.
The result of that system, of course, was that almost universally, except perhaps among their own guild, tax collectors were loathed by the local population. They were considered morally compromised collaborators with the hated Roman regime facilitating the oppression of the enemy. Worse than that, they were crooks, fleecing their neighbors for more money than even Rome required in order to line their own pockets. They were the worst of the worst as far as the average citizen was concerned. The cutesy children’s chorus, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he,” hardly does him justice. One writer put it well. He says of Zacchaeus, “He was the kingpin of the Jericho tax cartel and had the scruples of a modern-day crack dealer.” That’s the kind of man Zacchaeus was.
And so naturally, the third thing we learn about Zacchaeus was that he was rich. And that may not seem like much to you at first glance, but for careful readers of Luke’s gospel thus far, that is not at all an encouraging sign. In the chapter immediately prior to this one, Jesus has exposed the greed and the materialism in the life of the rich young ruler who couldn’t see that Jesus Himself was true treasure, and so he went away from Jesus sad, with his money idol still ruling from the throne of his life. And as He watched him go, Jesus remarked, do you remember, how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”
And as if to underscore that point, at the end of chapter 18, Luke records an encounter between Jesus and a blind beggar on his way into Jericho on the road just outside the city. The rich man loved his riches and he walked away from Jesus. But the beggar, well he responded to Jesus without any resistance, without a moment’s hesitation. His faith in Christ, Jesus explains, makes him well. And so in context, do you see, Luke is setting us up here to expect Zacchaeus to be another cautionary tale about the spiritual danger of riches. He’s not a beggar in need; he’s a lone shark preying on the poor and the vulnerable. No way Jesus will have anything but a word of rebuke for this man, surely.
And then comes the fourth thing we learn about Zacchaeus. Verse 3 says, “He was seeking to see who Jesus was.” Now given Jesus’ actions later in the story and Zacchaeus’ own response to Christ, I think we have to say that much more is going on in his heart than mere curiosity generated by the crowds. It’s not just that a local celebrity is causing a stir in town and Zacchaeus wants to get a good spot to ogle at Him like everyone else. No, I think we have to assume that Zacchaeus has heard something before now of Jesus’ ministry. Perhaps the news of the healing of the blind beggar just outside the city has reached him. Some commentators suggest that since tax collectors were generally shunned by the rest of respectable Jewish society, they formed a fairly tight knit fraternity among themselves. And so Zacchaeus may well have learned of the conversion of Levi, the tax collector, otherwise known as Matthew the apostle, from his other tax collector contacts.
But however Zacchaeus has heard about Jesus, it’s clear at this point that he wants to know who Jesus is for himself. There is a spiritual stirring, an awakening happening in his heart. He’s beginning to really seek the Lord. We know for sure that something like that is what’s really going on because Zacchaeus does what prominent, wealthy men of his station would never otherwise do, especially not men who want to defy the general contempt in which they are held by their neighbors by always acting with refinement and dignity in public.
Look at what Zacchaeus does. Being too small to see past the crowds lining the street, Zacchaeus runs on ahead further down the route through town that Jesus has to take, and he climbs a sycamore tree beside the road in order to secure the best view. Now men of dignity and gravitas who didn’t want to be laughed to scorn in that culture, they simply did not run. It was most undignified. And they certainly didn’t climb trees like adventuresome children. But here is Zacchaeus now, and he forgets himself completely, so caught up is he with the burning question that is filling his mind – “Who is Jesus of Nazareth? Why has He come? Can He really be everything the guys who work for me collecting taxes say that He is? He turned Levi’s life upside down for sure. I wonder, will He have any time for someone like me?”
And so you can imagine his astonishment when Jesus doesn’t simply pass near where Zacchaeus is perched as Zacchaeus had expected, but rather He stops right at the foot of the tree and looks directly at Zacchaeus and says, verse 5, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” I’m surprised Zacchaeus didn’t fall out of the tree. Jesus knows his name. Jesus knows his name! Isn’t that interesting? And while this, at first glance, might look like a chance encounter, Jesus uses vocabulary in His address to Zacchaeus that indicates that a divine imperative has been at work directing his steps. “I must stay at your house today.” Literally, “It is necessary that I lodge at your house.” He’s under compulsion, under constraint. Jesus hasn’t stopped at the sycamore by chance. Not at all. The reason He didn’t stop in the downtown of Jericho to find lodging for the night in the home of some elite, local priest wasn’t that He was intending to march directly on to Jerusalem after all. No, the reason He kept on moving and passed through the city was because He had a divine appointment on the far side of Jericho with a wee little man up a sycamore tree. “Today,” Jesus says to him, “is the day ordained for you, Zacchaeus.”
The word “today” is in an emphatic position. In the Greek, Jesus literally says, “Hurry and come down, for today in your house it is necessary for Me to lodge.” This is the moment of decision for Zacchaeus, and Jesus has come directly to it with a purpose. The fact that He invites Himself into Zacchaeus’ home underscores that point, doesn’t it? All the initiative lies with Jesus, not with Zacchaeus.
Now we said at the beginning – do you remember this first part of the story is about seeking, but now we have to ask, “Who is the real seeker?” It turns out it isn’t Zacchaeus after all, not really. Jesus has come this way on purpose. Led by the divine directive because He says, verse 10, “The Son of Man came to seek the lost.” Zacchaeus is lost and Jesus came for him. Why did the eternal Son of God become man that first Christmas? Here’s the answer – He came in pursuit of lost sinners. The initiative is all His. The movement is all from God toward us. That is true in the incarnation itself; it’s true in the total mission of the Son of Man, the Lord Jesus, who came to seek the lost. I think after this day, on the road beside Jericho, Zacchaeus could sing with joy the words of Jean Ingelow’s famous hymn. Do you remember these words? “I sought the Lord and afterward I knew, He moved by soul to seek Him, seeking me. It was not I who found O Savior true. No, I was found of Thee.” Part of the message here is that God is the great seeker who has come in person, in Jesus Christ, in pursuit of you. He’s come in pursuit of you. He’s seeking you. The wonder of Advent that ought to fill every Christian heart with profound gratitude is that Jesus Christ has come to seek us and to find us. And so that’s the first thing I want you to see here – the seeking.
Then, look at the second half of the story and notice the saving. The saving. “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” When Jesus stopped at the sycamore tree and invited Himself into Zachaeus’ home for the night, it was more than the chief tax collector could ever have hoped for, surely. Verse 6 says, “He hurried and came down and received Him joyfully.” He’s overjoyed. Now almost certainly, receiving Jesus would have meant turning this entire procession around and heading directly back in the way that they had come, back into the city that they’d just passed through, where wealthy Zacchaeus likely had his home – not on the poor outskirts of town, but in some prestigious neighborhood in the center. But of course the return journey gives the spectators plenty of time to grumble about the shocking, unseemly behavior of Jesus. “What sort of holy man hangs out with the likes of Zacchaeus?” Verse 7, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” The irony in their words is that it implies, of course, that the grumbling crowds aren’t themselves sinners. “Zacchaeus is a sinner, not us. Jesus should be out here with us, not in there with him.” But remember verse 10. Jesus’ mission. The reason He came that first Christmas was “to seek and save the lost.”What the crowds do not see is that they are just as lost as Zacchaeus, but they never will receive the salvation Jesus came to provide until they realize it.
And friends, let me say to you, that you too will miss not just the meaning of Christmas or the true significance of Jesus’ first coming, that would certainly be tragic, but you will miss the very salvation He came to provide altogether if, like the crowds that day, you put yourself in the wrong category of persons as they respond to Jesus Christ. He came to seek and to save the lost. You are lost without Him. It’s not just the Zacchaeuses of the world who are sinners. “All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.” “There is no one righteous, not even one.” I am guilty before God. You are guilty before God. The difference between the crowds in Jericho and Zacchaeus wasn’t that he was – what did that one commentator say about him? “The head of the local tax cartel with the moral scruples of a present day crack dealer.” That’s not the difference. The real difference between the crowds and Zacchaeus, the real difference between all true Christians and the rest of us, is that Zacchaeus has come to the painful but necessary recognition of the truth about himself and the crowds have not.
“Yes,” Zacchaeus would say, “of course you are all perfectly correct – I am lost! What do you think I am doing, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of Jesus in a sycamore tree? I’m driven by the awareness of my desperate spiritual need. Jesus has indeed gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner. But listen, unless you have come to that fundamental realization about yourself as Zacchaeus has about himself, Christmas can never be anything more to you than tinsel and fairy lights. Jesus can never be anything more to you than a vague, the focus of vague, religious sentiment. You can never know the salvation He came to give you until you see how badly you need it.
Well, Zacchaeus seems to have been well aware of the complaining crowds, but instead of embarrassment, he stands up. Being a wee little man, it’s not entirely clear to me how much of a difference that really made, but he stood up all the same, presumably to call attention to what he was about to say. And notice how he addresses Jesus in verse 8. Look at verse 8. “Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” That is a stunning declaration. Zacchaeus confesses Jesus as His Lord. He doesn’t call Him “rabbi” or “teacher.” He doesn’t even call Him, “friend.” He calls Him, “Lord.” There is a submission here, demonstrated in the words that follow, to the mastery of Jesus Christ from here on out, not stiffnecked determination to live his own way. To receive Jesus for the salvation of your soul involves the surrender of your life to His Lordship.
I wonder if you’ve done that today – surrendered your life to His Lordship. It might seem scary to you, the surrender of the reigns of your life to Jesus Christ. It sounds difficult, hard to do, to give yourself up, to be mastered by Him. But don’t miss what Zacchaeus says next because it gives us the clue that we need to understand why He was so very glad to do it. Until this day, Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector, has been swindling the poor out of their hard earned cash every chance he can get, but now here, in the presence of Jesus Christ, his heart has been radically altered. Hasn’t it? He resolves to give away half of what he has come to own in order to help the poor. Isn’t that extraordinary? The idol of money has lost its grip on him, hasn’t it?
What a contrast Zacchaeus actually presents to the rich young ruler in the previous chapter. He couldn’t let his riches go. The rich young ruler was like one of those chimps in a cage. Do you know the ones that reach through the bars to grab a banana in his fist and now he’s stuck? His closed fist can’t get through the bars. He can have his freedom or he can have the banana but he can’t have both. You can have your heart idols – in this case, the idol of money – or you can have Jesus, but you can’t have both. The rich young ruler preferred his money to the true treasure of having Jesus Christ. And so, Jesus said, “How hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom.” And yet here in our text, we see wealthy Zacchaeus “letting goods and kindred go,” quite freely, cheerfully. He no longer holds his prize tightly in his clenched fists with his hands stuck between the bars. Now he gives 50% of his total personal worth away to the poor quite cheerfully.
And keep reading; he says even more than that. “If I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” Now the law of Moses in Leviticus 6:5, Numbers 5:6, required the restitution of what has been lost for this kind of offense. But in those texts, the sinner was to pay the full amount plus one-fifth in addition. But Zacchaeus says, “From the 50% of my total worth that I’m not just giving away to the poor, out of what’s left, I will make restitution to anyone that I have defrauded at the much higher rate that is expected in the law of Moses for someone who has committed the crime of outright theft. A fourfold return.”
You see what Zacchaeus is saying? He’s saying, “I don’t want to minimize my sin in any way. I don’t want to dumb it down. No, I’m resolved to face it, to its fullest extent, in all its unvarnished ugliness and so whatever I can to make it right, wherever I can.” People who receive the salvation that Jesus came to give us, they confess their sin to the Lord. They do not excuse their sin. They don’t blame shift. They don’t engage in “what about-ism.” You know what “what about-ism” is? “Well yes, I suppose I am guilty of that, Lord, but what about her? If she hadn’t of done that, I wouldn’t have done this.” Do you ever do some “what about-ism”? And they don’t pretend to be victims either. “Yes, I’m a sinner, I guess, but it’s really not my fault. I’m a victim of my circumstances.”
No, those is whose hearts God is really at work, they own their sin. They face their sin. They grieve over their sin. They turn from their sin, and where they can, they do what they may to make restitution for their sin. That is part of what it meant here for Zacchaeus when he said of Jesus, “You are my Lord.” And that isn’t easy, is it? It’s hard to face ourselves, hard to face our sin, our shame, without sugarcoating it, without blameshifting, without justifying it. So how do you account for Zacchaeus’ change? Given how challenging this transformation really is, how do you account for his joy in gladly letting all his riches go? More to the point, how can you or I get to the place where the same scary looking revolution happens in our hearts and we welcome it with joy just like Zacchaeus?
Verse 9, I think, gives us the explanation. Notice Jesus’ response to Zacchaeus. “Today, salvation has come to this house, for he also is a son of Abraham.” Now get what Jesus is telling us here. “Today, salvation has come to this house.” When Jesus came to Zacchaeus’ house, salvation itself came to his house. This is so important for us to understand clearly. Salvation isn’t a transaction. It’s not a spiritual makeover. It’s not something you can bargain for from Jesus. That’s not what Zacchaeus is doing here. Salvation is Jesus Christ, and it was having Jesus that let Zacchaeus say, “You know, compared with Him, all these trinkets are worthless. He is treasure.” Salvation came to Zacchaeus’ house. When Jesus comes, salvation comes.
If you came to church today looking for a clean conscience or for some vacuum in your heart to be filled, or for a new sense of purpose for your life, well that’s all well and good, but you never will find it till you find Jesus Himself. Salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house. When He comes, everything your heart really needs comes with Him, but you must have Him. That’s how Zacchaeus can look at his riches and say, “What is it all now anyway? The money’s lost its luster. The riches all their lure compared with the pearl of great price, the Lord Jesus Christ. I have real treasure now.” He’s let go of the old idols of his heart for which he previously had been living in order to have Jesus.
Have you? Have you come to that point yet where you’ve unclenched your fists and let your heart idols go? This is what it really meant for Zacchaeus to call Jesus “Lord,” you know. He was happy to tear the idol of money from his heart, happy to give it away, happy even to face the full, unvarnished ugliness of his sin because he’d found in Jesus treasure that surpassed all of it. Look, it is scary to surrender to Jesus, but only if you still think yourself, your idols, your sin is better, safer and more satisfying than He is. But when you see the truth as Zacchaeus suddenly saw the truth that Jesus really is all your heart needs, when you see the truth, you drop the banana, you let it go. The idols of your heart, you let them go because you know that now if you have Him, you are free indeed.
So what, according to Jesus, is Advent really about? What are we celebrating this Christmas? Why did He come? Jesus came, He says, “to seek and save the lost.” That’s why you are here this morning. It is a divine appointment. Jesus is seeking you, inviting Himself into your life. He knows your name and He’s calling for you to come to Him just as He called Zacchaeus. He came not just to seek for you, but to find you and to save you. In order for Him to be treasure more precious than all of Zacchaeus’ riches, you know know Jesus Himself was stripped and impoverished and broken and condemned at the cross. He who was rich, for our sakes, became poor that by His poverty we might become truly rich. That’s what Advent is about. That’s why Jesus came. He was born of the virgin, laid in a manger, to seek and save the lost. He’s seeking you. I wonder if like Zacchaeus you will be among the found this Christmas?
Let’s pray together.
Our God and Father, how we bless You for Jesus the great Seeker. O Lord, grant that by His Word and Spirit He might find us today, save us today, that like Zacchaeus, having found the treasure buried in a field with joy over it, we go and gladly sell all we have that we might have Him, to let goods and kindred go, to give up the idols of our hearts that have hitherto been so precious and so safe to us because we’ve found at last the pearl of great price. Would You do that for each of us now today? In Jesus’ name, amen.