The One Up the Tree

The family closed the file about six years ago and they did it kindly, which is somehow worse.

Nobody said anything cruel. There was no falling out. It was more that the conversation about Beto shifted, over about two years, from something people worried about to something people accepted, and now when his name comes up at a table there is a particular tone that means: yes, that is how he is, pass the bread.

The reasons they give are reasonable. He is doing very well. That is the first thing anybody says and it is true; he has money in a way nobody else in that family has ever had money, and he is generous with it at exactly the moments when generosity settles a question and closes a conversation. He is not unhappy. He is not in trouble. He is fifty-one and he has arranged a life that works, and he does not need anything from anybody, and a man like that, they say, does not come down.

Tomás is his older brother and he has not closed the file, and he is the only one, and he does not argue about it at the table because arguing would make it a subject and he has learned that the subject cannot survive being a subject.

He sits on this bench most evenings on his way home. There is a fruit stall on the corner and a big tree and the light comes through it about six, and he says his brother's name here, and has for six years.

And what has been growing in him lately is the family's own sentence, in his own voice: he is not coming down for me.

If everybody has closed the file on somebody, hear the question. Which office were they filing it in?

The man in the tree was the local answer

The account is short and everybody knows it, and the details are worth reading slowly for a man on a bench.

Zacchaeus was rich, and the text says so plainly, and he was rich by a method the whole town resented. He was the chief among the publicans, which means he was not merely in it, he was senior in it. He was successful. He was comfortable. He was, by every measure that a family uses when it closes a file, doing very well.

And he was up a tree, which is a detail nobody would have invented: a wealthy senior official climbing a sycamore because he was short and could not see, which is undignified in a way that tells you something was going on in him that his life did not show.

And then this, at the end of it.

For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.Luke 19:10

Jesus says that sentence about this man. Not about a beggar and not about a woman in obvious trouble. About the richest, most settled, most written-off man in Jericho, on the day he came down out of a tree.

You are praying for the kind of man that sentence was said about, and it is already the stated mission, and it was said over somebody the whole town had filed. I am not being optimistic on a bench. It is written in Luke 19:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a mission statement said over a rich man and carries it to a corner under a tree.

Comfortable is not the same as closed

And here is the specific correction, because the family's reasoning has a hole in it and Tomás has never been able to name where.

Their argument is: he does not need anything, therefore he will not come.

But need is not what moved Zacchaeus. He needed nothing that anybody could see. He had money, position, and no visible crisis. What he had was something the crowd could not see and could not have guessed at, and the only evidence of it in the whole account is that a wealthy man did an undignified thing to get a look at somebody.

Nobody in that street knew what was in him. They knew what he had. Those are different files and only one of them was open.

You are looking at what he has rather than at what is in him, and the open file is already known to somebody else, and comfort has never once been the same as closed. Scripture says man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows what is in a fifty-one year old man that his own family cannot see.

Who did the calling

And there is one more thing in the account that takes a weight off a brother, and it is about who spoke first.

Zacchaeus climbed the tree to look. That is all he did. He did not call out, he did not ask, he did not arrange anything. He got himself into a position where he could see, and that was the whole of his contribution.

Jesus stopped, looked up, and called him by name.

Tomás has spent six years believing that the coming down depends on the persuasiveness of somebody on the ground. It never did. In the one account we have of a man exactly like his brother, the initiative came from the road, the name was known already, and the invitation was to a house.

You are not the one who has to persuade him down, and the calling is already done by somebody who knows his name. It is written that the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stops on a road and looks up into a tree.