Luke 19:2 Commentary and Bible Study

This passage is about the second of these two men, Zacchaeus. ‘Behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich. This man was an exceedingly wealthy man. He was a man who owned, as a chief tax gatherer, the right to ‘fish’ a whole area in terms of taxation. The Roman occupying forces, the Roman overlords, were far too shrewd to set up an elaborate civil service. In occupied territory, which they didn't understand and it didn't know well, they reasoned that the wealthiest people, the most successful businessmen, in those conquered territories who had money, probably represented the shrewdest individuals there. So what they did was literally to auction the right to tax a particular territory to the highest bidder. That way they got their taxation sums as the result of one straight, simple auction, and then whoever bought the right to take the taxes had a completely free hand with some measure of support from the local Roman militia, the local garrison, to deal with defaulters. But that system meant that once the right to tax got into civil hands like this, there was little or no right to appeal, and if a shrewd individual who had sufficient money to buy up a whole territory for tax purposes; if he was unscrupulous, there were all manner of ways in which he could line in his pockets and overcharge. This appears to have been one of the things which Zacchaeus was doing. But for him it was particularly loathsome because he was taking advantage of his own people. Let's make no mistake about this. This record of a man who is a tax collector and undergoes this very rapid conversion: you may think he had done nothing worse than defraud a few wealthy people out of money. But no, a man in his position would have done very much worse. To start with, history tells us that the class of person who it was most simple to extort money from and defraud were the poorer classes. You can be sure that the people who had most to lose at the hands of these unscrupulous individuals like Zacchaeus were those who had no money to defend themselves. The big business people always had influence in those days. They could always buy a hearing from the local garrison themselves. They could always pull some strings to get something done. But it was the small man, the poor man, the family man living on the breadline who suffered worse at the hands of these tax collectors. So you have got to see Zacchaeus as a particularly unscrupulous and heartless person, hard as nails. The strange thing here is that the Lord Jesus Christ doesn't really do anything in Jericho at all. We read that as he was come nigh unto Jericho – approaching the city, but not actually arrived – and a certain blind man sat by the wayside begging. There was a great multitude with him even then. People had gathered from the nearby towns and villages. People had come out from the city in order to escort him in, because they didn't want to miss anything. They expected there would be great miracles. They expected there would be healings, some mighty demonstration of his power and a lot of preaching within the city, and they wanted to see this. Yet, you read that as he was going in, he settles on a poor blind man, a beggar, who was shouting at the top of his voice, and people around him, they were trying to shut him up. But he was the one who the Lord Jesus Christ healed. Then when he went into Jericho and through Jericho, there was all the tension, there were the crowds. We do not read that he heals anyone, or that attempts to preach. He gets to the city centre, and he begins to go out the other side; he is leaving the city. ‘And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus.’ He was actually in the outer suburbs, going back out of the city, and nothing had happened, when there was this encounter with the most unlikely person of all, Zacchaeus. On the way in, the poorest of the poor, a blind man who couldn't even see him, who was just shouting from the roadside. On the way out, the most loathsome extortioner, the chief among the tax gatherers, a man who had probably been thrown out of the temple because of his crimes, a man universally detested and hated.