We remember Zacchaeus as the man who wanted to see Jesus. He was a chief tax collector in Jericho, rich and despised (his neighbors had their reasons), too short to see over the crowd, too notorious to be welcomed through it. So he ran ahead—undignified, desperate—and climbed a sycamore tree to catch a glimpse of Him.
But Luke turns the story upside down. It’s not Zacchaeus who sees Jesus, but Jesus who sees Zacchaeus. “When Jesus came to the place, He looked up and saw him.”
The crowd had filed Zacchaeus under: sinner. They grumbled when Jesus went home with him. But Jesus stopped under that tree anyway, saw him, and called him by name. Before Zacchaeus made a single promise or paid back a single coin, Jesus invited Himself in: “Today I must stay at your house.” The welcome of Jesus came first. Zacchaeus’ repentance, described as giving half of everything he owned to the poor, four times over to anyone he’d cheated, grew out of that welcome.
We know a little of what it’s like to be Zacchaeus. We know what it is to be noticed (not for what we want to be noticed for) without being known. To be seen for something we’ve done, not for who we are. We spend years alongside people—in class, at work, in the same pew every Sunday—who know our names, our jobs, and our opinions, and yet never know the fear that keeps us awake night. So we become experts at masking. We’ll smile while we’re grieving. We’ll sound confident while we’re wrestling with doubt. We’ll look strong while we’re running on empty. We wear our masks for so long we forget they’re masks.
Jesus sees through every mask. He knows us more deeply than our closest friend, more deeply than we know ourselves.
How can he know us like this?
It isn’t that He has our stats, all our data, every detail of our lives on file. Jesus knows us because He entered the very life we live. The eternal Son of God became one of us. He knew hunger. He knew weariness. He knew sorrow. He knew disappointment. He knew temptation. He knew suffering. He took up our humanity just as it is: broken, estranged, bent away from God. And, without ever sinning, He lived our life back toward the Father and healed it from the inside. He went down into the darkest parts of our stories. He carried our sin to the cross. And He rose and ascended to His Father, still human, still one of us, with our humanity healed and held in His own. He knows us from the inside because He has made our life His own. All the way down.
And He hasn’t turned away. He never has. He never will.
This is why we can take off our masks before God. We don’t have to set the record straight, or make our case, or clean ourselves up first. Our relationship with the Father has already been set in Jesus Christ. He has lived the trusting, obedient, worshiping human life we never could, and He has offered it to the Father as one of us, for us. By residing in us, the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Christ—joins us to Him and teaches us to rest there, fully known and deeply loved.
And then that rest turns our eyes outward. When our worth is held in Christ, we don’t need other people to prove it for us. We can stop sizing up the room: who can help me, who might hurt me, who’s in my way. We can stop scanning each other like barcodes for price and usefulness. The Spirit who opens our hearts to the love of Jesus opens our eyes to the people that His love has already embraced: the cashier whose name we’ve never asked, the coworker we’ve quietly written off, the person two rows back at church who always leaves early. Every one of them is someone Jesus has looked up at and seen.
Come as you are. You don’t have to introduce Jesus to the person you think you really are. He already knows. He has stopped under your tree. He has seen you. He has called you by name.
For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. —Luke 19:10 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. —Hebrews 4:15–16 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. —1 Corinthians 13:12
This spiritual antipasto has an accompanying call to worship.
Seen, known, loved.
Somehow, we’ve learned to imagine God’s knowledge as surveillance. We picture the all-seeing eye, cold and unblinking, scanning for our every infraction, always keeping our file current. He’s the cosmic auditor, and we’re always under review.
But Jesus completely shatters that image.