Zacchaeus is the chief tax collector of Jericho — not merely a collaborator with Rome but the head of the regional collaboration, a man who had built his fortune on extortion. He climbs a tree to see Jesus because he is short and the crowd will not make room for him. Jesus stops under the tree, looks up, and says: I'm coming to your house today. The crowd grumbles. By the end of the scene, Zacchaeus has pledged to give half his goods to the poor and repay fourfold what he has taken. Jesus has not said a word about his finances.

From the writers we read together

Mother Teresa

Missionaries of Charity, founder (1910-1997), Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Teresa's communities embodied the seeking of Luke 19. She did not wait for the abandoned to find their way to the Missionaries of Charity; she went into the streets to find them. The Zacchaeus story was, for her, a template: Jesus stops, looks up, and goes where no one expected him to go. Teresa's practical application was straightforward: if you want to seek and save the lost, you have to go where the lost are. That is rarely where the comfortable congregation is sitting.

The phrase “today salvation has come to this house” carries a weight Teresa would have recognized: it comes before Zacchaeus has done anything. He has not yet pledged the half to the poor or the fourfold repayment. Salvation comes with Jesus's arrival, not with Zacchaeus's improvement. His subsequent generosity is the evidence of a salvation that was already present, not the cause of it. Teresa's theology of service was built on the same foundation: you serve the person in front of you because salvation has already come to them, because the Son of Man came seeking them, because they are a son of Abraham too.