Where Is Your Hope?Sample

When the Impossible Happens

In Jesus’ final encounter on the way to Jerusalem, He enters Jericho. There, just over 15 miles from His execution, He meets Zacchaeus.

As the chief tax collector, Zacchaeus was powerful yet greatly hated by his community. At that time, Jewish tax collectors were considered traitors, collaborators with Roman oppressors who inflated tax rolls to line their pockets. Zacchaeus had become rich by cheating his own people and collaborating with an unjust government. Ironically, Zacchaeus’ name meant innocent in Hebrew!

Unlike the other encounters in Luke, the interaction between Jesus and Zacchaeus does not start with a request or even an approach, but with one small act of faith. Zacchaeus simply climbed a tree to see Jesus. Jesus takes this small step of faith and opens the door wide for salvation, saying, “Come down immediately. I must stay at your house.”

When Jesus entered this man’s house, Luke tells us that salvation entered in the form of the Savior Himself. And that changed everything. While Jesus basically invited himself to Zacchaeus’ home, in reality, it was Zacchaeus who was receiving the greater invitation: salvation, relationship, and restoration.

Zacchaeus responds with a radical reversal of perspective and behavior. In its truest definition, Zacchaeus repents or “turns his life around.” He stopped cheating people and instead vowed to restore over and above what he had taken (vs. 8).

In the encounter with the rich young ruler, Jesus ends by saying it is difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven but that with God, all things are possible (Luke 18:24-27). And here we see a rich man – a very unlikely rich man – entering the kingdom of God. How? With faith as small as a mustard seed.

Jesus’ death march to Jerusalem starts with Him saying that the smallest amount of faith can do impossible things (Luke 17:6). Why? Because it is not the size but rather the object of faith that matters. In the five encounters that follow this teaching, no one is lacking faith, but some have misplaced their faith. The young ruler’s good behavior and accumulated stuff can’t save him. The disciples’ ritual cleanliness won’t save them. Even the ten lepers’ healing doesn’t ultimately save them.

But it’s in the bondage of sickness, the insufficiency of toddlers, the desperation of poverty and blindness, and a cheating traitor’s willingness to humiliate himself in order to get close to Jesus that salvation is found. Only in Jesus are wholeness, healing, cleansing, and salvation. So don’t put your trust in anything else. Pursue Jesus, and in Him find life!