When Jesus came to the place, he looked up. . .

If you hang money from a tree at eye-level, people will walk right by it. This happens because, as our parents taught us, and as we have taught our children, "Money doesn't grow on trees." Trained not to expect it, we refuse to see it. Scientists call it "inattentional blindness." We pay attention to what should be there, rather than what is. . .or could be.

Zacchaeus going out on a limb was the equivalent of money growing on trees: He had a lot of it. And like money, tax collectors did not grow on trees. They grew in the fetid soil of a social system that left them few good options; like drug-dealers and pimps, publicans were made, not born. And then, of course, the society that had made them rejected them. They became invisible. Zacchaeus couldn't see Jesus in the crowd because the crowd couldn't see Zacchaeus.

He looked up: Those may be some of the most beautiful words in Scripture. Jesus looked - he attended to what was there; what anyone could have seen but no one else did. And he looked up - he actually had to take the trouble to train his gaze beyond the level plane of normal life. 

And there's one more thing: that Greek verb also appears to describe the recovery of sight by the blind. At the risk of committing my favorite exegetical fallacy, the illegitimate totality transfer, where one unloads all possible meanings of a word into a single use of the word, I do think there's a connection. Looking up and regaining sight, in this story, seem to flow together: Jesus saw because he looked up; everyone else remained inattentionally blind. 

In a world where climbing the ladder of success often causes people to come up short and leaves them up a tree, Christ calls us to look, and to look up. May Jesus open our blinded eyes to see what - and more importantly who - is right in front of us.

For more information, see Why We Miss Objects that are Right in Front of Us, by Heather Murphy.