Zaccheus is one of the most famous and colorful characters in the Gospels, even though he only appears in Luke’s account (19:1-10).

In that Gospel, we hear of Jesus passing through Jericho. Zaccheus lived there, and he was “a chief tax collector and rich.” He was “trying to see who Jesus was” but was short, so he climbed “a sycamore tree” to see him as he passed by. Jesus stops and calls him down and invites himself to dinner at Zaccheus’ house—to the dismay of the people of Jericho—and the tax collector converts on the spot.

Jericho is the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world (see it on a map here). It sits at the edge of the Dead Sea valley, 846 feet below sea-level. It is, literally, an oasis in the desert—a large spring there has fed that part of the valley for thousands of years, and is the only way people have survived there.

The spring allowed cultivation of the soil and people grew date palms and other crops. Herod the Great enhanced the irrigation around Jericho and used it as a winter palace. It was a significant city in the region, politically and economically.

In Jesus’ time, Jericho was one of the only places in the region where balsam was produced. Balsam is a fragrant resin that comes from some shrubs—today, balsam is the base of the perfume used in holy Chrism oil. It was expensive to make, and a large source of wealth for Jericho.

Zaccheus is noted not only as a tax collector, but as the chief tax collector of this important city. Luke goes to great lengths to emphasize his wealth, explaining on top of it all that he was “rich.” The audience should have no confusion about this man’s status, in other words. Tax collectors were loathed because they acted as agents of the occupying Roman empire, and often over-collected to enrich themselves. If there was one man most people in Jericho despised, it was Zaccheus, and for good reason.

Yet of all the people in that city, Jesus chose to stay with Zaccheus. He sensed in the man a readiness for a change—what else explains the lengths he went to in order to glimpse Jesus? A man of such stature would have been mocked for doing something so childish as climb a tree, but Zaccheus had to see Jesus. Despite his past and the labels others placed on him, Jesus could see his desire and answered it. He does the same for us.

In Jericho today, there is a large, old sycamore tree that stands at a major intersection in town. It probably wasn’t alive in Jesus’ time—or if it was, it wouldn’t have been sturdy enough to hold a man—but local tradition claims it as Zaccheus’ tree. If nothing else, it gives visitors a concrete idea of what the scene might have looked like on that day when Jesus passed through the town and inspired a conversion.

This icon of Jesus meeting Zaccheus is found on the walls of a Romanian Orthodox monastery located in Jericho.