The King Comes Near, and the City Fails to Recognize the Hour

“Passed through” is an imperfect, “was passing through”, so Jesus is still on the move when the next verse stops him. Jericho was a wealthy town of balsam groves and Herodian palaces, and a customs post on the road from Perea across the Jordan, the natural posting for a chief toll collector.

Zacchaeus is the Greek form of the Hebrew Zakkai, “pure” or “innocent”, a name that sits oddly on the head of a tax syndicate. “Chief among the publicans” translates architelones, a title found nowhere else in the New Testament and in no earlier Greek text that survives.

“Sought to see Jesus who he was” uses the phrasing Luke gave Herod, who “desired to see him” (9:9). The Greek could let “he was little” refer to Jesus, though no one reads it so. The word for stature, helikia, is the one in 2:52, where Jesus “increased in wisdom and stature”.

The sycomore is the sycomore fig, Ficus sycomorus, not the English sycamore or the American plane tree. It has a short trunk and wide low branches, easy for a small man to climb. Amos was “a gatherer of sycomore fruit” (Amos 7:14).

Jesus uses his name before anyone has introduced him. “Must” is dei, Luke’s word for divine necessity (2:49; 9:22; 13:33; 24:7), and “to day” is his word for the moment salvation arrives: “unto you is born this day” (2:11), “to day shalt thou be with me” (23:43).

His response mirrors the command word for word: make haste, come down; he made haste, came down. “Received” is hypodechomai, the verb used when Martha “received him into her house” (10:38). Joy is the response to the found in chapter 15, and here it belongs to the found man himself.

“Murmured” is diagongyzo, the verb of the Pharisees in 15:2, “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them”; the Greek Old Testament uses its root for Israel grumbling in the wilderness. “To be guest” is katalyo, to lodge, from the same root as the inn that had no room in 2:7.

The law required a thief to restore what he took plus a fifth (Leviticus 6:5; Numbers 5:7); fourfold was the penalty for a stolen sheep (Exodus 22:1), and David pronounced it on the rich man of Nathan’s parable (2 Samuel 12:6). “False accusation” is sykophanteo, extortion by trumped-up charges, the very thing John the Baptist told soldiers not to do (3:14).

“Unto him” can equally be “with regard to him”, since Jesus speaks of Zacchaeus in the third person, as if to the murmuring crowd. Luke used the matching title for the bent woman healed on the sabbath, “this woman, being a daughter of Abraham” (13:16), also defended against objection.

The saying gathers up chapter 15, where the sheep, the coin and the son are all “lost”, the same Greek word, apollymi. Behind it stands Ezekiel 34:16, where God himself, as shepherd of Israel, says “I will seek that which was lost.”

The parable is told while they are still listening, apparently in Zacchaeus’s house. “Appear” is anaphaino, to come into view, the word used in Acts 21:3 when the ship’s crew sighted Cyprus. The listeners expect the kingdom to heave into sight at the next turn of the road.

Luke’s hearers knew this plot from recent memory. In 4 BC Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, sailed to Rome to have Augustus confirm him as king of Judea, and his own palace was at Jericho, where the parable is being told (Josephus, Antiquities 17.219–249).

A pound is a mina, a hundred drachmas, roughly a hundred days’ wages for a labourer, a small sum beside Matthew’s talents, each worth sixty minas. “Occupy” in 1611 meant do business, trade, which is what pragmateuomai means; the same sense survives in Ezekiel 27:9, where mariners come “to occupy thy merchandise”.

When Archelaus went to Rome a delegation of fifty Jews followed him to ask Augustus not to make him king (Josephus, Antiquities 17.299–314). “Message” is presbeia, a formal embassy. Their line, “we will not have this man”, will be heard in another form at 23:18: “Away with this man.”

The nobleman receives the kingdom despite the embassy, as Archelaus did, though Augustus gave him only the title of ethnarch and withheld “king”. “Gained by trading” is diapragmateuomai, a strengthened form of the verb in verse 13: the ruler asks what each has done with the business he left.

The first servant credits the pound, not himself: “thy pound hath gained”. A tenfold return on money left in trust would be extraordinary in any market.

“Well” is euge, bravo. The reward reverses scale: faithful in “a very little”, the Greek superlative “least”, recalling 16:10, “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much”. Ten pounds earn ten cities, the sort of grant a new king made to loyal men.

The second servant uses the same formula as the first and reports half the gain. Luke names only three of the ten servants to the audience; the other seven drop out of the parable without a word.

No “well done” and no “good servant” this time, only the appointment. The reward still matches the gain exactly, five pounds and five cities, but the praise is withheld, and the difference is the only comment Luke’s parable makes on it.

“Another” is ho heteros, literally “the other” or “the different one”. The napkin is a soudarion, a Latin loanword for a sweat cloth, the word John uses for the cloth about Jesus’ head in the tomb (John 20:7). Later Jewish law held that wrapping money in a cloth was careless keeping, where burying it was safe.

“Austere” is austeros, a word first used of sour, rough wine, and the source of the English word. The two proverbs describe a man who pockets deposits he never made and harvests fields he never sowed, which is to say a thief.

“Out of thine own mouth” sets the terms of the verdict: the ruler does not accept the servant’s portrait, he simply grants it for the sake of argument and judges him by it. “Wicked” is poneros, and it sits opposite the “good servant” of verse 17.

“The bank” is literally “a table”, trapeza, the moneychanger’s counter. “Usury” in 1611 meant interest of any kind. The law forbade charging interest to a fellow Israelite (Deuteronomy 23:19–20), but lending through bankers was common, and it required nothing of the servant beyond a walk to the market.

“Them that stood by” are the attendants at a royal audience, the court now assembled around the new king. The pound goes to the servant who already has the most, which is why the next verse protests.

The King James sets the objection in brackets. It is missing from a few manuscripts, but where present it lets the court voice what the hearer is already thinking: he has ten already. The ruler does not answer the objection; he states the principle.

Jesus said nearly the same thing about hearing in 8:18: “whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have.” The saying about receptivity now becomes a saying about stewardship.

“Slay” is katasphazo, to slaughter, a butcher’s word, found only here in the New Testament. Archelaus had begun his reign by killing about three thousand people at Passover (Josephus, Antiquities 17.213–218), and Augustus deposed and exiled him in AD 6 after complaints from his subjects.

Jesus walks at the head of the column. “Ascending up to Jerusalem” names the climb from Jericho, and closes the long journey that began at 9:51, when “he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.”

Bethphage is usually explained as “house of unripe figs”; Bethany lay about fifteen furlongs from the city (John 11:18), on the eastern slope. Zechariah 14:4 had placed the LORD’s feet “upon the mount of Olives” on the day he comes, so the location already carries expectation.

An animal “whereon yet never man sat” was fit for sacred use: the red heifer had to be one “upon which never came yoke” (Numbers 19:2), and the cows that drew the ark were untried (1 Samuel 6:7). The colt is set apart before it is ridden.

“The Lord hath need of him” could be heard by the owners as “its master needs it”, or as a word from God; kings and occupying soldiers commonly commandeered animals. Luke’s reader hears Jesus claiming the title plainly for the first time in an instruction to strangers.

The same phrase comes back at 22:13, when two disciples go to prepare the Passover and “found as he had said unto them”. Luke frames the last week between two errands in which Jesus’ word runs ahead of the disciples.

“The owners thereof” is literally “its lords”, hoi kyrioi, plural. The colt’s several lords ask a question, and the answer in the next verse invokes the one Lord, ho kyrios, singular. The wordplay is in the Greek and survives only faintly in English.

The disciples say exactly what they were given and nothing more, and it suffices. Luke records no reply from the owners at all, as though the sentence settled the matter by itself.

“Set Jesus thereon” is epibibazo, to mount someone on an animal. It is the verb of 1 Kings 1:33 in the Greek Old Testament, when David orders Solomon set on the king’s own mule and taken to Gihon to be anointed. The disciples seat him; he does not climb up himself.

Spreading garments on the road is a royal gesture with one clear precedent: when Jehu was proclaimed, the captains “took every man his garment, and put it under him” and blew trumpets, saying “Jehu is king” (2 Kings 9:13).

“The descent of the mount of Olives” is the point where the road crests the ridge and the whole city appears across the Kidron valley. Luke says “the whole multitude of the disciples”, not the crowd in general, and the praise is for “mighty works”, dynameis, things they had already seen.

The cry of the angels at the birth was peace “on earth” (2:14). The disciples cry “peace in heaven”, as though peace were held above while the city below is about to miss it, “the things which belong unto thy peace” (19:42).

They call him “Master”, didaskale, teacher, and not Lord. This is the last time the Pharisees appear in the Gospel of Luke; from here on his opponents are chief priests, scribes and elders, and the Pharisees have no part in the passion.

Habakkuk 2:11 has “the stone shall cry out of the wall” against a city built by violence. John the Baptist had said God could raise children to Abraham from stones (3:8), and four verses later the stones of Jerusalem return: “they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another.”

“Wept” is klaio, the loud weeping of mourning, not the quiet tears of John 11:35, where a different verb is used. Only Luke records this lament. The procession has just come over the crest; the city is the first thing Jesus sees.

The sentence breaks off: “if thou hadst known… !” with no second half, a figure called aposiopesis. “Thy peace” plays on the name Jerusalem, heard as a city of shalom, and on Salem, which Hebrews 7:2 interprets as “King of peace”.

“Trench” is charax, a palisade of sharpened stakes, a siege work. In AD 70 Titus built exactly such a wall round Jerusalem, finished in three days, to starve it (Josephus, Jewish War 5.491–511). The phrasing echoes Isaiah 29:3, “I will camp against thee round about.”

“Lay thee even with the ground” is edaphizo, to dash to the ground, the word the Greek Psalm 137:9 uses of infants dashed against the stones. “Thy children within thee” are the city’s people. The stones return in 21:6, when Jesus says the same of the temple itself.

Luke tells the cleansing more briefly than any other Gospel: no whip, no overturned tables, no doves, only the expulsion and the saying. The selling served pilgrims who needed sacrificial animals and temple coinage for Passover.

Isaiah 56:7 says “an house of prayer for all people”; Mark keeps the last phrase and Luke drops it. The “thieves” of Jeremiah 7:11 are lestai, bandits, the same word as the robbers on the Jericho road in 10:30.

“The chief of the people” are hoi protoi tou laou, the lay aristocracy of Jerusalem, now joined to the priests and scribes. Luke will close this block with a matching summary at 21:37–38: by day teaching in the temple, by night on the mount of Olives.

“Were very attentive to hear him” is literally “hung upon him”, ekkremannymi, a verb found only here in the New Testament. The people are the obstacle the rulers cannot get round, and they will keep being so until Judas offers a way “in the absence of the multitude” (22:6).