Most districts have one. The house people walk past a little faster. Perhaps the owner is known to be hard in business. Perhaps there were rumours about how the money was made. Perhaps it is simply the house with the high wall and the gate that never opens, where nobody has been invited in years. Children are told not to go there. Church members pray about it in general terms but never knock.
In Jericho, it was the house of Zacchaeus.
A short man, a tall wall
Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, and that he was rich (Luke 19:2). In that world, those two facts together told people most of what they thought they needed to know. Tax collectors worked for the occupying power and were widely believed to take more than was owed. A chief tax collector had grown wealthy on the arrangement. His house, we can imagine, was one of the better ones in town, and one of the least visited.
When Jesus came through Jericho, Zacchaeus wanted to see Him but could not get past the crowd, because he was short. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree. It is a slightly comic picture: a wealthy, resented man up a tree like a schoolboy. Then Jesus stopped beneath it, looked up and called him by name. “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house” (Luke 19:5, NKJV).
The grumbling at the gate
The crowd’s reaction is instructive. “They all complained, saying, ‘He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner'” (Luke 19:7, NKJV). There were other houses in Jericho. Respectable ones. Houses where the host would have been honoured to receive a famous teacher and where nobody would have raised an eyebrow. Jesus walked past them to the one the town avoided.
It is worth asking which houses we walk past. Not only the house of the neighbour with a bad reputation, but also the rented rooms at the back of the lane, the elderly man whose yard has gone to bush, the family who moved in last year and speaks with an accent nobody on the street shares, the house where the police came once and people have talked about it ever since. Our visiting habits often follow the same lines as the crowd’s in Jericho. We go where we are comfortable, and where our reputation is safe.
What happened inside
Luke does not describe the meal. He takes us straight to what Zacchaeus said. “Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore fourfold” (Luke 19:8, NKJV).
Something changed inside that house before anything changed on the outside. Nobody lectured Zacchaeus at the gate. Jesus simply came in, sat at his table and treated him as someone worth spending the day with. The change followed the welcome, not the other way round.
And the change was practical. It touched money, property and the people Zacchaeus had wronged. Restoration went out of the house and into the town. The families who had been overcharged would soon know about it. The poor would feel it. A house that had been a symbol of taking became a place of giving back.
Jesus’ verdict speaks of the whole household: “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9, NKJV). Not only to Zacchaeus, but to the house.
If yours is the house people walk past
Some readers may recognise themselves not in the crowd but in Zacchaeus. Perhaps there are things in the past, in business, in family, in how a piece of land was acquired, that have left a shadow over the household. Perhaps the gate has stayed closed because it felt easier than facing people. The story offers two kinds of hope.
First, you are seen. Zacchaeus was hiding in plain sight up a tree, and Jesus called him by name. Second, it is never too late for a household to change direction. Zacchaeus did not wait until he had made everything right before he came down. He came down first, and the putting right followed. For some, that might mean an honest conversation with a relative over a family property, paying back what was taken, or finally opening the gate to the neighbours.
Knocking on the other door
For the rest of us, the story is an invitation to visit differently. Consider a church family who decide, for one year, to invite someone to Sunday dinner whom they would normally never think of. A widower who lives alone. A young mother the church has quietly judged. A neighbour everybody finds difficult. Not to fix them, not to preach, but to eat together.
Some of those meals will be awkward. Some will be the beginning of friendships that last decades. A few may be the moment someone’s life turns, the way it did in Jericho. None of that will happen if we only ever walk up the paths to the houses that feel safe.
“The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost,” Jesus said that day (Luke 19:10, NKJV). Seeking usually involves going to places others avoid. Sometimes it involves knocking on the one gate in the district that nobody else will touch.
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