27 After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, 28 and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
29 Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. 30 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
31 Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Today’s passage is a short one; so we will be brief on the narrative side and more focused on how this might apply to you and me.
Yesterday we concluded several days’ portions of Luke in which he focused on Jesus’ authority: in teaching, in commanding the reversal of various aspects of the suffering brought on by human sin, and in forgiving the sin of those who believed in him. Here was one who taught authoritatively, who had the power to cure any affliction or addiction, no matter how prolonged, and who could forgive all sins against God—not in some distant future, but right now, on the spot. This kind of man would be welcome in Israel, and the elite leadership and “scholarly” community (i.e., the Pharisees) were eager to claim him as their own. But they were not interested in sharing him with the hoi polloi.
So Luke follows up on the demonstration of Jesus’ threefold authority by picking up on a theme that he has already broached earlier: that Jesus came for a wider community than just Israel—and not just racially or linguistically wider, but religiously and spiritually wider—not just for pious people, but especially for those who knew they were not pious.
We have mentioned earlier that political tensions ran high in Palestine under the Roman occupation, and Israelites were polarized as to how to react. Some felt that it was wisest just to collaborate and make the best of it—these were the upper classes in general: the Sadducees, many of the Pharisees, and the Herodians. Other groups hated collaborators, seeing in them the worst kind of traitors to Israel’s freedom from the iron heel of Rome. These were the Zealots, who were ancient equivalents of terrorists, who carried out assassinations of Roman officers and Israelite leaders who were collaborating with Rome. Some among the collaborators even gained their wealth by helping Rome extort money from other Jews: these were the hated publicani (“publicans,” or tax farmers), who skimmed off a healthy cut from whatever they could gouge out of their compatriots before giving the rest to Roman officials.
Such a man was Levi, whom Jesus found one day sitting as his collection post (v. 27). Everyone hated Levi—perhaps even his Roman superiors despised him as a traitor to his own people—except for his fellow publicani, with whom alone he could socialize, party, and spend his ill-gotten gains (v. 29). Certainly, Jesus too would despise him, right? Wrong! Instead of shunning Levi, or spitting in his direction while passing the tax collection post, Jesus went right up to him and issued him an invitation to become one of his disciples! What an astounding honor to be offered to a (yet!) unrepentant sinner and traitor to his people! Down through the ages of Christian history, the most spectacular converts to the faith have often been the most hardened sinners, and many of these have testified later that what shocked them into the realization of their need for forgiveness and inner transformation was an astounding and totally undeserved act of God’s grace to them. This is what shocked Levi. He was used to the rebukes and snubs of the religious set—immune to their kind of “religion.” What he was not unimpressed by was an unexpected act of pure kindness and grace from a man of well-known sincerity and un-pretended godliness. If Jesus said more to him, it wasn’t important to Luke and wasn’t germane to the point Luke wished to make here. Notice how quickly Levi responded. He knew a real opportunity when he saw one and knew from his business background that one had to seize these chances while they were available. So he dissolved his business immediately and held a farewell party to celebrate his new career as Jesus’ disciple. He invited all his friends, so that they too could meet his new boss, who was the guest of honor. In Franco Zeferelli’s magnificent film Jesus of Nazareth he imagines that during the banquet Jesus told to the guests the story of the Prodigal Son, and that Simon Peter, who had hated Levi all his adult life, stood outside the doorway listening. When Jesus reached the end of the story, where the Prodigal Son has returned and the father wishes to reunite his older son—who had never strayed—with the returned wastrel son, he beckoned Peter inside and placed his arms around Peter and Levi to reconcile them. How beautiful! Although this association of stories is not found in the gospels themselves, it is thematically appropriate.
The “dark side” of today’s passage is the appearance of critics of Jesus, who accuse him of defiling himself ritually by sharing the dinner table with collaborators and those who deviated from the religious law of Moses (“tax collectors and sinners”). For these men, who otherwise would have liked to claim Jesus as one of their own class, it was totally inappropriate for him to do this.
Jesus’ answer was beautiful. It doesn’t openly accuse his critics of anything, but beneath the surface it offers them plenty to think about in terms of their own guilt. He compared his ministry to that of a physician. Physicians go where there are sick people. Their skills are useless to healthy people. The tax collectors and sinners are obviously spiritually “sick” and in need of a cure. The religious leaders and Torah scholars considered themselves the “healthiest” of the Jews in those days. If they wanted him to confine his socializing to their circle, they must admit themselves to be seriously ill spiritually, which of course they were!
Abandoning then the metaphor, Jesus concluded: “I have not come to invite the righteous into God’s kingdom, but to invite ‘sinners’ to enter by ‘repenting.’” If I may unpack the work “repent,” in Jesus’ terms, this meant responding to God’s gracious and unexpected invitation not only by acknowledging his Son, Jesus, as Lord and Savior, but also by showing the sincerity of that acceptance in clear and decisive change. That is certainly what Levi did. He went out of business in his old life, and pulled up stakes to start over. It is hard to fake a real Christian conversion, no matter how the secular media likes to debunk it. I have known many people over the years become Christians as adolescents and adults, and without fail one sees a dramatic change in the way they live. Rarely, one will see such a person only last a short time and then give it all up. That is very sad. But if the changed life persists, you know that the initial transformation was not put on but was really from God.
How about you? When you first took a serious interest in the Bible and in what you might learn about Jesus, did anything similar happen to you? It did to me, and is still doing it!
No comments:
Post a Comment