Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-october-2-2024
Luke 5:27-32
The Calling of Levi
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.”
I’ve participated in three different discussion groups on the TV series The Chosen, and in all three of them, people have been very interested in the interactions between Matthew, who had been a tax collector, and the Jewish people around him. That includes Matthew’s family and the other disciples. People are portrayed as questioning Jesus’ judgment for calling a tax collector to follow him.
That has a ring of truth about it, I think. It seems like the one thing Jesus was most harshly criticized for was befriending and hanging around with people that the religious types condemned. That included tax collectors, as well as prostitutes, gentiles, other sinners and ‘unclean’ people.
Over the past few years, one idea that has popped up again and again in the life of the church is the idea of a “non-religious” form of the Christian faith. Maybe the first prominent voice in this movement was the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a leading member of the ‘Confessing Church’ movement that resisted the Nazi control of the German church, and he was hanged on Hitler’s personal order in the closing days of the second world war. Bonhoeffer pointed out that religion is usually about obeying rules and putting up walls between ‘good people’ – those who obey the rules – and ‘bad people’ – those who don’t.
The religious people thought that by befriending and hanging around with people they thought were ‘sinful,’ Jesus was condoning sinful behavior and undermining public morality. That’s why the Jewish religious leadership of his time said of Jesus, “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them.” They obviously meant that as a condemnation of Jesus, but he seems to have taken it as an affirmation. He said those sinners were the people he came into the world to reach.
In today’s reading, Jesus meets a tax collector named Levi and calls him to become one of his followers.
The historians say that in that society, there were two different kinds of tax collectors. One kind collected the direct taxes on the population – usually a per-person or per-household tax. The other kind of tax collector collected things we would call tolls and tariffs and customs duties and so on – taxes that might be more like business taxes. This second kind of tax collector had a reputation for being particularly corrupt. And that’s the kind of tax collector Levi was.
Let’s face it: Nobody likes tax collectors, but Levi would have been more despised than most tax collectors in history. For one thing, he had to collect taxes from gentiles as well as Jews, so Levi would have been considered unclean. Just going into a gentile home or accepting money from a gentile was enough to make a person ritually unclean. So Levi would have been excluded from the religious life of his people – he couldn’t go into the temple or a synagogue or take part in any sort of religious rituals or feasts. And on top of all that, since Levi collected taxes for the Roman Empire, he would be considered a traitor – a collaborator with the hated Roman occupiers.
But Luke says that when Jesus called, Levi immediately “left everything and followed him.” Then he called together a bunch of other tax collectors and friends for a big dinner with Jesus as the guest of honor. Of course, when it became known that Jesus had participated in this dinner, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were outraged.
But that’s when Jesus said that he had come into the world specifically to reach out to those rejected people – those who were condemned by the religious types. Jesus reached out in friendship to the tax collectors and sinners, so they could encounter God’s love through him. And some would be transformed by that love and moved to live according to God’s law.
Even today, there’s a tendency among religious folk to shy away from those we identify as ‘sinners.’ We assume that if they’re alienated from the church, they’re also alienated from God. And it seems to me that we’re secretly afraid that if we’re friendly with them, we’ll become alienated from God, too. That’s obviously not a ridiculous thought. We don’t want to put ourselves in situations that represent obvious temptation, and we need to guard against doing things that could bring scandal on the church.
But we can’t just avoid all contact with sinners until they clean up their act and become saints. Jesus didn’t. And as his followers, we’re called to do what Jesus did – to let people know that God loves them and offers them a new and more abundant life.
As followers of Jesus, we need to connect with people on a sinner-to-sinner level. We know that being followers of Jesus doesn’t mean we never sin. We try to live more Christ-like lives, but we also recognize our own sinfulness. And when we connect as Jesus did with people who are outside the faith, if they see that we are more concerned about our own sins than we are about theirs, that’s the most powerful way we have of leading them to join us in walking the path of discipleship.
Let’s pray. Lord, as your Son’s followers, help us to join in his mission to those who have been rejected by religious people. Help us to extend welcome and friendship to them, and to communicate the life-changing message that whatever our sins, you are eager to forgive us when we confess them and commit ourselves to follow Jesus. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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