Happy Friday afternoon to everyone. I as scanning through my notes in 2011 and I ran into this one. I don’t claim authorship in this but I really don’t know how I got this or who I got this from. However, it is really worth reading:
Bob Mumford once said, “The Christian army is the only one that shoots its wounded.” I regret to see this statement to be all too true. In our most recent past, I have watched friends and their families undergo untold pain and hurt because of the incredible power of gossip and slander. But, we can choose between having the eyes of a judge or we can have the eyes of a doctor. The eyes of a judge see choices that God should punish, leave us thinking, Why have anything to do with them? The eyes of a doctor see the hurts that God can heal.
These are the thoughts Mark 2:13-14 forces us to ponder. Here we see Jesus moving into the world of someone considered disreputable—someone whose lifestyle was questionable to other people. Jesus invited this disreputable man to be part of his group. Through his example Jesus is saying to us, “Move into their world as I do, with the eyes of a doctor, seeing the hurts that God can heal.”
The taxation process in the New Testament world was oppressive. There were no posted toll costs or tax rates. If you were a merchant, and you rolled into the station with your goods, you had no clue what it was going to cost you to pass through. Levi just came out, counted your carts, poked around in your sacks, checked out all your goods, and then told you how much you had to pay. And you can bet that like all tax collectors in Rome, he was setting the cost high enough so he could send the right amount to King Herod, while also lining his pockets with a little extra cash. But despite the corruption, if you were a merchant, you were at his mercy. After all, the soldiers were there to enforce whatever he said—and he was probably giving them some money on the side to help him out.
And this is why it was so surprising when Jesus came along and moved into Levi’s world—even inviting him to be one of his disciples! Much more, Jesus actually commits to attending a party with a whole crowd of disreputable people!
Why does Jesus make such a socially risky move? He has the eyes of a doctor. He sees their hurts that only God can heal. The Pharisees objected to Jesus eating with such disreputable people. To them it implied acceptance of the sinners’ lifestyle. Why was he partying with them? they wondered. And it was a party going on at Levi’s house—no doubt about it! The words used in the text to describe the gathering are not the normal words for simply sitting at a table, having a nice meal. They are party words of that time—words that say they were all having a grand ole’ time! But as far as the Pharisees were concerned, Jesus was with the wrong people in the wrong place.
You can imagine how horrifying it was for the Pharisees to see Jesus go into a house filled with sinners. Even worse, they could hear laughter coming from the house. So when the party finally broke up and Jesus and his disciples were coming out of the house, some of the Pharisees confronted Jesus’ disciples, saying, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? Why is he associating with such disreputable people?” They were not asking for information. They were saying this in an accusatory manner, insisting he should not be doing what he was doing.
The text tells us that Jesus overheard their question and gave them the answer that becomes our pattern of behavior for today: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” Jesus is saying that it makes as much sense for us to stay away from sinners as it does for a doctor to stay away from the sick. A doctor must go out among the sick in order to bring healing, just as we go out among the sinners to proclaim an even deeper healing that comes from God.
The choice is ours.
