Good morning. This morning we’re going to continue on in our sermon series on the gospel of Mark. We’ve gotten as far as halfway through chapter 2, and so I’m going to invite you now to stand for the reading of God’s word. I’m going to be reading from Mark 2, verse 13.

Reading: Mark 2:13-17

Before we look with closer attention at these 5 verses I’ve just read, it will be helpful for us this morning to stand back just a little bit to see how this particular episode fits into the unfolding story that we’ve been looking at here in the gospel of Mark.

As you know we’ve been in this sermon series for a number of weeks now, and in some sense haven’t gotten very far. But this is very deliberate. We have been wanting to go very slowly, at least in the early portion of the gospel, to really let the story unfold and to let us kind of sink into the story.

There are some things that, it seems to me, we can already say about the gospel of Mark. If the gospel of Mark is to introduce us to Jesus Christ, it seems that Mark is convinced that we will best come to know Jesus if we can see him in action. If we can see him out doing things and particularly interacting with other people as he acts.

That’s why, in the gospel of Mark, it seems to me he’s not interested in birth stories or genealogies or spending much time on his time in the wilderness. He doesn’t even care very much on the front end of the gospel to show us what Jesus is teaching. He wants us to see Mark Jesus in action. And then, under that, he wants us to see how people are interacting with this Jesus in action.

Now that is kind of a second strand that we’ve already begun to see, but will become even clearer in the following weeks here; that there are people who, when they meet Jesus – when they see him in action – they are strongly drawn to him. But there are also other people who meet the same Jesus in action and who are strongly repulsed by him.

In fact, you can see almost the first 2 chapters being organized in this way. The first chapter is really just a growing crescendo of Jesus’ popularity. He starts out by himself. He calls a few disciples to join him. Then he does a miracle in a town and the whole town turns out. He moves on to other towns.

The reputation begins to precede him. And it crescendos right at the end of chapter 1 where we’re told he is so popular that he cannot even come into a town in the open because he’d be mobbed by the people, and he has to stay out in the countryside and let the crowds come to him. And that’s sort of the strand in chapter 1.

But then last week, we began chapter 2, and Dan said this is introducing the second strand – the strand of opposition. Last week we looked at the paralytic who was let down through the roof and Jesus pronounced that his sins were forgiven, and we were told that the scribes and the Pharisees began to mutter among themselves.

Well, in our passage today, the opposition escalates one notch. They don’t just mutter amongst themselves. They ask questions of his disciples. Next week it escalates further. They ask questions directly to Jesus. The following episode, they challenge Jesus. And in the fifth episode, they seek to trap Jesus and when he works his way out of the trap, they are so angry that they leave plotting to kill him.

In just a little more than two chapters at the beginning of the gospel of Mark we see Jesus, on the one hand, so popular that he can’t even get into towns, and making Jesus so angry that they’re out plotting to kill him. The same Jesus.

And by putting those two reactions together at the beginning of the gospel of Mark, it seems to me that one of the things he’s clearly inviting us to do is to ask why. “Why is it that some people respond so powerfully positively, and others so powerfully negatively?” Why is he sweet to some and sour to others?”

And if we have that question in mind I think we can understand a little better the function of this episode in the gospel of Mark. It doesn’t fully answer that question. In fact, that question is going to be answered out over the entirety of the gospel, but it begins to hint at some of the answers to that question. So that’s what we want to keep in mind as we look at our text today.

Our text starts in verse 13. It starts with what I would think of as just kind of a backdrop verse. Jesus is out by the sea, teaching. This is kind of, for Mark, the default case for Jesus. That’s where you just find him. If you want to think of this episode like the movies, that would be the scene that was in the background while they were rolling the credits. Jesus was out by the sea.

But very quickly Mark can’t let Jesus stand still. Very quickly, he has him on the move. And by verse 14, Jesus is walking. Now, we aren’t told very much and a lot of, with Mark, when you read these passages you have to infuse them with some imagination. But I imagine him walking along, it’s a hot Galilean day. He’s got his disciples around him. Some of the hangers-on and the crowds that were down by the beach are there.

Nobody knows exactly where he’s going. It’s dusty. It’s kind of loud. There’s a lot of confusion; multiple conversations all going along. And then Jesus walks by the booth of a tax collector. These would be set up in various, different places to collect a wide array of taxes including, sometimes, simply tolls on roads. And Jesus stops and looks and sees Levi.

Now we’re not told, really, anything other than Levi’s name. We’re not told anything about him except that he’s a tax collector. And from that, we know for sure that he would be an ostracized outcast in this community. That’s the one thing we know about him for sure. And there are a number of reasons for that.

The tax collectors in the first century in Israel were really the face of economic oppression to the people. The people that Jesus was ministering to, particularly in Galilee, were by-and-large very poor.

There was almost no middle class in first century Israel, and so most of the people that Jesus hung around with were very poor. They were subsistence living. And even before Rome moved in to take over Palestine, they would be expected to contribute to the temple tax; a tax they would use to support the Jewish system that was in place. But then when Rome came in, the temple tax didn’t go away, but Rome added in an overlay of its own taxes – lots of different types of taxes. And it retained local folks to collect the tax for them. And so, and this was very typical of the Roman empire, anytime they would move into a new territory, they would suck the wealth out of that territory to try and pull it back to Rome.

And so here, you have local folks (your neighbor, in effect), sucking the wealth out of already very poor people in order to send it back to Rome. And when the poor felt this economic oppression, the face they saw was the face of the tax collector.

It was also a face identified with corruption. The tax collectors were thought of as a group to be corrupt. That is, they would charge more than they were entitled to and they would pocket the balance. Many of them got quite wealthy that way. Later on in Luke, we’ll encounter Zaccheus who was a chief tax collector, and obviously very wealthy from his tax collecting activities. And then finally, the tax collectors were to the people the face of traitors. I mean, remember that they are sucking the wealth out of the poor to give it to the rich in Rome who can use it to station soldiers – to garrison soldiers – in Palestine to subjugate the people.

Israel never accepted itself as simply a part of the Roman empire. It was constantly a people in resistence, which meant that the Roman army was constantly an enemy occupying force, and so the tax collectors who were collecting the money to sustain the army were collaborating with the enemy.

And so, for all of these reasons and perhaps more, a tax collector was shunned in Jewish community. They would not be welcome in the synagogue. They would have by their own practices long since have turned their backs on the Jewish faith. But no good Jew would hang out with a tax collector. But Jesus looks in and says to Levi, “Follow me.” And Levi gets up and follows him. Luke, in recording this same episode says, “He left everything and followed him;” exactly the same words that Luke uses for Peter. He left everything and followed him.

I think it’s interesting that in the two cases where Jesus calls tax collectors to himself – in this case, and then later with Zacchaeus – immediately their response is to invite Jesus to dinner. And so that is what happens next. The scene shifts and we go to a dinner party at Levi’s house.

Now, we don’t have any real picture of what Levi’s house looked like. I kind of imagine a sort of modest structure that perhaps kind of has an outdoor courtyard which is where the meal would be served. They don’t have tables like we do in the sense that people would sit at chairs. They would put things on either a low table on the ground or a mat. People would eat, typically reclining, so you would lay on a mat resting on one elbow and reaching over for your food with your other hand, so that you have this kind of picture of people lounging in this courtyard.

We know that Jesus is there. We know that Levi is there. We know that his other disciples are there. And we know that there were many other tax collectors and sinners that were also joining there. This was a huge gathering.

Now, in that culture – and it’s still true today – but in that culture at that time in particular, to eat with somebody was not just to fill your stomach in their presence. It was an act of community. It was an act of acceptance. It was a way of saying we belong together. It was fundamentally a statement of inclusion. And so when Jesus and his disciples recline at table with the tax collectors and sinners, it was in a statement of including them. And that, of course, is what provokes the Pharisees and the scribes.

Now again, we don’t have a clear picture of how they see Jesus in this setting. But I imagine that this courtyard has kind of a low wall and that the scribes and the Pharisees are on the outside kind of looking over the wall and seeing inside all of these tax collectors and sinners laying around, eating and laughing and stuff. And the scribes and Pharisees say, “Hmm. What is this about?”

Remember, I’ve told you this before in sermons. It’s very easy to always want to put a black hat on the Pharisees; that as soon as they show up in scriptures to say, “Oh, those are the bad guys.” And it’s easy to do that because those are the ones who seem to be fighting with Jesus. But let me remind you that if you were a first century Jew and someone came to you and said to you, “Who in our culture is the most committed to understanding what God wants for them, and for applying that to every aspect of their live, who would that be?” You would say, “Oh, that’s a Pharisee.”

These aren’t necessarily folks who would be particularly fun to go to a ballgame and have a beer with, but these were people who were very sold out to following God in every particular. Now, their theological framework which really derived from Israel’s time in exile was that, to be a good follower of God was to be pure. Pure in your behavior. Obedient in every respect. But also pure in the sense that you would not mix with foreign cultures and you would not mix with people who were not like you, committed to living pure and holy lives. So a Pharisee would never sit down to a meal with a tax collector or sinner.

That would simply be wrong. That would not be what they were supposed to do. It would be disobedient to God.

And so, as they lean over the fence and they see this going on, they say, “How can your teacher, your rabbi, Jesus, eat with these tax collectors and sinners?” It is certainly possible to understand that question as simply a criticism. It may be, though, that it was a genuine (sort of) earnest effort to understand. In fact, it would be a fairly typical way for scribes to ferret out God’s truth from the Torah, the midrash, to ask each other questions. How can it be…? And How can this be…? And how can…?

And so it may be that all they were doing, in this case, was genuinely trying to sort out how can it be that someone who speaks and teaches with such authority and purports to sort of say things from God, yet at the same time is mixing it up with these tax collectors and these sinners? How can this be?

Now the Pharisees just ask this question of the disciples, but Jesus hears and he comes over and he answers. And his answer really is the capstone of this episode. He says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners.”

I want to stop on that verse for a moment because it seems to me that that’s the heart of this little story. And it seems like it functions on a couple of different levels. On one sense, all Jesus could be saying is, “I’m here with the tax collectors and sinners because these are the people that need me.

These are the people that need to hear of God’s love. And so I go to where the need is.” That would be a simple way of explaining. That’s his effort to answer the Pharisees. In a slightly deeper sense, this verse 17 actually operates as a kind of summary of all that we have learned about Jesus so far. If you think about all the different ways that we have seen Jesus in action in Mark, what have we seen him doing?

• Healing
• Casting out demons
• Forgiving sins

In each case, if you wanted to summarize everything we know about Jesus’ ministry so far, we could say he is here to restore people to wholeness. That is, physical wholeness, mental wholeness, spiritual wholeness. And so it makes sense that when he picks a metaphor, the metaphor he picks is one of a doctor. I’ve come as a doctor to bring wholeness to the people.

But I think we need to go even one layer deeper than that, because I think in this calling of Levi we see Mark beginning to hint at the deepest ministry that Jesus is given. And to get you here, I have to back up a little bit. I have to go all the way back to the beginning, to creation.

Remember the creation story. God creates the world in this perfect harmony, perfect balance, perfect peace we call shalom. And in the middle of it, he puts human beings that he intends to have this wonderful relationship with. He intends them to have wonderful relationships with each other. He gives them bounteous, easy, creative, joyous work to do with him; to enable the whole to flourish. This is God’s original intent.

And then, as Marge pointed out in the reading of the Old Testament lesson, Adam and Eve in their efforts to become God to themselves, disobey and then everything gets broken. Everything gets broken. The relationship between God and human beings gets broken. Whereas they used to walk peacefully in the garden together, chatting in the evening, now when God comes they’re embarrassed and they hide.

It used to be that Adam and Eve would be this wonderful partnership in work. But now Eve and the curse is told that her husband will rule over her. And in fact, in chapter 3, Adam names her. It’s the first time he’s named her. Before that, he’s named the animals. But now he asserts authority and names his wife, “Eve.”

In chapter 4, this breakdown of human-to-human relations continues as Cain rises up and murders his brother, Abel. Because of the fall there is now this brokenness in human-human relations. And work, which was to be joyous and life-giving and creative now has been transformed.

Dorothy Sayers has this wonderful British phrase. She says, “Work has now become erksome.” This means, by the sweat of the brow, you have to work hard in the field. Thorns and thistles will come up. Yes, the ground will still support you, but it’s going to be hard work, whereas before it was joyous, creative stuff.

And that’s the consequences of the Fall.

Now, if you think about it for a minute, you’d think that Levi exhibits all of those consequences in his person. Here’s a man whose relationship with God has clearly been broken. He’s been kicked out of the synagogue. He himself probably has abandoned the faith. And yet it is God in the person of Jesus that says to Levi, “Come. Follow me.”

Levi’s relationships with other human beings have been broken. He’s ostracized. He’s an outcast. And yet it is Jesus who says, “Come. Let’s eat together.” Levi is engaged in extremely destructive work, sucking money from the poor, giving it to the rich so that they can further oppress the poor. And Jesus says to Levi, “Come away from that and then implicitly come and follow me and engage in the creative life-giving work that I’m about.”

When Jesus calls Levi and specifically when he says at the end, “I have come to call these people. That’s my purpose,” when he calls them he is announcing that which will come into further expression later in the gospel; that Jesus’ ministry is not just to restore to wholeness in a sort of sense of healings, but at the deepest level to reverse the consequences of the curse. That that is what Jesus is here for. That’s his ministry.

Now let’s return for just a second to that question at the beginning. Why is that this notion of Jesus as physician is so attractive to some and so repulsive to others?

And again, I don’t think this is the full answer, but here is the beginning of the hints. I think, ini a sense, Jesus is simply saying, “When you’re sick, when you’re broken, when you are in need of healing, you will welcome the doctor. When the doctor shows up, you’re gonna be excited to see the doctor, because you know you need what the doctor has to offer.

But if you’re perception of yourself is that you are well and healthy, or in spiritual terms righteous – or we might say self-righteous – you don’t have much interest in a doctor. You don’t need a doctor. In fact, the coming of the doctor is a little disappointing. What you want is a judge. You want someone that will draw a bright line and say that you’re on this side of the line and those people are on that side of the line. And Jesus says, “I did not come to draw lines. I did not come to be a judge. I came to be a doctor. I came to heal. I came to include. I came for wholeness.”

Now in doing that, he has really challenged the very fundamental understanding that the Pharisees and scribes are carrying around as to what it means to be obedient. They think obedience is about drawing lines. And Jesus is saying, no, it’s about being a doctor. And that difference grates. In fact, it calls into question their whole way of being. And that, I believe, is what gradually grows to eventually become a murderous hatred of Jesus.

I come as a doctor.

Well, as I’m finishing up here, I think, “What does this passage have to say to us? How might we approach this story for our own lives?” I think about it and where do you see yourself in this story? Do you see yourself in this story as one of the scribes and Pharisees, or do you see yourself more as a tax collectors and sinners? Frankly, there’s probably some of that in all of us – both sides – probably at different times in different proportions. I can certainly see myself in the scribes and the Pharisees here. It shows up in lots of different ways, my sort of pharisaical attitudes. I’ll give you a few examples.

Sometimes I’ll go with friends or colleagues off to some event. And sometimes in that circumstance one of my friends or one of my colleagues may talk a little too much or talk a little too loud or interject themselves in some socially awkward ways…at least in my judgment. And I will find myself in these circumstances actually almost physically sort of sliding off to the other side of the room as if to sort of say, “I’m not really with them.” There’s kind of a little separation there.

I find that sometimes in superior attitudes, even with other Christians. This past week or so I was off at a dean’s conference in the south. And in the town I was in there was also a women’s Christian gathering. And I remember sitting outside and watching these masses of women pour out of the convention center and, from my perception, they were all heavily made up and they had the big poofy hair. And I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, God. Thank you that I am not that kind of Christian.”

Sometimes I find it in work situations where I’m working very, very hard on a project that requires the collaboration of a colleague, and I work so hard. And I pour myself into it. And my colleague drops the ball. And I notice that my first reaction in almost every case is not, “Oh, no. I wonder what happened in their life that caused them to drop the ball?” My first reaction is, “How could they possibly have done that to me? God. God, look at what I did, and look at what they did.”

I also find that, like the Pharisees, that really for very good reasons I sometimes want to draw lines. Some of you know that for years and years, my passion for our congregation has always been that we will go deeper in our walks with God. It’s not so much a passion that we will get bigger, but that we will go deeper. And so over the years I’ve had various different ideas that I’ve thought would help:

• Everybody in our community should be in a small group.
• Everyone should like a more radical, in community, kind of lifestyle.
• We should have greater financial accountability to one another.
• Everybody in our congregation should be in spiritual direction.

I’ve had a lot of spiritual ideas. And a lot of them were (I think) very good ideas. But a lot of the time, I coupled them with the idea that the way we’ll get there is by saying that, if you’re willing to commit to that you can be a member.

And if you’re not willing to commit to that, you’re still welcome to show up on Sunday and worship with us, but you can’t really be one of us unless you’re willing to make deeper commitments. In effect, I’m drawing these bigger walls around our community so that people can say, “Wow, it’s really cool in there. I want to get in.” And, well, it’s hard. You have to do all these things to get in.

This comes out, I will tell you just between us, worse on Easter. I am the biggest Pharisee on Easter. When all those people come to our church and I can’t even get a seat in my pew because all of these “nominal” Christians like I know are showing up, I’ve been known actually to suggest that we have a special Easter service for real Christians.

When I talk like this, and it’s been very good for me, with Dan and Dan, whose instincts are not like mine, is always good to remind me…he likes some of my ideas, but he always says, “Remember, Jeff. Jesus never built walls. He never drew lines. He always went out to dinner.” That’s what Jesus was doing.

You might ask yourself, “Where am I feeling pretty smug, self righteous? Where do you see yourself wanting to separate yourself? Where do you feel superior? Where do you want to draw lines? Where do you want to circle the wagons? Where are you like a Pharisee today?”

In a few moments, we’re going to celebrate communion here. And at the communion table, I want you to hear that Jesus invites everybody to the table. He invites the tax collectors. He invites the lepers. He invites the paralytic. He invites the demoniacs. And he invites the Pharisees.

I’m reminded of the parable of the prodigal son. Remember how that parable ends? In the very end, the father goes out to talk to the elder brother, who is really the representative of the Pharisees in that story. And he says, “Come into the party. Come into the party.” And the parable ends with that question dangling. Will the Pharisees cross over their lines?

Jesus never draws lines. The only people that draw lines are the Pharisees.

And Jesus would say to you, “Sit down your self-righteousness, your smugness, and come and eat with me at this table.” Maybe you feel today more like one of these tax collectors and sinners. Maybe you feel already a bit of a sense of outcast. Maybe you’re single and all of your friends are married. Maybe you’re concerned about your physical appearance, you feel like people are not drawn to you. Maybe you have a physical disability that makes people feel uncomfortable around you. Maybe it’s something inside.

Maybe you feel like, if people really knew who you were, nobody would want to be with you. If they knew what your thought life was really like. If they knew what you had done. Maybe there’s a sense in which maybe you even disgust yourself when you think too closely about it. And maybe your natural tendency is to want to pull back and pull away.

If that’s where you find yourself today, this is your table. Jesus is here at this table and he says to you, just like he says to Levi, “Come. Let’s eat together. Let’s eat together. You don’t have to fix yourself. You don’t have to purify yourself before you’re welcome at this table. I want to come eat with you just as you are. I want you to know that I am here desiring to restore you to wholeness – whole relationship with me, whole relationship with your community. Desiring to call you out of destructive lifestyles that are wrecking your wholeness. To put you into positive lifestyles that will cause you to flourish. That is what I want. Come. Eat with me at this table.”

There’s one other place we might imagine ourselves into this story. We might also imagine ourselves coming into this story as if we were Jesus. Because after all, we are (in a sense) the body of Christ here on earth. And what would it look like if we began to say to ourselves, “This is our calling. To go out into the world, to places where people are outcast, and bring them in.”

You know, in some ways, maybe what we do Wednesday night at dinners where we have people who have homes sitting down with people who don’t have homes in community together, eating a meal together…perhaps that is one place where we do that. What would it look like if we were to say, focus on speaking to people who were suffering from AIDS. What would it look like if we were to reach out to sexual predators who were relocating to neighborhoods where everybody hates them and fears them? What would it look like if we were to reach out to outcasts? In Seattle, reaching out to outcasts might be as simple as taking a Republican to dinner. What would it mean if as a church we went out and said, “Come in. Come in and eat.”

This is the table that the church is invited to as well. We get fed by the body and blood of our Christ so that the life of Christ will live within us, so that the Spirit of God will animate us, so that He will send us out in the world where we will be the hands and feet of God to bring wholeness, to bring people in, and to restore, to redeem, to bring all of that work that God is doing out into the world that He so loves?

Let’s pray.

God, I thank you that you welcome us in every place and from every way that we’re coming. I thank you that you even extend your welcome to the self-righteous Pharisees in our midst. That you extend your welcome to the broken tax collectors in our midst. And that you extend your welcome to this table, to us as your body. I pray that in every place you might be working for wholeness in us and enabling us to work for wholeness in the world that you love. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.