Mark 2:13-17
13 [Jesus] went out again along the seashore; and all the
multitude kept gathering about Him, and He kept teaching them. 14 And as He was
passing by, He saw Levi (Matthew) son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax office,
and He said to him, Follow Me! [Be joined to Me as a disciple, side with My
party!] And he arose and joined Him as His disciple and sided with His party
and accompanied Him. 15 And as Jesus, together with His disciples, sat at table
in his [Levi’s] house, many tax collectors and persons [ definitely stained]
with sin were dining with Him, for there were many who walked the same road
(followed) with Him. 16 And the scribes [belonging to the party] of the
Pharisees, when they saw that He was eating with [those definitely known to be
especially wicked] sinners and tax collectors, said to His disciples, Why does
He eat and drink with tax collectors and [notorious] sinners? 17
And when Jesus heard it, He said to them, Those who are strong and well have no
need of a physician, but those who are weak and sick; I came not to call the
righteous ones to repentance, but sinners (the erring ones and all those not
free from sin).
Food for thought!
In order to understand Jesus' way of doing things, let us
look at the kind of man Levi was. He was a tax collector. In Jesus's
time, the Jews were under occupation of the Romans. The Romans collected taxes
on everything and on every activity of the Jews, including the fish that were
caught on the Sea of Galilee. As a tax collector, Levi worked for the occupying
authority, the Roman government. This is what made Matthew bated by
his own people, the Jews. For them, he was a traitor.
The Romans had come up with a tax quota system for each
province in the empire. They allowed their nobles to bid on the contracts for
collecting the taxes in each area. These nobles usually hired locals to collect
the taxes. As long as they met their quota, the Roman government didn’t care
how much more they collected. As a result, the tax collectors became very rich,
(like Zacchaeus, Luke 19:2), as they overcharged the people, paid the
Roman government and kept the difference for themselves.
Because of the system, all tax collectors like Levi /
Matthew were notoriously dishonest, and as a result he was among the most hated
people in Israel. He was viewed as public sinner, isolated in the community. He
would not have been allowed to go to the Temple or the synagogues. He was a
social outcast, who could only socialize with other tax collectors and sinners.
This is the reason why at dinner he invited others like him, "when Jesus,
together with His disciples, sat at table in his [Levi’s] house, many tax
collectors and persons with sin were dining with Him, for there were many who
walked the same road with Him."J
This is the kind of man Jesus saw and called to be his
associate. From his decision to follow Jesus Matthew got some thing.
He lost one job but he got a far bigger one. It has been said that Matthew left
everything but one thing—he did not leave his pen, for the first gospel was
written by Matthew. With his orderly mind, his systematic way of working, his
familiarity with the pen, Matthew was, the first man to give the world a book
on the teaching of Jesus. So, don't give up on Jesus; he specialized in human
transformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment