Eating with Sinners
Part 1
19th July 2007
Luke 5v27-32
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,
and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others
were eating with them.
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'?"
Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
The people of Jesus's time despised the tax men and the sexually immoral. Not much changes, does it? In fact, tax collectors were much more hated in those days then they are now; they worked for the Romans - who had invaded and occupied Judea, Galilee and many of the surrounding countries. Tax collectors were considered traitors. Think about a French tax collector working for the Germans in occupied France in the 1940s.
But Jesus chose a tax collector to be one of the 12 disciples!
His name was Levi. And he was so grateful that Jesus didn't hate him the way most people did that he gave a "great banquet" in Jesus's honour. Trouble was, Levi invited his friends. Well, you would - you'd want your friends to have a chance of meeting Jesus! So Jesus sat down (in all probability) with con-men, thieves and prostitutes.
We shouldn't be surprised that the religious leaders of the day disapproved. "Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?" they accused him. Surely nice, godly people wouldn't associate themselves with riff-raff! Why eat with sinners, when you could eat with us?
The tragedy of all this is that the Pharisees were sinners, too, but they were so religious, they'd forgotten. They had so many rules, didn't they? And they kept most of them, most of the time, didn't they? No, they probably didn't. But it's amazing how the religious can convince themselves that they're righteous. And they still do today. You can see it in every church in the land.
I think the greatest single disservice that the church does to the people around us, is that we give the impression that we think that they're sinners and we're not. In truth, we're all sinners.
Jesus was very gentle with the Pharisees at this time. He could have said "These people may commit different sins to the ones you commit, but they're no worse than you are". He could have said, "If I don't eat with sinners, I'll dine alone every night". But instead, he gave them something to think about. He said:
It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
Do you think you're OK without God's forgiveness? Are you "healthy in mind and body"? Then you won't find Jesus! It's the sick who find Jesus - the sinners, the failures, the outcasts, the unpopular. Maybe that's why it's hard to find Jesus in some churches - the people in those churches think they're so holy, they don't need God's mercy any more.
This is what Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount, when He said:
Matthew 5v3
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven".
It's those of us who know we're sinners that can receive God's grace. He says "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance". And, since we're all sinners, we have absolutely no right to despise or judge others.