Dinner With The Wrong Folks
Jesus calls a rotten tax collector and throws a dinner party with outcasts, showing the kingdom is for the sick, not the self-righteous.
2:13 Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. 14 As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.
Jesus is teaching by the lake, crowds gathered to hear his words, when he spots someone who didn’t bother to show up for the sermon. Levi, the tax collector, is still in his booth, skimming coins and betraying his neighbors on behalf of Rome. In those days, tax collectors weren’t merely disliked—they were despised, seen as traitors worse than the Roman occupiers themselves. And yet Jesus calls him to follow.
Notice what Levi does to earn this honor: nothing. He doesn’t fight through a crowd. He doesn’t dig a hole in a roof. He doesn’t even raise his hand. He just sits there, rotten in his sin, and Jesus calls him anyway. First a paralyzed man who could do nothing; now a crooked man who would do nothing. Helplessness and rottenness—apparently that’s all you need for the kingdom. It’s almost laughable. But that’s the Gospel: it only works for losers, or at the very least, those who’ve lost. And Jesus makes sure to call him in full view of the crowd, right in the middle of his teaching—forcing everyone to see that even the people they hate most are included in his upside-down kingdom.
15 While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. 16 When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
If calling Levi wasn’t bad enough, Jesus goes to his house for dinner. Suddenly the guest list fills up with tax collectors and “sinners”—a catch-all label for the rotten, the immoral, the misfits you don’t want your kids around. Jesus doesn’t lecture them or demand they shape up first. He eats with them, reclines at their table, enjoys their company. And predictably, the religious leaders can’t handle it. A rabbi eating with sinners? Unthinkable.
But Jesus offers them a riddle: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” They hear it as a dismissal: “I came for these lowlifes, not you.” But the joke’s on them. He’s doing this right in front of their noses, for their sake as much as for the sinners’. Because the truth is, both groups—the rotten and the self righteous—are sick. Both are bound by sin. And both need the doctor who has come not to congratulate the well but to take on their disease, succumb to the affliction of death, and in his resurrection bring healing to all.
Reflection Question
Who are the “wrong people” you assume Jesus would avoid—and how might that assumption be keeping you from seeing your own need for the doctor?
