The following is a sermon preached on 27 July 2008. It has been lightly edited for publication. The Bible passages read during the service were Isaiah 61:1-3 and Mark 2:13-17.
The story we read from Mark chapter 2 is in a simple form we frequently find throughout the gospels. Like every story, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is the set-up – the situation which forms the backdrop to the spiritual points being made in the story. Here it is Jesus calling Levi to be one of his disciples, and the subsequent celebratory dinner held at Levi's house to mark his becoming one of Christ's people and to which Jesus and his other disciples go along to, joining in the celebration. The middle is the conflict when the Pharisees object to what Jesus is doing and make an accusation that Jesus is somehow not acting as a good and faithful Jewish rabbi should be acting. The ending is the resolution, when Jesus shows up his opponents by an authoritative statement, a word of wisdom, that resolves the issues and destroys his opponents’ arguments against him.Such is the story - the true story - that we're going to look at tonight. As I read this passage in preparation for tonight, I was struck by the very different attitudes we find in the different characters. Much of the interest and value in the story comes from seeing how those different attitudes play out and either work together or come into conflict with each other.There are actually three different attitudes that the various participants in the story display.
1. The attitude of the Pharisees.
2. The attitude of Jesus towards the Pharisees and towards Levi and his friends.
3. The attitude of Levi towards Jesus.
At the end of our time, we'll spend a few minutes drawing the various threads together and hopefully gaining some kind of insight into our own attitudes - to see where those attitudes need to be nurtured, encouraged and strengthened and perhaps where they also might need to be looked at, challenged and changed. Okay, so let's begin by looking at the attitude of the Pharisees to Jesus.
One of the key themes running through Mark’s Gospel is the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders of his time. The disagreements time and time again boiled down to two things: the true nature of God and the truth about God’s acceptance and forgiveness of sinners through faith in Jesus.
This is the first time the Pharisees are actually mentioned in Mark’s Gospel. I think it will help us to understand their attitudes if we understand a bit about what the Pharisees believed and why they acted as they did.
The Pharisees were a strict, zealous, highly religious group within the Judaism of Jesus’ time. They took obeying God’s laws very seriously. So seriously in fact that they added on extra, even more strict rules on top of God’s laws to make sure that in their behaviour they never even got close to breaking one of God’s own commandments. Jewish scholars determined that there were in fact 613 commandments in the Old Testament (248 positive ones – the “thou shalts” so to speak – and 365 negative ones – the "thou shalt nots"). The Pharisees added other rules on to top of these 613 commandments as extra “hedges” designed from stopping them falling into sin.
One example of the Pharisees’ adding onto God’s laws to give “extra protection against sin” so-to-speak, was that Pharisees would only eat with other Pharisees. Because otherwise, so their thinking went, how could you be sure that the person you were eating with had obeyed God and tithed a tenth of the produce to God? How could you be sure you weren’t being tainted by this other person’s sins?
Not only would Pharisees not eat with anyone who wasn’t a Pharisee, they regarded anyone who wasn’t a Pharisee as morally suspect. They would freely call everyone who didn’t agree with them “sinners”. That’s exactly what we find in our passage. When the Pharisees learn that Jesus is in a house eating with sinners they question it.
“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” they ask.
The questioning of the disciples probably happened when the meal or party was breaking up and everyone was leaving the house to go home. Do you see the mentality of the Pharisees here? If you are a religious person, you don’t mix with non-religious men; and if you do mix with non-religious people, then by definition you are not a religious person. They knew that Jesus was a rabbi – a religious teacher – so why was he eating with “these people”?
After all to sit down to a meal with someone in that culture was a sign of acceptance and camaraderie. It’s not that different now is it? If someone asks you out to a meal, you would probably be reluctant to go unless you accepted that person as a friend or at least a trustworthy acquaintance, someone you were happy to spend time with. Even the special meal we share as Christians, the Lord ’s Supper, is a visible sign of our unity and mutual friendship in Christ, isn’t it?
So, the Pharisees ask, how could Jesus have a meal with tax collectors and sinners? In their eyes, these people were sinners without God, and this Jesus claimed to have come from God and yet he eats with them. They couldn’t understand it. To them it looked wishy-washy. It looked like a compromise with evil. And the Pharisees hated compromise. Really, they are accusing Jesus of not being as holy as them. To be pure and holy in their eyes means staying away from sinners.
Now of course, Jesus challenges this attitude of the Pharisees in what he says. His criticism of the Pharisees isn’t because they want to take God’s law seriously. There is nothing wrong with being zealous and wanting to obey God. That’s not their problem. After all, we know that Jesus himself obeyed God’s law perfectly in his life – he never sinned.
No the problem with the Pharisees was their attitude. They might have scored high marks for their moral behaviour, but according to the great teacher in Israel, Jesus, their report card showed they had a bad attitude. To quote an old song: It ain’t what they do, it’s the way that they do it.
What Jesus objects to in the Pharisees’ attitude, it seems to me, is two things. One of them is what I mentioned before. The Pharisees added things on to God’s law. They tried to out-do the strictness even of God’s perfect law! They added extra things on based on their own traditions and particular interpretations and then they labelled and condemned people as sinners who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept those extra bits and pieces.
The other problem I think Jesus’ finds in the Pharisees attitude is that they get all hot and bothered about minor wee points and forgot about the most important things that God commanded. They use the excuse of wanting to avoid being tainted by sin so that they don’t need to actually get on with loving their neighbours and seeking their good always.
In other words, Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, “Guys, let’s get things in perspective here. Sure the little things are not meaningless, but you have to get the big things right first or obeying God in little things is totally pointless and hypocritical. Later in his ministry, in Matthew 23:23-29, Jesus is scathing in his criticism of the Pharisees on this same point:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence…Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”
In Jesus’ eyes, the Pharisees had a terrible attitude. His own attitude is so different. Jesus not only has a completely different attitude towards the sinners than the Pharisees did, but he also has a completely different attitude regarding what it means to be righteous and holy. Unlike the Pharisees, Jesus teaches that sinners need love, grace, mercy and forgiveness most of all, not condemnation and rejection.
Jesus’ attitude is so clearly shown in the answer he gives to the Pharisees’ question. They ask him, “What is he doing eating with sinners?”
He answers: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
As the commentator, Donald English says:
“Put bluntly, Jesus is saying that you would expect to find a saviour among those who need to be saved. You would not look for a doctor among the well but among the ill.”
For the Pharisees, to be holy means avoiding contact with sinners. Jesus turns this attitude on its head. It’s important to realise what Jesus is saying and what he isn’t saying if we’re going to get his point here. Jesus is not saying that holiness isn’t important. He isn’t playing down the need to be pure and avoid sin as Christians. No, he says that it is precisely because he is the Holy One, God’s Messiah, that he can get close to sinners, to socialise with them, to show them his love and care and to save them. Jesus’ exemplifies what Craig Blomberg calls “contagious holiness”. In other words, true holiness isn’t about steering clear of sinners, but in getting so close to sinners that our holiness, our Christian beliefs and lifestyle rub off on sinners, so they are changed and saved too.
Picture a surgeon. He gets scrubbed up before an operation. He makes sure that all the medical instruments are sterilised and disinfected. But this is not an end in itself for him. He has everything spotlessly clean so he can use the instruments to make people better. In the same way, Jesus gets close to sinners not because he wants to take part in their sins, as the Pharisees allege, but because he wants them to catch his holiness. He wants them to catch the cure for sin – his gospel of repentance and faith.
What Jesus is doing here is fulfilling his mission as God’s Messiah. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus read out in the synagogue the passage from Isaiah that we read tonight and applied it to himself. He told his listeners that the passage was being fulfilled in their presence as he spoke the words.
"The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion— to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendour."
Jesus’ work as the Messiah is to preach good news to the poor, not ignore the poor. It is to bind up the brokenhearted not condemn them for their weakness. It is to proclaim freedom not condemnation for people who are captive. It is to release prisoners, not lock them up in a prison of man made religious rules. It is to proclaim God’s grace and favour, not judgment and damnation. And that’s what he’s doing in that party at Levi’s house.
The lesson that Jesus gives the Pharisees is that to be holy is not to cut yourself off from sinners. To be truly holy is to get alongside sinners and help them. That is Christ’s attitude always.
The third character whose attitude we need to look at tonight is Levi.
The tax collector is named Levi in this passage in Mark’s Gospel. In Matthew’s Gospel, the same incident is recorded but there the tax collector is called Matthew – the same Matthew who wrote that gospel and who was one of the Twelve Apostles. We need not get too worried about this apparent discrepancy. It could either be that the same man had two names. Or another possibility (this is what I think is more likely), was that the man’s own name was Levi but when Jesus called him, he acquired or was given a nickname that stuck, just as Simon was named Peter by Christ. You see “Matthew” means “the gift of God”.
The fact that Jesus called a tax collector to be one of his closest followers is highly significant. Who Jesus called tells us a lot about Jesus and his attitudes. He calls someone who worked in a toll booth collecting taxes or toll charges on behalf of the hated Roman occupiers of Palestine. Sitting beside the Sea of Galilee, he was probably taxing trade passing along the trade route between Syria in the north and Egypt in the south.
The problem with tax collectors in those times was not just that people didn’t like paying taxes. The tax man now is still not a popular figure, but this is nothing to how they were viewed by their fellow Jews in Jesus’ time. As a tax collector, Levi was technically in the service of the puppet king, Herod Antipas, but in reality a tax collector would be viewed very much as a collaborator with Herod’s political masters in Rome. And tax collectors weren’t aversed to taking a bit more tax than they should have. They had about the same reputation as dodgy loan sharks have in poor neighbourhoods now. They weren’t allowed to vote and they weren’t allowed to be witnesses in courts. They were viewed both as traitors and as thieves by everyone in their society. As one commentator puts it:
“[Levi] sat near the lake at a table. Around him were piles of money, and account books, and fish, but few friends.” (Hargreaves).
But it’s precisely this outcast, despised man that Christ comes to seek and to save.
Although it might appear from Mark’s account that this happened to Levi out of the blue, it might have been that Levi knew of Jesus already and this decision to abandon his career to follow Jesus was merely the culmination of an interest in Christ that had been gradually building up. We don’t know for sure either way.
What we do know is that Christ chose him, Christ called him – all the initiative in the relationship was with Christ. And Christ chose someone the world despised. From this we can be assured that no one is “not the right kind of person” to become a Christian. God’s grace and the Christ’s gospel are for every conceivable kind of person. Levi was almost certainly a cheat and thief and seen as a traitor to his own people. But Christ chose him to be one of his own.
So what was Levi’s attitude? Well, reading between the lines of Mark’s account, I don’t think it is unreasonable to conclude that after being called to follow Christ, and after realising that Christ had good news of salvation even for a sinner like he knew he was, Levi was so filled with joy and thankfulness, that he wanted to celebrate the event by having a party with all his friends, and with his fellow believers, at which Jesus and his disciples were guests of honour.
Tom Wright makes an interesting point:
“Levi had been working for Herod who thought of himself as King of the Jews. Now he is going to work for someone else who has royal aspirations…[for] Jesus is the Messiah, the [true] King of the Jews.”
Levi wasn’t just going through the motions. Christ really had changed his life. And so he wanted to honour the Saviour in his home. He wanted to spend as much time with his new friend and master as possible. He wanted to share his joy with others. He wanted to just have a brilliant time because he couldn’t contain himself he was so happy.
That’s the attitude of someone who knows they are a sinner, the attitude of one who knows they don’t deserve God’s blessings and so one who responds with joy to the grace and peace they have received from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Levi’s attitude is that of someone overwhelmed by the experience of salvation and Christ’s love.
We’ve seen three lots of attitudes. All very different. I suppose the last question we need to explore is what does it have to do with us here tonight.
Well the first question is what is your attitude to Jesus? Do you know him as your Saviour and Lord? If the answer to that is no, then there is hope for you in this passage tonight. Christ’s calling Levi says that God’s grace can reach you, no matter who you are, no matter what you have done. The grace of God is boundless, choosing, redeeming, pardoning and saving any sinner who hears his call to follow Jesus Christ. Everyone who comes to Christ will share Levi’s experience of sharing a meal with the Saviour. Christ says in Revelation 3:20:
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”
If you are a Christian, then Levi’s attitude is perhaps one we should take note of as our example. Do we try to spend as much time as we can with the Saviour in prayer and reading the Bible? Are we eager to have him as a royal guest in our homes and in our lives? Do we celebrate and enjoy ourselves when we worship God? Is going to church for us like going to a party? If we truly know the good news, let’s celebrate it.
But the real conflict in the story is between Christ’s attitude towards the sinners and the Pharisees’ attitude. I think we all need to look at our own hearts and our own attitudes on this. You see Christ and the Pharisees actually typify two very different approaches to life.
The Pharisees wanted to stay away from sinners to protect their holiness and they got caught up in petty details while forgetting the most important things in life, like loving our neighbours and having an attitude of mercy and care towards those in need. In their zeal to obey God, they also added things on top of God’s laws and insisted everyone obey those traditions too. Jesus says they were wrong, dead wrong.
What about us? Do we keep ourselves to ourselves and away from people whom God is calling us to get alongside, to seek and bring to Christ? Do we think that we can use the excuse of not wanting to be tainted by socialising with “sinners” to avoid obeying Christ’s call to go out into the world to make disciples? This passage indicates that such an attitude is not true holiness, but a distortion of holiness.
Do we add things on to the gospel that make it more difficult for people to believe than it should be? Do we have extra requirements that people must meet before we will accept that they are a Christian? Are people suspect in our eyes if they don’t go to church as much as we’d like or as often as we do? Or if they spend their leisure time in ways we don’t think is right for Christians? It could be a hundred different things. For every one of us it might be different things. But I think it is something each of us needs to be on the look out for and guard against. “Beware the attitude of the Pharisees” I think Christ says to us all.
Christ says his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Are we adding extra burdens on to people’s backs? It might be by insisting that only certain kinds of worship are allowed, or certain kinds of hymns should be sung, that other people find hard to understand. It might be that certain “good works” or acts of service as we define them must be done that other Christians don’t think are that important. What traditions do we cherish and making tests of fellowship? Which ones do we need to let go of in order to open up the door to Christ’s Kingdom to sinners?
The kind of attitude we need is the attitude of Christ. We need to be willing to “get our holiness dirty” if I can phrase it that way. We need to be willing to get close enough to sinners, to touch them in their lives, that our contagious holiness is passed on.
The situation is not so much that we are to go out and find parties to go to where we can enter evangelism mode and launch into a gospel presentation to anyone we can corner. Some well-meaning Christians do things like that, and tend only to be resented and ridiculed by other guests. And I honestly don’t think doing that kind of cringe-worthy gospel presentation in social situations is what Christ is calling us to do here. No, Christ’s call is both far more challenging and far more effective than that. Remember the party Christ is attending is a celebration thrown by Levi after he has become a Christian. Christ was celebrating with his people at that meal, and getting close to sinners as a doctor gets close to patients. He never engaged in cheesy evangelistic techniques. He was always real with people and drew them to himself by his absolute sincerity and genuine compassion.
To be his disciples, to pass on his contagious holiness, we need the spirit of Christ in us. We need to imitate our King and Saviour in every kind of social contact we have with people in our daily lives.
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