Calling The Tax Collector

Good morning.

As you can see, I'm not there.

This morning, which is Saturday for me, I got notified from a friend that they likely have COVID.

And so I got tested this morning.

So while my test is out, I decided to do a recorded sermon instead of joining in person.

So I miss all of you.

Look forward to being together hopefully soon.

And yeah, so with that, let's just go ahead and get started and get into our text today in Mark.

So first, uh a couple things that I want to point out.

Just in my experience just today, you know, as we're working through a lot of COVID logistics and ways in which this virus has put pressure on all of our lives in different ways.

And just going through like the PTSD from March and April, of man, I really don't want to preach to a camera again.

But here we are.

And you know, it's reminded me that we we really do have a pretty anxious culture right now.

And the difficulty with an anxious culture, especially as we've seen develop over these past uh seven or eight months, is it starts to create this dynamic of friendship, which leaves very little margin of error for us to enjoy one another.

And you see this developing all over the place.

Our friendships are don't have the character so much of iron sharpening iron.

What I think we see that's more typical is friendships that take on more of a codependency, where in our friend groups we're relying on the other people to justify ourselves, and our friends are relying on us to justify them.

And so we develop groups that instead of being friends where we can disagree and still enjoy one another, uh, there are these sort of you know interlocking structures where if one person moves, the whole thing falls apart because we're all leaning on each other to uphold ourselves.

And it's uh more like codependency than it is like relationships that we really enjoy.

Now, you can tell because our culture right now has all sorts of in-group, out-group shibboleths.

Uh remember the word shibboleth?

It's uh a biblical word, but uh basically for one tribe to determine whether you were in the tribe or out of it, uh they would have you pronounce the word shibboleth, which just means cornstalk, but it's very hard to say in the particular way that they said it.

And so your ability to say shibboleth meant that you were a part of the in-group.

And our culture has loads of shibboleths right now.

Uh we've turned the mask into a shibboleth of in-group-out-group.

We've turned, uh obviously, politics and the way that we talk about that is a shibboleth for in-group-out-group.

Of course, Christians are no less vulnerable to this than the rest of culture because we like to be Christians, right?

But we we want to let you know that we're not like those Christians.

We're not like that type of Christians.

We're this different group of Christians, and we'll develop, you know, ways we dress and ways we talk to send those signals to ensure that we remain on the in-group and we're not placed on the out group.

I think a combination of our anxiety and the pressures and codependency in friendships kind of starts to develop this type of way of existing that's that's really fearful and really nervous about being placed into the outgroup.

Now, today we're going to be looking at how Jesus engages with the outgroup of all outgroups.

Okay, you could not be part of a uh a group that you would less want to be associated with than who Jesus will be associating with in our text today.

That's the tax collectors.

Uh the tax collectors were the outgroup of all outgroups.

In fact, they could bring everyone together and we would say, yeah, we're not like them.

There used to be a couple of street preachers that would come to TU Boulder when I was a student there, and they would shout just these terrible, like not orthodox, horrible things at people, and give this this absolutely non-biblical representation of Christianity.

The main group that would come, they thought that once you became a Christian, you no longer sinned.

And so they literally thought that they had not sinned for decades, which was an incredible thing to think about yourself.

So I used to say that when they were on campus, it was the best day because it united everyone.

When I was walking to class with my atheist friends and my Christian friends, we were all able to look at them and say, well, they're definitely wrong.

And so we all felt pretty united with that.

But uh the tax collectors, they kind of filled that role in the culture that we're looking at.

Now Jesus engages in this incredibly strange way because rather than having a group of people that he needs to justify himself and that he uses to bolster up and support his identity, Jesus instead comes into his relationships in a completely selfless way, and in the truest way possible, not so that by their response to him they can justify who he is, but so that by him showing them who he truly is, he will justify them.

It's a complete opposite way from the way that we can develop these kind of toxic cultures of relating to one another.

So, although today is about the tax collector, we're really gonna learn about Jesus and the clarity of his identity.

We're gonna see Jesus as the caller, Jesus as the provocator, and we're gonna see Jesus as the physician.

These are the three roles that Jesus plays: the caller, the provocator, and the physician.

And we need him as those three roles in each of our lives, if we're gonna be pried out of our typical codependent ways of living with people, and instead we're going to be able to live like Jesus does, resting in the truth of the identity that He provides for us as He justifies us.

Okay, so let's look at Jesus, the caller.

In Mark 2, 13, it says, He went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them.

Okay, so we're beginning to see this familiar shape of Jesus' ministry unfolding.

Seems like wherever he goes, there is a crowd.

And here he's back along the Sea of Galilee, where his ministry first began, and a crowd begins to form around him, and he begins teaching them.

We can see that Jesus doesn't have a monastic seclusion as a part of his ministry.

Jesus is not a set of principles that he merely publishes and then lets loose in the world.

Jesus is a presence and he's on a mission.

He's moving from town to town and he is proclaiming his message, working to get the word out.

This is not a secluded teacher.

He's not a talking head or just a set of principles, but a presence among people while he's there.

Now, if you were to watch him from the outside for a couple of months and see the shape of his ministry, I think you'd start to think it's like this guy's looking for something.

He's traveling from town town, from town to town, proclaiming to the crowds, and I'd swear this guy is on a hunt.

He's looking for something.

And you'd be exactly right.

That is the shape of Jesus' ministry.

He's looking for something.

Jesus is a shepherd.

And he is a shepherd that has come to seek the lost sheep of Israel.

He has come because we as God's sheep have all gone astray.

We have all turned after our own way.

And so Jesus comes to proclaim the truth and to reveal the truth of God's word in himself.

And as he reveals that, he is drawing his sheep together.

He is bringing the flock of God back together as they unite in Christ.

And so you see him speak to crowds, and some of them turn and they walk away because they were not his sheep, but some of them hear his voice and they recognize this is the true shepherd.

And then sometimes Jesus walks by and he spots one of his sheep and he calls them by name.

And so he draws his sheep by name, him doing the seeking, calling his people into the flock of God.

And that's exactly what he does next.

As he is proclaiming, he passes by and calls one of his sheep.

Mark 2 14.

And as he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alpha, sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, Follow me.

And he rose and followed him.

Notice, it is not Levi that spots Jesus.

Jesus spots Levi.

And Levi is sitting at a tax booth.

So that means that Levi is a tax collector.

Okay, now let's sum up what tax collectors are and what that meant for Jesus to go over and call a tax collector.

You know, following Jesus in the Jewish tradition, the rabbinic teaching tradition, there are two schools.

And these are named after their two head teachers, Halel and Shemai.

And as you would guess, there's a conservative stream that stays really close to the text, and there's a liberal stream which stays further from the text.

And they are typically poles apart in their instruction and interpretation of the scriptures.

But there was one thing that they agreed upon, these conservative and liberal schools, and that's that it was always permissible for a Jew to lie to a tax collector.

That's where they found agreement.

Co-belligerence.

A friend of my enemy, or an enemy of my enemy, is my friend.

And that's what they saw.

Everyone was permitted to lie to a tax collector.

Any Jew was.

Now, why would that be?

Well, it was viewed that the Roman occupation of Israel was an illegal and wrongful occupation.

And so for the taxes to be collected there was really a military, a militaristic imposition on Israel.

And these people who were tax collectors, they were themselves Jews.

But instead of hoping in Israel and maintaining aligned with the hope of the future nation, they aligned themselves with the power of Rome.

And what did they get because of that?

Well, they got riches.

They were held up in Roman society, but they were ostracized from the Jewish community.

Likewise, this role, the way that you became rich as a tax collector, was basically extortion.

You were given the power of the sword because you worked for the government, and they were able to use that to their own profitable ends by extorting people who owed the government money and taking from them beyond what they owed.

And so we see someone like Levi sitting at the tax booth, and he is both traitorous to his people and he's an extortioner of his people.

So that means that Levi is both morally unclean because he is doing these corrupt actions, but likewise he's ritually unclean.

And that's because he's working directly with Gentiles, which made him unclean in the Jewish community.

This is the outcast of outcasts.

So we would think it's so obvious what the Messiah is going to do when he finally returns, what he's going to do to people like Levi.

It's so clear that he's going to find them and he's going to annihilate them and kill them and take vengeance on them for the extortion and the treason that they've committed against God's people.

That would be the obvious expectation, right?

Well, Jesus, the Messiah, arrives and he calls Levi by name and says, follow me.

The same thing that he said to Simon and Andrew along the shore of the same sea, the Sea of Galilee.

For them, they were unqualified.

For Levi, he is disqualified.

And yet Jesus calls him to follow Jesus.

Following Jesus is always about discipleship.

It always requires a response of faith.

And the effective call of Christ, just as it worked for Simon and Andrew, it works on the heart of Levi as well.

And Levi leaves the tax booth and he follows Jesus.

He arose.

That means he stands up from the desk and he follows Jesus.

Just as in every other place in Mark that we've seen so far, this act of faith is always an action.

Faith in Mark is always an action.

He does the thing, he truly follows Jesus.

So now that we've seen Jesus acts in this completely unexpected way as the caller, the one who goes out and finds his sheep.

Now we see that Jesus also acts as the provocator.

So let's see how this unfolds.

Mark 2, verse 15 says, And as he reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him.

Mark 2:15

Okay, so Jesus goes back to Levi's house, and he sits down for dinner with all of Levi's friends.

So if Levi is an outcast, what type of friends is he gonna have?

Other tax collectors, other sinners, other people that were were able to live in that type of a world.

And this is the moment of provocation.

Because Jesus, instead of hiding in a corner, or instead of keeping his relationship with Levi secret from the scribes and the Pharisees, instead he publicly engages with Levi and brings himself and his disciples into this unclean community of Levi and his friends.

Now we've got to put some pressure on this word reclining.

It says, and as he reclined at table in his house.

Now reclining would have been the normal way of sitting for uh to eat a feast at a person's home.

So they would have the meal kind of in the middle, and uh you'd be like propped on your arm, uh leaning in towards the food, and with your right hand would have been eating, and legs would have been just kind of uh out from the table like spokes from the hub of a wheel.

Uh but this reclining is always a sign of fellowship.

This is no accidental gathering.

He is laying down, participating in real communal fellowship with these people who are unclean sinners.

The worst of the worst.

And uh this word recline, it also just means to lay down.

And so we've got to see the other people that have laid down so far in our story.

The first person that we saw laying down was uh Simon Peter's mother-in-law, who was sick and she was lying down.

Jesus entered into that and he healed her.

The next person that we saw lying down was just in uh the story that we saw of the paralytic who was healed.

Uh the paralytic is described as reclining, lying down when he's placed before Jesus.

Now the next time we see that it's Jesus who takes his position among sinners.

Jesus is a stand-in for sinners.

He identifies with sinners.

That's where Jesus identifies.

We see Jesus always seeks out in order to bring into community with himself.

Jesus doesn't just seek out and then send up to heaven.

Jesus always seeks out the sinner to bring her into community, into his table fellowship, so that we enjoy his presence and that we truly fellowship with the Messiah.

This is the shape of Jesus' ministry.

He is the shepherd who seeks us out in order to bring us in, right where we are, even when we aren't the ones seeking him.

This is the wonder of Christ.

But look at the response of this wonder of Christ.

Mark 2, verse 16.

Mark 2:16

And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?

You see, look, this move was intentional.

Jesus was trying to provoke the scribes.

And we know that he does this throughout his ministry.

Jesus is intentionally provocative to those who think that they themselves are righteous.

So we see this first of all when Jesus heals the paralytic.

How simple it would have been.

Jesus knew what was on everyone's mind for the paralytic to have been laid down, and Jesus said, Take up your mat and walk.

And after he had said that, he meets him outside, and Jesus says, Son, your sins are forgiven.

Nobody is any the wiser that Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins, and no feathers get ruffled by the scribes.

But instead, Jesus intentionally flips the order and he forgives sins first.

So that he's provoking this question of who is this man?

What does he think he's doing?

Doesn't he understand the way things are supposed to work?

Now Jesus does the same thing here.

How simple it would have been.

He's back on the shores of Galilee.

We know that he's living at Simon and Andrew's home.

How easy it would have been to say, hey, Levi, how about just you?

Come into Simon and Andrew's home tonight and we're going to eat together here.

And then the scribes would have easily been able to think something like, you know, I bet Levi is a special type of tax collector.

And Jesus is willing to identify with him because Levi must have shown that there's some righteous quality in him so that he's not really like those other bad tax collectors.

It would have been so easy for them to think that.

But Jesus wants to close that door.

And he wants to make it clear that Jesus came to identify with sinners, to seek out and to identify the unrighteous and to bring the unrighteous into table fellowship with the Messiah.

Now, if you're a scribe and you're sitting there and you see this new guy who showed up in town and he's preaching with authority in your synagogues, and he draws a crowd wherever he goes, proclaiming the glories of God and then healing the sick and casting out demons.

And you see this cultural wave, this shift that's taking place in this place where you've sought to guide and shape the culture for so long.

Now you See him taking those same disciples and bringing them into fellowship with the traitorous and extortionist tax collectors, it's enough to make you sick.

It's enough to make you think that all the work that you've put in is about to be undone by this guy.

You would start to feel sick to your stomach seeing this take place.

And that's exactly what Jesus is trying to do.

He's trying to make them, he's trying to make the uh uh scribes and the Pharisees become sick.

Look at Jesus' answer in Mark 2.17.

This is where we start to, this is where we see Jesus the physician.

And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

Jesus hears the scribes questioning his own disciples, and he speaks to them like this.

He says, Look, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, they have need of a physician.

Now I came for those, I came not to call the righteous, but to call sinners.

Do you see what he's saying?

Look, Levi had no question that he wasn't righteous.

That was never a question in his mind.

So when Jesus came and called him, he followed him.

Because Levi is the type of person who knew this is my only shot.

How else, what other opportunity do I have to sit with a rabbi?

But the righteous, the ones who think that they're righteous, well, they can simply sit back and enjoy being a part of the in-group.

They can enjoy being a part of the ones that already know.

The ones that draw the lines that determine whether you're in or whether you're out.

But what Jesus is doing is he's drawing a whole new line.

And he's saying there's only one person that makes you righteous.

Jesus is saying, and that's Jesus.

That's me.

Righteousness is not something that you've achieved by your commitment to the Torah.

In fact, much the opposite.

Because you think you're righteous, you're missing the one who came to save.

Because you think you're healthy, you're missing the one who came to heal you.

Jesus is the only true King, and He is the only one who actually defines who is in and who is out.

Because the only true definition of that is in Christ or out of Christ.

What we see here is that in order to experience Jesus the physician, we must first realize that we need a physician.

In order to experience Jesus the healer, we first need to be sick.

And so we can see that Jesus is always moving and ministering to everyone around him.

Why is he intentionally being so provocative to the scribes?

Because they're the ones whose hearts need to be softened.

They're the ones who need to be confronted with the reality of their own sickness.

And they see that in Jesus' identification with sinners.

It exposes that them not identifying with sinners is false.

It's a lie.

It's just hypocrisy.

Because they're no better than who Jesus is reclining at table with.

Levi and Levi's tax collector friends.

Jesus is first and foremost a requirement to face the depth of our own need.

And the hope that we have when we see, when we begin to see the character of Christ, is that he seeks us out while we're in our sin in order to draw us into fellowship with him, where we realize the truth of who he is as the most important fact of our lives.

Jesus' identification with us as sinners is our only hope.

That's why he calls us.

That's why he provokes our hearts.

And that's why he is our only true physician, so that he might come in and offer the only true righteousness, the only true healing that actually affects our hearts.

I was talking with a friend earlier this week, and we were talking about just how we can end up in these particularly dark places and how sin so easily corrupts our hearts.

And we return to this simple truth that I hope we return to over and over again as a church, which is, you know, sometimes we just need to repent.

I want you to consider how Jesus may be relating to you now.

Do you feel like you're too far gone, or that you're too far outside of the camp, and it's been too long for Jesus to actually be, or the fellowship of Jesus to actually be a reality in your life?

Well, I want you to hear his call.

Do you think that uh you've run out of a need for Jesus?

Then I want you to feel his provocation.

If you currently feel provoked, offended, uh, nervous by Jesus, I want you to recognize him as the only physician.

He's the healer.

You're as sick as you seem.

And he is our true healer.

You know, it seems uh extremely relevant preaching to an iPhone in my garage because of this imminent threat of this sickness that we're all surrounded by right now.

Jesus is the true physician, addresses the deepest issues of our hearts.

Well, let's pray for him to do that.

Holy Father, I pray that we would see you as the one who calls us, even in the depth of our sin, you see us and call us.

Lord, that you provoke us out of our complacency, so that you might draw our hearts into deeper dependence on you.

And Lord, you call us towards yourself so that you might heal us.

You came for the sick, which means that our only qualification to draw close to you is just recognition of our need for you.

Lord, we need you.

I pray that you would work in our hearts.

In Jesus' name, amen.