Even Tax Collectors - Mark 2:13-17

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.  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.” (Mark 2:13-17 NIV)

In this next passage from the second Chapter of Mark, we are given yet another story of Jesus demonstrating the inclusive nature of his ministry and of his coming kingdom.  This is the third story, one right after the other, about the inclusiveness of Jesus. Rabbi Dr. Hillel ben David (Greg Killian) relates that according to Jewish law, once something is done three times it is considered a permanent thing (http://www.betemunah.org/three.html). This is called a “chazakah".  For the community of Mark to put three stories in a row centered on Jesus' inclusion of those considered outsiders in the society of his time is a strong and definitive statement about the importance of inclusion as a defining principle in their understanding of the way of Jesus.

Let's look at these three stories:

In the previous passage Jesus is shown as forgiving the sins of a man who by nature of being crippled was excluded from the temple and the temple practice of sacrifice and forgiveness.  As such he was a religious and social outcast. The community of Mark used this story to illustrate that none among them were by their nature, or by virtue of who they were, excluded from Jesus' kingdom, or the full fellowship of God.  


The story before that was the healing of the leper.  The man with leprosy breaks the rules regarding proximity and social contact for lepers when he approaches Jesus.  He puts Jesus, and the crowd that was most likely around him, at risk of becoming unclean themselves and unable to worship God until they underwent purification. Jesus, however, instead of shunning or rebuking him, not only interacted with the man, but also touched him to heal him, making himself ritually unclean.  

Lepers were considered to be in a constant state of ritual impurity and were excluded from the community worship of God and from interaction with, "clean", people.  Jesus' compassion in wanting to see the man returned to fellowship with the people and with God overrode any concerns over his own religious purity and ritual cleanliness.  The community of Mark included Gentiles and women, people who were by their very nature considered to be, "unclean", by Judaic law and ineligible for full communion and worship of God.  This story told them that they were included, that no ritual or religious law could bar them from full membership in the community and the faith, and that Jesus' coming kingdom was for all of them.

The third story on the principle of inclusion is the passage we are currently looking at.  Here Jesus calls a Tax Collector named Levi to follow him, to become one of his disciples.  He is also criticized for eating at Levi's house with tax collectors and, "sinners".  Let's start off by looking at Tax Collectors in first century Palestine and the people's perception of them.

Tax Collectors were reviled by the Jews of Jesus' time because they were usually fellow Jews collaborating with the Roman occupiers.  They were seen as greedy opportunists using the oppression of their fellow Jews as a source of profit for themselves.  They worked for tax farmers, a form of revenue leasing where the tax collector leases the right to collect and retain the whole of the money owed to the state in return for a fixed payment.  Known to cheat the people they collect from by collecting more than what was required, they were usually well to do and formed their own elite social group.

Tax Collectors were seen by the Jewish community and particularly the Religious Leaders as enemies to both them and God, to be shunned and despised like lepers and the disabled.  Think of the Nazi collaborators in France during the German occupation and how the people of France viewed them.  The Tax Collectors not only gained profit by supporting the people's oppressors, they were in competition with the collection of the Temple taxes and the tithes.   The Religious Authorities believed the people of Israel needed to pay these tithes and Temple taxes to be right with God as part of carrying out their side of their Covenant with God.  It was believed that the reason God had allowed them to be defeated as a nation was a lack as a people in fullfilling the obligations of Covenant in terms of the Law and that they needed to follow the regulations to a greater degree before God would rid them of the Roman occupiers and make them a nation again.

The Tax Collectors, if not unpopular enough, used violence, or the threat of violence in order to extort their money from the people under the auspices and authority of Rome and the backing of the occupying Roman military forces. 

To appreciate how the Jewish people felt about Publicans, consider the modern parallel of the Black community in the town of Ferguson Missouri. We have watched on television the protests and rallies against the white city officials and judiciary who use legalized force to exploit and further impoverish the Black community.  In Ferguson they do this through a de facto taxation system of laws and regulations targeted at extorting money specifically from members of the Black Community.  The Jewish community would have harbored a similar resentment to their exploitation by Tax Collectors for Roman taxes.

Now, in the Gospel story so far, Jesus has already gained a great deal of popularity with the people and a popular Rabbi calling someone to be his talmidim, or disciple, was a great honour and a great commitment on both their parts.  To bestow this honour on someone from a group considered to be an enemy of the Jewish people and their return to nationhood was shocking to say the least.  To the teachers of the law who were Pharisees, this was close to both heresy and treason.

To put this into perspective, imagine a Christian faith healer and teacher with a following in the Southern U.S. gaining a lot of attention, drawing crowds due to his miraculous faith healings and growing in popularity among Christians there.  Imagine him publicly picking a newly immigrated Gay Socialist Transvestite Arab as one of his inner circle.  Like the Pharisees of Jesus day, the leaders of the Religious Right would be outraged.

"God hates them" 

"These people are the reason God is not blessing us, the reason why we are no longer great" 

"God is punishing us because we tolerate this kind" 

"We need to get rid of them in order for God to bless us and bring us prosperity and victory again"

Jesus drove his message further home by having dinner at Levi's house with a group of tax collectors and "sinners", those who did not tithe or follow the Jewish purity rituals and practices.  Eating with tax collectors and sinners is the issue that the teachers of the law who were Pharisees criticize him for.  To fully understand why this offended them, one has to look at table politics and etiquette in first century Judea.

Commensality, the practice of eating together, or its absence, was a sign of group membership. "Likes eat with Like." The meals of Judeans showed their group affiliation, or their separation. Food also functioned as a metaphor for the word of God. Concern for doctrinal and ethnic purity were mirrored in the dietary and commensality practices. 

Food, articulated in terms of who eats what with whom under which circumstances, had long been one of the most important languages in which Jews conceived and conducted social relations among human beings and between human beings and God. Food was a way of talking about the law and lawlessness (Gillian Feeley-Harnik1981:72).  
https://www3.nd.edu/~jneyrey1/meals.html

For the pharisaical teachers of the law, Jesus, who claimed authority to teach Scripture and therefore be one of their group, was acting as if their group included "these kind" of people.  He included those who were considered outside of the fellowship and love of God in the same group as the Teachers of the Law who considered themselves as holy and set apart.  By proclaiming the Tax Collectors and Sinners to be members of the same group as the Teachers of the Law, Jesus was also demanding that the Teachers of the Law treat them as they treat each other.  By eating with them he proclaimed them to be as special to God as the Teachers of the Law. This may be the main message of the community of Mark; all are included in the fellowship and love of God with no special favorites and none excluded. 

All are included in the fellowship and love of God with no special favorites and none excluded.

Now some with a more "fundamentalist" perspective of Christianity as a religion of rules, condemnation and control might focus on the last verse of the passage, verse seventeen, where Jesus replies to the question the Tachers of the Law who were Pharisees asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

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.”

A "conservative" view might see this as Jesus condemning the Tax Collectors and those at the meal who did not observe Jewish religious practices, the "sinners", and inferring that the only reason he associated with them was to cure them of the wickedness of their behavior and lifestyle.  I can picture the conservative mind imagining the scene at the meal consisting of Jesus lecturing them on the wickedness of their ways and refusing any fellowship and companionship that might taint him with their influence until they had agreed to bow their knee and recite the Sinner's Prayer with him.

However, there is no lecturing, preaching or condemnation by Jesus mentioned in the story.  In fact, the only group of people that Jesus ever condemns or lectures throughout the Gospels is the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.  What sort of lecture would Jesus preach during the meal to correct the "sinners" the Pharisees talk about?  What might he preach to those who failed to keep the Jewish purity rituals, laws and regulations which the Pharisees felt were the requirement to be right with God and an accepted part of their community?  Jesus himself was constantly being criticized by the Pharisees for not following these regulations to the degree they felt required.  He and his disciples didn't observe the proper washing rituals before eating and they were lax in following the dietary rules.  In fact in one of the Gospel stories when Jesus is sending out his disciples to teach his way, he specifically tells them when staying in someone's home to eat whatever is put before them without question.  He was always pushing the boundaries and deliberately breaking the religious laws, healing on the Sabbath, touching lepers, eating with the "unclean" to prove that the principles of equality, compassion and justice behind the law are more important than blind adherence.

To see Jesus' table fellowship with sinners as correction rather than inclusion also depends on the dubious presumption that Jesus considers the Pharisees and teachers of the law as healthy and righteous in terms of being preferred by God and in a right and whole relationship with God.  Since Jesus is answering the Pharisees it could appear he is implying that the Pharisees and their ilk are the healthy and the righteous, but I don't think that is what is going on here.

 

As we saw in the two earlier stories, sickness and disability is not associated with individual failing, moral lack, or a fundamental ineligibility to be part of community in this Gospel.  The issue is not the leprosy or the lameness per say, it is with how it causes the person to be excluded from the community and the community's fellowship with God.  Once Jesus personally absolves the lame man's sin he solves the man's problem of being excluded due to his inability to participate in Temple sacrifice and gain his forgiveness along with the rest in his community in that manner.  The healing is then an afterthought to prove a point to the teachers of the law.

One of the mistakes we as modern readers make with these stories is that we project our own cultural prejudices and values on them.  Individualism is a strong cultural perspective for us, but in this time community was the much stronger focus.  I believe the sickness that the writer has Jesus refer to is the exclusion of the Tax Collectors and "sinners" from the Jewish community, exclusion from fellowship with the community of God. It is a sickness of the community, not of the "sinner".

Note that Jesus never asks the sinners and tax collectors to change their actions and there is no discussion indicating that they make any changes.  The only action, the only change in behaviour, was on the part of Jesus and his disciples in including the outcasts as part of their group and as part of the wider religious and social community.

 

In the Gospel of Luke there is another story about Jesus eating in the home of a Tax Collector.  Jesus publically invites himself to the home of a chief tax collector named Zacchaeus.  In this story there is a change in behaviour by the outcast. When Jesus comes to his home, Zacchaeus pledges to give half of his goods to the poor and to restore fourfold anything he has taken from anyone by false accusation.  Nowhere in the story does Jesus condemn him or instruct him to do these things.  It is just a heartfelt reaction to the respect and dignity Jesus shows him through inclusion.

It is probably fitting to note here that the Gospels have Jesus state that all the Commandments and the Law, all that God expects of us, can be fulfilled by loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves.  The only new commandment they have him give is that we love one another as he has loved us.

The Jesus of this passage as portrayed by the Community of Mark has little to no concern about rules to control peoples' behavior, or how individuals stack up to some behavioural standard.  His concern is only about the inclusion, the love, and the respect that the community should show everyone irregardless of their behavior or practices.  It is all about the faith that including and respecting others will generate a love that will be contagious and inspire others to act in the same way.  The only behaviour targeted is that of the wider community in excluding and margainalizing some of it's members.  That this inclusion and respect often inspires those ot embraces to act in the way they have been loved and respected is just a byproduct of the wholeness Jesus calls us to.