What happens when Yeshua/Jesus has the audacity to eat with a Roman collaborator and his sinner friends? The controversies are heating up and, this time, the scribes of the Pharisees are the ones with a beef against the Messiah’s choice of eating companions.
The book I mentioned this week is Craig L Blomberg’s Contagious Holiness, highly recommended
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Mark 11—Contagious Holiness and the Sinner’s Dinner
13 He went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them.
14 And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him. 15 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. 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?” 17 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.”
Before we start out this week I want to give you all an important reminder of one of the themes of Deutero-Isaiah, Isaiah chapters 40-55 which we studied all winter long—Israel in exile was constantly and incessantly arguing with Yahweh over the terms of their redemption and salvation and with how it was going to happen (through a gentile King, no less, oh the horror. Oh, the humiliation!). We’re going to see that big-time this week as Yeshua upends all norms of first-century Jewish social decency. We’re also going to tackle some uncomfortable assumptions that people make about this situation that are not actually supported by the text, but we make those assumptions for the same exact reasons that the Scribes of the Pharisees were protesting because this makes us very uncomfortable when read without those assumptions.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. I’m not prejudiced. They all teach us how to become more like Yeshua and to preach the Gospel to the lost so since that is job #1, you just use whatever you like. Unless you are driving, then I most certainly do not want you following along in your Bible.
Last summer, God hit me with a bolt of lightning about today’s passage because of something that Pastor Mark Horne mentioned in his book The Victory According to Mark. He said, “Jesus’s message was in great measure an invitation to a party. It was virtually a dinner club roaming around ancient Palestine.” As we will see in the coming weeks, this is absolutely true. But my brain just sort of exploded when I read that and I dropped all my Mark studies and did nothing except read the Bible from Matthew to II Chronicles in order to see first what Yeshua did and said in reference to food and table fellowship and then I started over again in Genesis and just kept reading. It was almost all I did for six weeks (sorry, honey for all the unimaginative dinners!) and when I came out of it I saw very clearly for the first time in my life how integral food and the sharing of food has been to God’s message and ministry to us from the absolute beginning. The Bible literally begins with a feast in the Garden and ends with a feast in Revelation. The Gospels are packed full of references, some overt and some subtle, to the upcoming Messianic banquet and who will and will not be invited and it is some insanely controversial stuff—which is why the scribes of the Pharisees were so incredibly upset about what Yeshua was doing in fellowshipping and feeding. We’ll sit at a table in a cafeteria and eat with anyone—but that wouldn’t have happened in the ancient world where who you ate with was a sign of who you were accepting.
The other book I want to specifically point out this week is one that was recommended to me about two months ago and I just tore through it, incredible book on this subject, called Contagious Holiness by a scholar named Graham A. Cole. It’s one of the NSBT books (New Studies in Biblical Theology) and I have quite a few of them, I call them the “grey books” and every single one I have read has been absolutely excellent. I actually based my last book, Image-bearing, Idolatry, and the New Creation, in part, on Richard Lints’ Identity and Idolatry which is also from that series. They put out amazing materials.
So, last week, I pointed out that we are now in the section of Mark called the “controversy dialogues.” Mark chapter one was largely about Yeshua being commissioned and dealing with the forces of Satan, but these passages have Him involved with increasingly serious controversies where He is dealing with people. Last week, the controversy was with the scribes over whether or not Yeshua could pronounce someone forgiven, which He proved He could by healing a paralytic. Now, they didn’t say anything, but they were thinking He was a blasphemer. This week, His opponents are going to be more open about their opposition and challenge. Each week, the tension and consequences will grow. That’s why Mark does these groupings, not to show a chronology of what happened but to thematically bunch different areas of His ministry and life so that we can see patterns. Not everything is about dry history and chronology and, in fact, that is quite the modern obsession. We prefer it that way, but it can obscure the mini-themes. And, I might add that we also have a mini-theme among the controversies and this one concerns food—in fact, three of the five controversies concern food. Namely, who one eats with, when should one eat and when should one fast, and whether it is lawful to demand that the poor go hungry on the Sabbath. Let’s get back to the text and get on with this:
13 He went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them.
Now, last week gave the location as the small fishing village of Capernaum, in which it is estimated that about 1500 people lived. In ancient thought, the sea represented a place of chaos and death—not shocking given the dangers of traveling by sea and the unpredictability of the sea in general. But Yeshua often goes into such places in order to be alone—the wilderness, eremos, another place of chaos is where Yeshua had His victory against Satan and where He often went to escape the press or the crowds to pray. This is in stark contrast to historical Israel, who failed in the wilderness, repeatedly, and well as on the shore of the Yam Suf, the Sea of Reeds where they refused to trust in God’s deliverance when Pharaoh’s army pursued them to the seashore. But Yeshua, the perfect representative of Israel, succeeds in the very places where they failed and, not only that, the people seek Him out in these places. You know, like we are supposed to do when we are in our own wilderness journeys and surrounded by chaos. And it was there that they came to Him and He taught them. Which was a pain for Him, no doubt, but what we all should do when we have our trials.
14 And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.
Lots of stuff here. First, this verse isn’t really tied in any real way to the one before it. It isn’t as though they had a tax collector booth there on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, right? So, this happened some time later. But, geographically, the first-century Roman province of Syria was made up of a bunch of smaller regions under the leadership of various governors. The ones we are interested in for Bible studies are, of course, Judea in the south, which is where Jerusalem was under the direct authority of Rome via Pontius Pilate, Idumea to the south, where Herod the Edomite was from. To the north of Judea was Samaria and to the east of them both was Perea, across the Jordan River. To the North was the Galilee which lay to the west of the Sea of Galilee and to the east of the sea was Gaulanitis. Herod Antipas (mistranslated in the Bible as King when he was just a tetrarch—basileus can mean many things but in this case, he was just a ruler and never was made king by the Roman Senate who had to approve such things—only his father, Herod the Great, was a king and later, Herod Agrippa)—anyway, Herod Antipas ruled over the Galilee and Perea and his brother Philip ruled over Gaulanitis, which sounds like a terrible disease. And frankly, being ruled over by that family WAS a terrible disease. Heck, being a part of that family was generally a fatal disease. The border between Gaulanitis and Galilee was the Jordan River north of the Sea of Galilee and so that is exactly where one would expect to find an import/export tax collector, right? Herod Antipas wants his money and Philip wants his money! This would not be where you would find a tax farmer who is bilking ordinary citizens out of their money, this would be a specialist dealing with traveling merchants. But still, that would hardly matter to the Jews because it meant that this man worked for Rome and would have been considered a collaborator, dealing with merchants who were morally suspect and with Romans who weren’t just morally suspect but outright condemned. Levi was, to put it mildly, a traitor to the Jews—that is how the people would have seen it. He was doubtless born into the job and so he came from probably a long line of shamed people. Rich, but without honorable social stature—which doesn’t leave him with anyone nice to hang around with.
I want to read some accounts about tax collectors from contemporary writers of that era. Plutarch, in On Curiosity (aka “The Busy-body”), said this:
“But how ungrateful it is to mankind to have their evils enquired into appears from hence; that some have chosen rather to die than disclose a secret disease to their physician. Suppose then that Herophilus or Erasistratus, or Aesculapius himself when he was upon earth, should have gone about from house to house, enquiring whether any there had a fistula in ano or cancer in utero to be cured. Although such a curiosity as this might in them seem much more tolerable, from the charity of their design and the benefit intended by their art; yet who would not rebuke the saucy officiousness of that quack who should, unsent for, thus impudently pry into those privy distempers which the modesty or perhaps the guilt of the patient would blush or abhor to discover, though it were for the sake of a cure? But those that are of this curious and busy humor cannot forbear searching into these, and other ills too that are of a more secret nature; and — what makes the practice the more exceedingly odious and detestable — the intent is not to remedy, but expose them to the world. It is not ill taken, if the searchers and officers of the customs do inspect goods openly imported, but only when, with a design of being vexatious and troublesome, they rip up the unsuspected packets of private passengers; and yet even this they are by law authorized to do, and it is sometimes to their loss, if they do not. But curious and meddlesome people will be ever enquiring into other men’s affairs, without leave or commission, though it be to the great neglect and damage of their own.”
So Plutarch here actually describes the normal operating procedures of customs inspectors like Levi. They not only were legally allowed to go through open imports, no shock there, but to rip open the packages of private citizens, without having cause for suspicion. But even in doing that, Plutarch still considers them to be superior to gossips. I would totally have to agree.
Josephus also writes about a tax collector in Wars of the Jews 2.14, but positively about a certain tax collector named John who worked diligently on behalf of the synagogue in Cesarea within a very complex and tense situation. But then Josephus was also considered to be a Roman collaborator so that might make him more or less objective. More likely, this was a tax collector who did genuinely care about the synagogue because he was shelling out his own money in bribes for the sake of it. So, tax collectors came in different flavors, but they were still considered to be collaborators.
And his name was Levi and there are a lot of folks who make a big deal about that and say, “Oh wow! He was a priest! That’s a priestly name! He should have been working in the Temple but couldn’t survive and so he was resorting to tax collection.” Okay, were all the men in Scripture named Joseph descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh? One of Joseph’s ancestors mentioned in Matthew 1 was Zadok—does that mean that Joseph was a priest? Nope, we have him as a direct descendant of the tribe of Judah. Mary’s genealogy also traced back to King David, making her from the tribe of Judah, but her ancestors include two Levis and a Joseph. Names were names and didn’t belong to any one tribe. There is this tendency out there to try to make the Gospels more Jewish than they already are and I am telling you that’s it’s just plain impossible. The Gospels are as Jewish as it is possible for any document to be—we don’t have to get overly clever with them. There were many Jews out there named Levi who were not priestly. I imagine that most of the patriarchs had a zillion namesakes wandering around first-century Israel. Levi was a tax collector probably because his father had been one and his grandfather before that. Reading anything more definitive into it than that is really unnecessary and probably quite misleading—and I have seen it used by folks who are trying to guilt more money out of people.
So, the verse says that Yeshua is walking by and sees Levi, as he is sitting at his customs booth, and that he called to him to “Follow me.” Levi rose up and followed Him, and if you have been following over like the last four weeks you might have just gotten super excited there when you heard the word rise. You might have even shouted “egeiro” but I am going to have to disappoint you. This is not the resurrection language word, this is anastas, which is the word for standing up. But, if you caught it and you at least wondered, you get bonus points for paying attention to the text. That’s why I end up using logos software so much, to check out these words. But that’s not to say that this isn’t interesting for other reasons. Why did Levi get up and leave his source of income to follow Yeshua? Let’s look at the probable background here:
(1) Yeshua knows Levi’s name. Probably everyone in town did. They probably spat when they mentioned it. So this is not shocking.
(2) Yeshua was the most famous person in Capernaum. Of course, Levi knew who He was already. A miracle worker/exorcist/healer in a fishing town of 1500 people. Yeah, everyone knew Yeshua and what He was claiming.
(3) When you are a Jewish social outcast and the most amazing, law-abiding, respected Jew in the city calls to you in words of acceptance and invitation, you just go. Yeshua was undoubtedly the first respectable person to ever give Levi the time of day or to associate with him willingly. Everyone avoided Levi, except for the other outcasts who benefitted from his table. Oh sure, he could get sinners to eat with him. Other tax collectors, Herodians, prostitutes, Roman collaborators would enjoy Levi’s company, but this was a man who didn’t fit in to his world at all.
Levi didn’t ask any questions because Yeshua was offering him acceptance. There was nothing more important in their world than acceptance by an honorable person. And, at this point, Yeshua was still on top with the ordinary people who made up the town of Capernaum. And He had just offered a place in His social world to an outcast. We just can’t even imagine.
15 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.
We kinda read over this and create a fictional scenario in our minds because this is still just so awful to contemplate. I have heard (and said myself) that Yeshua was preaching hellfire and damnation and they were all repenting. But there’s a problem. The text doesn’t say that and even if He was doing that, there is still the problem that He is SITTING AT THE SAME TABLE WITH SINNERS. No way to get around that.
There was no greater intimacy in the ancient world than table fellowship. Sharing a table, breaking the same bread together and dipping into the same bowl, in an age without hand sanitizer and modern cleanliness standards and, dare I mention, no toilet paper—well, it was just a profound expression of acceptance. You didn’t do it lightly. A common theme in Jewish literature was and is the great Messianic Banquet in the world to come when the faithful Jews would share a table with Messiah and the forefathers. No outsiders allowed. No unclean. No sinners. Certainly, none of the wicked people. The Qumran sect believed there would only be themselves and the greatest of the great at Messiah’s table but they weren’t exactly known for heir humility.
So we have a table, probably at Levi’s home because he was wealthier than your average Capernaum bear and it was a common occurrence to throw a party in honor of important life events. Yeshua isn’t standing over them, He is reclining with them and so are His disciples. It suggests but doesn’t demand a symposium-like setting that might have been possible and even probably depending on how far Hellenized Levi’s family was. What we have no reason to suspect is some of the more objectionable “entertainment” that often accompanied these gatherings. We see no references to prostitutes here, only to sinners. It’s Matthew and not Mark who lumps tax collectors in with prostitutes, but Mark never explicitly mentions them. We will have the sinful woman who anoints Yeshua in Mark 14 but we are never alerted to her profession if she even had one.
Something I want you to notice. It doesn’t come up here but it does in a lot of other table fellowship accounts in the Gospels. Even at other people’s homes, when they are putting on a feast, Yeshua acts as though He is the host and not the guest—frequently being the one to break bread and offer the prayers and to do host-y things. There is a reason for this—we are supposed to be picturing the Messianic banquet whenever He sits down with people to eat. Messiah will be the host of that banquet in the future and so He acts as host even in other people’s homes.
So, the most important thing we have here is that Yeshua, by going to Levi’s home and reclining with other tax collectors and sinners, a menagerie of outcasts, has just committed no less than a revolutionary act. The controversies are all marked with revolutionary, counter-cultural acts. First, He declares forgiveness—unthinkable. Now He is seemingly defiling Himself by eating with the unacceptable. I want to share how serious this was. Here’s a quote from Mekilta Amalek 3 “Let a man not associate with sinners even to bring them to Torah.” Wow, that’s super cold. Not even to bring them to Torah—so what this is saying is that some untouchable people aren’t even encouraged to repent. That’s the opposite of what Yeshua is doing here. By pre-emptively accepting them, He is inviting them to the table and to repentance and to share in His holiness. Craig L. Blomberg calls this “contagious holiness.” Yeshua goes and eats with the untouchables and instead of coming out defiled, He changes at least Levi’s life, hopefully, more of them. We hope so and we want it to be true but the text does not give us even the slightest hint. These people absolutely vanish from the account after this shared meal. Evidently, we aren’t supposed to know what happened with them—that’s part of the uncomfortable uncertainty that we have to accept in this account of Yeshua doing the socially and religiously unthinkable. He didn’t just break the taboo, He is saying that the taboo is dead wrong in the first place.
So, now I hope this is a bit clearer when they say:
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?”
Notice they don’t go to Yeshua but to His disciples. They are still being kinda passive-aggressive and sneaky here, not daring to openly oppose Him. They are disrespecting Him by approaching His students instead of approaching Him. It’s one step up the confrontation ladder from just thinking the accusations without actually speaking. But this isn’t an innocent question—in an honor/shame society this is flat out an accusation and a challenge. Yeshua laid down the revolutionary act and the scribes of the Pharisees (as opposed to unaffiliated scribes last week), which simply means the Scribes who ascribe to the tenants of Phariseeism and are probably their teachers of the law—well, the Scribes respond with a challenge to His disciples. A challenge that His disciples aren’t going to get a chance to answer and likely they were just as shocked as anyone else. I mean, fish were taxed. Possibly by Levi himself, so he was not on their list of favorite people. They were probably biting their tongues when Levi got the call and even more appalled when he followed along with them. Oh, the horror of it all. They were in the in-group and now all of a sudden there were too many people in, or at least the wrong types of people.
It is quite possible that they didn’t see the irony of how far beneath Yeshua they were in the first place so they couldn’t put into context that compared to Yeshua, they weren’t much superior to Levi! It’s like a carpenter ant telling a sugar ant how short he is while they are both standing next to Goliath the giant. We’re kinda funny, eh? We do the exact same thing.
So, they get asked, “Hey dudes, your teacher is not observing the appropriate social boundaries that we have all agreed on! And it is all the worse because he is a teacher and should set a better example for all of you by—well, by being more like us decent folks who know not to associate with this sort of rabble.”
Peter was asked the same sort of question in Acts 11:3–
11 Now the apostles and the brothers who were throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. 2 So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party
Were just absolutely thrilled and praised God and danced in the streets! “The gentiles are coming, the gentiles are coming! Woo hoo!”
Actually, not so much…let’s see what they really said:
…criticized him, saying, 3 “You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them.”
Priorities, right? But this is why Peter had to be given that vision in Acts 10. Even though he had eaten with Levi and his merry band of tax collectors and sinners, that was one thing because they were still Jews. This was another matter entirely. According to the Talmud, Gentile women are considered Niddah, or to have menstrual level ritual impurity, from birth. There are all sorts of rulings about not being able to eat foods or drink beverages that were touched by Gentile hands in those times. Among the ultra-Orthodox, some of these prohibitions still remain to this day. Peter had to be told not to call unclean what God had made clean—and of course, Peter goes on to say at the end of the chapter that he has realized that God was not talking about animals but about people. We don’t call people inherently unclean. Although I have seen people do it and mess around with those sorts of insults directed toward other believers. That’s dangerous territory, right there, lemme tell you. Let’s go back to the question posed to the disciples:
“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Make no mistake, this was confrontational and no simple question. And I don’t know if Yeshua heard it or it was relayed to him but the answer was:
17 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.”
The first part of his comeback is a well-known Greco-Roman proverb. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” They would have absolutely agreed to this. It’s a no-brainer, right? Nothing controversial about that. But then He turns it over on them by saying that He came to call sinners, not the righteous. A healer makes people whole, which is what He did to the demon-oppressed man in the local synagogue (btw, these scribes were probably not locals any more than the ones last week would have been), with Peter’s mother in law, with the leper, and with the paralytic. He made them all whole. What He is really saying here is, as it is the responsibility of a doctor to be among the sick who need him, so it is the responsibility of Yeshua to be among the sinners who need Him. What we don’t know is the tone of His voice when he said the word “righteous.” We really and truly want it to be sarcastic, right? Because these guys are committed to their own comfort zone and not to the Kingdom of God. Maybe the irony was there and maybe not. I like to imagine it but then I also have to make it apply to me when I don’t want to associate with certain people because I hate their sins worse than other sins. So maybe I am “righteous” too.
To wrap this up this week I want to talk about the truly important ramification of this revolutionary act. Let’s repeat that bit from
Mekilta Amalek 3 “Let a man not associate with sinners even to bring them to Torah.”
But Yeshua, by His actions, says, “No this is exactly who you should associate and exactly why you should do it. Sick folks need doctors. Sinners need God. Period.”
Paul also talks about this, and he says that there are immoral people that we should not associate with—believers who are immoral. We have an obligation to associate with immoral people out in the world who do not know the hope and salvation we have found. How else will they find it too unless we help them? I Cor 5:
9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. 11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. 12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? 13 God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”
God judges those on the outside—we judge those on the inside. And I know this is hard—but this passage is clear. Fornicators, porn addicts, greedy people, drunks, thieves, (idolatry as it would have been meant in Paul’s time no longer exists in the West)—believers who do these things are not to be coddled or tolerated. Hey, I used to be a porn addict, for over twenty years—the hard stuff even. I gave it up cold turkey at the cross. I struggled with my thoughts, but I gave it up. I was working my way toward total freedom. But we have this society nowadays where people are so focused on pleasure and comfort that they prize them above the Gospel and addictions of all sorts have run rampant in the Body. Because we no longer value the community and have become grossly self-absorbed, this stuff is no longer the exception but the rule. People who dislike anxiety, hunger, discomfort, uncertainty to the point where we cannot cope with them as people used to have to learn to. We want shortcuts and so we turn to porn, illicit sex in movies and in real life, we hoard possessions when others go without, we drink, we smoke, we are caffeine addicts, we overeat—and we are revilers. That word means to speak abusively. Been on social media lately looking at the mask debates? It’s disgusting. You would think we were dealing with an actual sin issue with how abusive people are being over it—on both sides.
And yes, I know it’s a hard word but it is right there. The people who do those things shouldn’t be enabled and coddled because it destroys the community and the witness of the Cross when we are just as much wrapped up in carnal and comfort-focused behavior as the rest of the world. Community was everything to them and so they had to work at it. Nowadays we have sadly grown feeble because we can do quite nicely on our own, but we suffer more for it when we do. Even introverts like me, who would not have even existed a few hundred years ago because you needed other people to survive. Introversion is a preference that I have the luxury to indulge in. But it isn’t a positive thing, no matter how uncomfortable socializing makes me.
Next week we’ll be covering the third controversy—when is it and is it not appropriate to fast and what about those new wineskins?
