Jesus kept the wrong company.
In the later decades of the nineteenth century, Hell’s Half-Acre was known as the red-light district of Fort Worth. While the area was cleared in the 1960s for the Tarrant County Convention Center, it was, as the name suggests, a rough and rowdy district. In the 1870s, the Chisholm Trail was the cattle trail from Texas to Kansas that ran through the lower end of downtown. It was here that you could find two-story saloons, dance halls, and bordellos. The more famous of the Old West were men like Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was in Hell’s Half-Acre that you could find what one newspaper writer said were, “…lewd women of all ages 16-40… the experienced thief, [and] the ordinary murderer…”
We begin a series of messages known as Jesus Loves Sinners. Today, I want to explore with you Jesus’ connections to people on the other side of the tracks.
After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.
And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:27-32)
1. Birds of a Feather, Flock Together
There’s a saying that the religious people of Jesus’ day knew well and it continues to our day. Your mother told it to you, “Be careful of the company you keep.” Those with whom you assemble, we soon resemble. And this is at the heart of a religious controversy that swept over Jesus in today’s story.
When the new convert, Levi, threw a great banquet for Jesus, he didn’t limit his invitations to his new Christian friends, the deacons and preachers. Instead, he invited his fiends.
“And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them.” (Luke 5:29)
Soon, the cauldron of controversy began to boil over. This story is found in three of the four Gospel: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And it’s one of several controversial stories where Jesus offends the religious leaders of His day.
Levi is also known as Matthew for people in that day were often known by two names. Matthew is famously known as the person who wrote the first book of the New Testament. Just as Simon Peter could be called by either name, so Levi is also called Matthew. Matthew, as I’ll refer to him throughout the message, was a tax collector.
Tax collectors play a significant role in the pages of the four Gospels as it does in today’s story. Later on in Luke, we’ll meet a short little man named Zacchaeus , who gets up in a tree to see Jesus because of the overwhelming crowds surrounding Jesus. Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector. While Matthew’s role was not a supervisory role, he was nevertheless a tax collector. Just like Matthew, Jesus chooses to eat in the home of Zacchaeus as well. Jesus’ actions flew into the face of “Be careful of the company you keep.”
Taxes in the Roman Empire were a complex affair. Cities would lease the right to collect taxes to individuals who bid for the right to do so. Usually, the rights to collect taxes would go to the highest bidder. People like Matthew would not only collect the tax that Rome had stipulated, but would also have added a surcharge to meet his expenses. He would be allowed to keep this additional amount. People of Palestine would have a land tax, as we do today, but they would also have a toll tax. Then there was also a tax on all items that were purchases or leased in a region, like our sales tax. It was this tax that would be collected in the major cities of the day. In all, it’s estimated that somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of one’s income went to taxes in the region of Palestine.
Capernaum was the last village located on the road between Herod Antipas’ territory and Herod Philip’s territory. It was there that Matthew set himself in a good position to receive taxes on the goods that passed along this busy road. The system was susceptible to great abuse. Most tax collectors received a considerable sum of the money they collected. Matthew was most likely a wealthy man. People despised tax collectors in Jesus’ day. They were seen as cheats like we see gangsters in our day. People who had to travel for business would be taxed as they traveled through each local city. The Jews of the day considered this robbery. People in Matthew’s chosen profession were notoriously dishonest as they gouged people with extortionate tax rates. They were beyond hope and were grouped with adulterers, pimps, yes-men, and snitches.
Just like the leper from earlier in Luke 5, Jesus reaches out the outcasts of His day. Matthew celebrates the grace he’s found with a celebration among friends. The Bible says that he threw Jesus “a great feast in his house” (Luke 5:29). He prepares a feast for his friends because of his concern for them. Matthew leaves the sinful lifestyle but he doesn’t lose his friends. Instead, he invites them to a shindig at his place where Jesus is the honored guest.
The whole scene is disturbing to the scribes and Pharisees: “And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?’” (Luke 5:30)
The word “Pharisees” means “separated one.” This group had numerous rules on keeping them separate from unclean people. Tax collectors, and other rank and file sinners, were among the people they kept their distance. These guys wanted to separate themselves from sinners like you want to separate from the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Jesus pursues relationships with sinners, and not separating from them.
It’s no accident that Jesus selects Matthew. Note carefully Luke’s words in the beginning of twenty-seven: “After this he went out and saw a tax collector…” (Luke 5:27)
The word “saw” is one that describes Jesus not as a casual look in Matthew’s direction but Jesus examined him thoroughly. The word Luke chooses in verse twenty-seven indicates that Jesus consciously singles Matthew out. So here is Jesus was surrounded by crooks and sinners.
Meals are where the barriers break down in a relationship. And Luke loves to tell stories where Jesus is having meals with all kinds of people (Luke 7:36-50; 9:10-17; 10:38-42; 11:37-54; 14:1-24; 19:1-10; 22:7-38; 24:29-32, 41-43). Luke will portray Jesus eating with others ten times in his Gospel alone. Jesus will eat with His Disciple, the Pharisees on numerous occasions, and the multitudes. Yet, it’s His meals with sinners that bring the most controversy.
A sinful woman disturbs Jesus’ meal with the Pharisees when one of the religious people said to themselves: “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” (Luke 7:39)
The evening meal was the very heart of family life. Remember there were no electric lights in those days. So the evening meal was the centerpiece of family life. Jesus was invited into the very center of Matthew’s social world. Meals are the place where the personal barriers come down in our lives. Their fear was that Jesus was going to be corrupted by those who were morally and socially corrupt. Now when can sympathize with the religious leaders of Jesus’ day.
Again, birds of a feather, flock together. Those with whom you assemble, we soon resemble. Be careful of the company you keep. Even many of our doctor’s offices have separate waiting rooms for the sick and the healthy. We instinctively know that proximity can contaminate you. Contact means the germs come onto you and you’re contaminated. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day had complex rules on whom to associate with. These intricate, complicated rules were known as the dietary laws.
Listen carefully to Jesus: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:31b-32)
Jesus came for the morally sick. The gospel doesn’t gain traction with smug respectable people like it does with those who know their sins. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day want Him to keep a mask on and walk around with the spiritually equivalent of sterilized hands. Unlike anyone else, everyone Jesus touches is made clean. He’s not made unclean by your touch, no matter who you are. Instead, you’re made clean by His touch. Significantly, Jesus invites those who are beyond the pale. And Jesus goes there not to allow sinners to go on sinning. Instead, Jesus goes to Matthew’s house for the purpose of seeing Matthew’s friends to change.
1. Birds of a Feather, Flock Together
2. Disciples Make Disciples
The church is to emulate Jesus by befriending sinners. Matthew himself tells the story where he invited Jesus to be the guest of honor at his home.
“And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.” (Matthew 9:10)
Notice that the disciples also join Jesus is eating with sinners. From the start, God has designed Christianity for every, single disciple to make a disciple who in turn, makes a disciple. Not every disciple of Christ has to leave their job. But every disciple must leave their life’s loyalties for Jesus. Everything else must take a back seat. Any loyalties that compete for Christ’s loyalties must be left aside.
Disciples multiply. Disciples don’t stay silent. Disciples pray for people. Disciples invite people to church. Disciples have memorized a short presentation of the gospel. Disciples financially support missions. But disciples don’t substitute financial support for being personally involved.
The first step of making disciples is to do evangelism. We are four weeks away from celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. Our strategy for outreach when all of America will celebrate the holiday called Easter, where so many people are open to exploring Jesus. Our plans include Hang Ten (thousand) Neighborhood Blitz on Palm Sunday, Easter in the Community, and Sit Close Park Far on Easter Sunday Morning.
You see, when the Disciples also ate with sinners, they showed their holiness wasn’t fragile. The grace of Jesus caused them to be secure in the transformation His grace caused. They weren’t insecure. They weren’t fragile. They didn’t need to draw a bright line between sinners and “righteous” to be secure. Jesus changed it all for them and for us. They were secure in God’s grace. They had been radically changed. Because you’ve been changed by Him, you have an industrial-strength self-image.
Every Christian is Called. Matthew, like the story of Peter before him, is busy at work when Jesus finds him. And just as Peter did, Matthew leaves everything to follow Jesus. Where Peter left his fishing nets, Matthew leaves his tax booth. To be called is no longer to be in control. There are a variety of experiences where Christ calls people to follow Him. In John 3, Jesus and John 9 are examples of other people being called to be a Christian. Don’t press the details of anyone's conversion to make the details normative.
What does it mean to be called? To be called is when Christ presses you to make Him central in your life. You may have believed in Him, but He was on the periphery of your life. To be called is to make Him the center of everything.
A Lesbian Feminist Comes to Christ
In 1999 Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University. She said, “As a leftist lesbian professor, I despised Christians. Then I somehow became one.”
When I was 28 years old, I boldly declared myself lesbian. I was at the finish of a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies. I was a teaching associate in one of the first and strongest Women’s Studies Departments in the nation. I was being recruited by universities to take on faculty and administrative roles in advancing radical leftist ideologies. I genuinely believed that I was helping to make the world a better place. At the age of 36, I was one of the few tenured women at a large research university, a rising administrator, and a community activist. I had become one of the “tenured radicals.” By all standards, I had made it. That same year, Christ claimed me for himself and the life that I had known and loved came to a humiliating end.
She said her conversion felt like both a train wreck and an alien abduction. Rosaria details how this train wreck happened:
I began researching the Religious Right and their politics of hatred against queers like me. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track: the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics, and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers. It was 1997.
I was a broken mess. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world.
The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter … I didn't know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.
Later that night, I fished it out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response…
With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen. Oh, I had seen my share of Bible verses on placards at Gay Pride marches. That Christians who mocked me on Gay Pride Day were happy that I and everyone I loved were going to hell was clear as a blue sky. That is not what Ken did. He did not mock. He engaged. So when his letter invited me to get together for dinner, I accepted. My motives at the time were straightforward: Surely this will be good for my research.
Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics. They did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken's God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.
Today, Rosearia is a mother of four, a homemaker, and a wife of a Presbyterian pastor in Durham, North Carolina.
When Jesus called Matthew, He performed a miracle equal in power to making paralyzed people to walk again. This miracle was to lift Matthew’s greedy fingers from his money. “The same call which lifted the paralytic from his mat now lifts [Matthew] from his toll station.” Jesus’ voice had the ability to make lame people walk just as easily as He made greedy people give. Any loyalties that compete for Christ’s loyalties must be left aside.
“So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:33)
When Matthew deserts his post, he will not be welcomed back with open arms. While the other Disciples could return back to fishing, Matthew wouldn’t be able to return to the tax booth. Matthew left Herod and Rome when he left the tax booth. Matthew may have very well heard Jesus’ teaching throughout the region as he sat idle between transactions. Nevertheless, His actions were quick and decisive. Any loyalties that compete for Christ’s loyalties must be left aside.
Birds of a Feather, Flock Together
Disciples Make Disciples
3. Jesus is in a Category by Himself
“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:31b-32)
Who does Jesus think He is? Just a few verses later, Luke quotes Jesus as saying: “The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” (Luke 5:35)
In our day where tolerance and diversity reign supreme, it is perhaps most controversial to state that Jesus is the only Savior. In some people’s eyes, it is the height of arrogance to say Jesus Christ is distinct and superior to all other religious leaders.
John Lennon: “I believe that what Jesus and Mohammad and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.”
“All paths leading to God are equally good,” Mahatma Gandhi
“One of the biggest mistakes humans make is to believe there is only one way. Actually, there are many diverse paths leading to what you call God.” Oprah Winfrey
Jesus is unlike any other religious leader.
Think of three major religions and their respective geographic centers.
Islam started in Arabia, at Mecca. Today, Islam is still centered there. Buddhism started in the Far East, and that’s still the center of Buddhism. Hinduism began in India and it’s center is still in India. But Christianity is the exception. Christianity’s center is always moving. The original center of Christianity was Jerusalem, but soon Gentiles embraced Christianity. Then Christianity’s center was Alexandria, North Africa, and then Rome. Today, Christianity’s center is moving from North America to Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Here in these places, Christianity is growing ten times the population growth rate. The moving center of Christianity through the centuries shows the uniqueness of Jesus.
Invitation
For some of you to come to know the real Jesus, you’re going to have to get past the religious crowd. Just as in Jesus’ day, and it’s embarrassing to say as a pastor, many religious people in churches everywhere are “righteous.” The rules have changed since Jesus’ day, but the principles stay the same – don’t hang out with immoral people. Yet, despite the religious crowd, many of you are still interested in the real Jesus. His love has discovered you and you’ve been found.
Some of you love Jesus but you can’t get past the crowd of self-righteous people around Him. You’re saying to yourself, “If Christianity is true, it couldn’t produce people like this.” You have to get past the religious crowd by seeing Jesus directly outside of the self-righteous religious crowd. Go straight to the pages of the Bible and there’ll you find that Jesus is every bit as turned-off by the self-righteous as you are. Jesus is gentle with sinners but He thunders against the self-righteous, Bible teachers.
Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. (Matthew 21:31b)
Find a way to see Jesus directly. If you’re going to know the real Jesus, you’re going to have to get past the religious righteous crowd. But you’re also going to have to invite Jesus home with you. Just like Matthew did, he invited Jesus to his home. You’re going to have to make Him central to your life. Jesus is never content to stay out the outskirts of your life. Instead, you’re going to have to repent as Matthew did of your sinful life. And then invite Jesus into your very home.
