Apprenticing Under The Master
Mark 2:13-17
The Calling of Levi
I don’t think that tax collectors have an equal today in Canada in terms of how people in Judea felt about them.
Hate would be too weak a word. Even today, tax collectors are not well-loved in the best of situations! But these guys were given carte blanch by the rulers to get as much money from the people as they could with only the official portion going to the government. It was sanctioned corruption. This would be bad enough except that the government that they were collecting taxes for was the occupying forces of Rome. They were collaborators with the pagans that were controlling God’s promised land. They were traitors. They would be first against the wall in the revolution.
Levi (Matthew) was a tax collector.
13Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. 14As 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.
15While 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. 16When 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’?"
17On 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."
Apprenticing under the Master.
How does Jesus treat this outcast, this corrupt traitor to God’s people?
He loves him – he calls him out of his destructive lifestyle, and comes to eat at his house!
Jesus Love is Unconditional
You might wonder what was going through the mind of the disciples as Jesus walked toward the tax-collecting booth. “Is this it? Is this the beginning of the revolution, is he going to turn over the table, rip down the booth & beat this guy up? … That’d be good.”
“maybe he is going to call that wicked man to true repentance, I hope he’ll let him know how low he really is!”
Jesus doesn’t list all that Levi had done wrong in his life – he doesn’t make sure that Levi has “a good understanding of his need for salvation.”
He simply says, “Follow me.” And Levi does!
Jesus invites him to join this little group of His – the group that would include Simon the Zealot. The Zealots were the resistance movement against Rome. It would be like having Ossama Bin Ladden & George Bush in the same Bible study group.
Jesus invites them both to follow him.
Matthew decides to have a party to celebrate his new life & he invites his best friends to come and celebrate with him. – the mayor, the high priest, the principal of the local school, president of the Synagogue – not. He invites more tax collectors and the people who had nothing to loose by hanging out with tax collectors – the lowest of the low.
Jesus and the boys join him – The Pharisees see what’s going on and say, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and ’sinners’?"
We sing that Jesus is the friend of sinners, but he was originally called that by the Pharisees as an insult.
But Jesus says to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."
“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8
“Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ came into the world to save sinners” – 1 Timothy 15
This is the radical thing about God’s love – he doesn’t love us because we are good – he just loves us. I is not that we were having this great love affair with God and he sent his son to life and die for us because we loved him so well – God sent his son while we were in rebellion against him! He loves us whether we are good or bad.
“Long lay the world in sin and darkness pining, ‘til he appeared and the soul felt its worth” – O Holy Night
We are loved by God no matter our history
If The calling of Levi teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that you cannot not go so low that Gods hand is to short to lovingly rescue you. If Jesus could show love to Levi & his friends, there is nothing that you could have done or that was done to you that can keep him from loving you.
He doesn’t just call this Tax collector to be his follower, but Matthew becomes one of the 12 “inside circle” disciples and he is an author of one of the Gospels! Jesus doesn’t call him into a life of penance for his terrible sins, but a life of living for God his savior! You might start your faith journey in the gutter, but Jesus will lift you up as high as you will let him!
We Are Called to Love Others Unconditionally (Just Like The Master)
In Donald Miller’s book “Blue Like Jazz,” he has a chapter called “Love: How to Really Love Other People”
He was at a lecture by Greg Spencer that talked about the metaphors that we use around (amongst other things) relationships. We talk about how we value people, invest in people, how we say people are priceless, or that a relationship is bankrupt. All these metaphors are economic ones.
“And that’s when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.”
…“There was a guy in my life at the time, a guy I went to church with whom I honestly didn’t like. I thought he was sarcastic and lazy and manipulative, and he ate with his mouth open so that food almost fell from his chin when he talked. He began and ended every sentence with the word dude.
…He began to get under my skin. I wanted him to change. I wanted him to read a book, memorize a poem, or explore morality, at least as an intellectual concept.
I didn’t know how to communicate to him that he needed to change, so I displayed it on my face. I rolled my eyes. I gave him dirty looks. I would mouth the word loser when he wasn’t looking. I thought somehow he would sense my disapproval and change his life in order to gain my favor. I short, I withheld love.
After Greg Spencer’s lecture, I knew what I was doing was wrong. It was selfish, and what’s more, it would never work. By withholding love from my friend, he became defensive, he didn’t like me, he thought I was judgmental, snobbish, proud, and mean. Rather than being drawn to me, wanting to change, he was repulsed. I was guilty of using love like money, withholding it to get somebody to be who I wanted them to be. I was making a mess of everything. And I was disobeying God.”
If Jesus, our master was known as a friend of tax collectors and sinners, we must ask ourselves, as apprentices, how often do I befriend the outcast? Or, am I part of the group that has cast them out? Do I eat and drink with sinners?
We are the light of the world! How many dark places, dark hearts, have you brought light into?
Jesus calls Levi into Redemption
Jesus doesn’t just communicate love to Matthew – he calls him to something better. Those simple words “follow me” are so loaded – “leave your sin and corruption and treason behind and follow me”
Matthew goes from being a traitor to the Jews to writing the Gospel account that is directed to the Jews!
“God loves you just the way you are, but he refuses to leave you that way, he wants you to be … just like Jesus” – Max Lucado
We are to call people into redemption.
This is the difficult thing – to love people unconditionally, and call them into redemption.
I saw a woman coming out of Loblaws this week with a t-shirt that said “I’LL LOVE YOU WHEN YOU ARE MORE LIKE ME”
That’s often how we do it – once people get redeemed, then we will love them, it is not that (like God) we love them first and then call them into redemption.
The church has generally got this wrong – we have called people into redemption by judging them rather than by loving them. Jesus calls most people into redemption by loving them – the only people he passes judgment on are the leaders who think that they are not in need of redemption. We often feel that we need to convict people of their sins first before they will understand their need of redemption. My experience is that most people feel their need for redemption – possibly not for the things that we think that they need redemption for, but they feel it nonetheless.
I think that one of the places that we have got this wrong that is really obvious right now is with the homosexual community. We have read the scriptures properly that homosexual behavior is sinful, but we joined the world in its hatred and prejudice against gays and lesbians. We told them that until they fix their sexuality we will withhold God’s love and acceptance from them. In many cases we saw their sin as so heinous that we would never accept them even if they repented. So now our invitation to redemption and healing feels more like hate to them than the love that Jesus gave to Levi the tax collector. We’ve got ourselves in a real bind in that now most people say that in order to accept them, we must also accept their sin. The consequence of our sin is that now our love and call to redemption is not heard, felt or accepted. And our voice for healthy a right living and legislation is mostly ignored. The only way through is confession and repentance.
That is the macro level, on the micro level, most of us have family or friends or co-workers or neighbours who are living in ways that we do not approve of. The closer those people are, the more their sin affects us and hurts us, and often makes us angry.
How do we love and call people to redemption?
How do we show love without enabling their sin?
Begin with confession and repentance – most things in the Christian faith begin with these.
Confess to your person that you have allowed the disagreeable parts of their life to get in the way of you loving them – ask for forgiveness.
In prayer, begin to work out how you love them without condition, and how you call them into redemption as an act of that love.
There is no guarantee that this will “work.” You family member might not change – they might not even accept your love as love! St. Ignatius said that when someone is running from God, even his grace feels like violence. Your unconditional love might not fix them, but it might fix you!
Love unconditionally – don’t use love like money!
Call people into redemption – it’s Good News!
