Dinner with Sinners: Mark 2:13-17

The tax booth sat at the crossroads like a wound in the town's flesh. Everyone who passed had to pay—fishermen with their catch, merchants with their goods, travelers with their coins. And everyone who paid had to look into the face of Levi, son of Alphaeus, who had sold his soul to Rome for a percentage of his neighbors' misery.

Tax collectors were more than unpopular. They were traitors. They worked for the occupation, skimming extra for themselves, growing fat on their brothers' poverty. Levi had money. Levi had no friends—at least none that decent people would acknowledge.

Jesus walked past the booth, and the crowd parted around it like water around a stone. Then he stopped.

"Follow me," he said.

Levi looked up. Perhaps he waited for the punchline, the sneer, the righteous condemnation he had learned to expect. It didn't come. Jesus simply stood there, waiting, as if the invitation were the most natural thing in the world.

Levi rose from his booth. He left the coins on the table, the records half-written, the whole corrupt enterprise sitting there for anyone to take. And he followed.

That night, Levi threw a party. His house filled with the only people who would associate with him—other tax collectors, other sinners, the moral refuse of Galilean society. And reclining at the table among them, sharing their food, laughing at their jokes, was Jesus.

The Pharisees clustered outside like flies at a window, scandalized. They pulled the disciples aside: "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

Jesus heard them. He always heard them.

"It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick," he said, and his voice carried to every ear. "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

The party continued. The Pharisees fumed. And somewhere at that table, Levi was learning what it felt like to be welcomed home.