Show Don't Tell: Mark 2:13-17

Instead of saying "Jesus called Levi and ate with sinners," smell the tax booth. Jesus goes out again beside the lake. A crowd comes, and he teaches them. Walking along, he sees Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector's booth—the place everyone avoids, where a traitor to his people extracts money for Rome. "Follow me." Levi gets up and follows. Then a dinner party at Levi's house: Jesus is reclining at table with many tax collectors and sinners—the disreputable, the despised, the outcasts. The teachers of the law see this and ask his disciples: "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Jesus overhears: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." The sick need the physician. Jesus goes where the disease is. Religious respectability doesn't need him; broken sinners do.