Mark Chapter 2. What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? We continue looking at discipleship in the gospel of Mark. We look to the reading of God’s word. Please join me in prayer. Living God, we do ask that you would help us to hear your Holy word that we would truly understand. And Lord, that in understanding we may believe, and in believing we may follow in all faithfulness and obedience, seeking your honor and your glory in all that we do. And this we would pray and ask through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Continuing in verse 13. He went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them. 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. And as he reclined at the table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. 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?
And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a position, but those who are sick. ‘ I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. The word of the Lord. Thank you. I checked, there are some 900 actual Samaritans today living in Israel. I’ve never met one. The only one I know about is the good Samaritan that Jesus mentions, and he was really nice. So the only Samaritan I’ve run across lived 2,000 years ago, and he’s a good one. Now, when Jesus told the parable, no Israeli would have said any of the Samaritans were good. They really did hate one another. That’s what makes the story of the Good Samaritan so powerful, because the worst person turns out to be the best person. Jesus’ point was that to love your neighbor applied even to those you dislike or despice. Now, that sounds all nice and amazing until you’re actually confronted with someone you really struggle with. There are sinners, and then there are sinners. This has always been the scandal of God’s grace. When the Lord shows his love and favor unconditionally towards us, we are grateful and amazed.
But what is our attitude when he accepts and loves someone whom we struggle with, who we do not like? What then do we think of this unconditional love towards them. Because the Lord loves and accepts sinners before there is a response, we also have to love and accept those unconditionally. Now, to get ahead of the objections, love and acceptance is a disposition of the heart. It does not mean an acceptance of a person’s sin, nor does it mean that we foolishly trust someone who trust is not warranted. Trust and acceptance are not the same thing. So we got that taken care of. Continuing then following, as I mentioned last week, Pastor Stephen Smallman, his simple definition of a disciple. One who has heard the call of Jesus has responded by repenting, believing the gospel, and following Jesus. That is a disciple. We see that in the life of Levi, the tax collector. While it was certainly good news for some, it definitely troubled other people. We see this good news for sinners. Verse 13, Jesus went out beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them. He’s the son of a local carpenter, and he’s now on to the local scene.
Nobody knows what to do with any of this. He teaches with an authority unlike anything that they have ever heard. He heals the sick. He cast out demons. They know his family. They know where his house, where he grew up. They know all that. This is extraordinary. Their sleepy little provincial lives had been blown up by Jesus. Everybody’s going out to see what’s What’s happening? The kingdom is at hand. Well, what does that mean? As he’s proclaiming this, it says in verse 14, he passed by, he sees Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at a tax booth. Okay, who Who exactly is this? Later, we hear of another son of Alphaeus named James as one of the 12 disciples, and they go, Are they brothers? We also have mention of Matthew being a tax collector in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Traditionally, Levi and Matthew are soon to be different names for the same person. Jesus said to him, Follow me, and Levi rose and he follows Jesus. Like the four fishermen already mentioned, Levi would have known something about Jesus ahead of time. He was a toll collector who was stationed at a booth at the crossroads outside of Capernaum, where people were traveling back and forth and he’s collecting taxes of commerce.
Just like the four, Levi leaves his livelihood to follow after Jesus. This Jesus whom he has seen walking about, who he has heard some of his teaching, who he has seen taking place in the local area. Now he follows Jesus, looking at it unconditionally. Then we’re told that he reclined at the table in his house, and assuming that it’s Jesus reclining in Levi’s house. Many task collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. Jesus is invited into Levi’s house, a joyous response given by Levi, and he invites his other friends to meet Jesus. We see, without it being told, he became a of men. He’s been called by Jesus, he follows him, and now he’s telling other people, Look to Jesus. Now, we’re used to hearing this behavior by Jesus. It’s something we’re used to. Jesus likes sinners. But think about for a moment. Have you ever said, I’m going out to dinner with a bunch of sinners? Self-designate people that way, it’s a strange thing. But Mark is showing us something about the mission of Jesus, and Mark is also speaking in the familiar terms of his day.
You could speak of sinners generically, meaning everyone, which Mark does. And you could also use this as a special category used by the pharisees. Sinners for them were religiously unclean people, those who stood outside of the Torah, outside of the law of Moses, and it included a list of people. It included tax collectors, money lenders, steeds, sabbath breakers, but also ones you probably would raise your eyebrows at. It included poor people, some trade like shepherds, people who were either too busy or too poor or too simple to live up to the standards of the rules of religion set by the authorities. Notice the rules of religion set by these authorities, not by the Bible itself, but the expectations of the religious people. They were typically thought of being outside of the community of decent folks. We’ve heard things like this. Those outsiders who end up being really good people. All the other Pharisee Reindier used to laugh and call him names. They never let poor tax collector, Rudolf, play in any of their Reindier games. We immediately liked the underdog, the little guy, and we’re like, Yeah, go get him. But the reality is that these are people we don’t like.
They don’t have any redeeming qualities that the rest of us are, Oh, isn’t he amazing? If you were a tax collector or a toll collector, is what Levi is, you were considered a later. Because to get the job, you had to sell out to the Romans. It was a barely legal trade. Everyone understood you skimmed off the top to get your share. These people got rich at the expense of their fellow countrymen, and they hid behind the military backing of the Roman Army to enforce their unjust practices. It was hard to be more disliked than this. The reason these people are at dinner with Jesus is they had to hang out the other. Nobody else would have anything to do with them. James Boisey points out that Levi was unacceptable in three ways. He was unacceptable politically, he was unacceptable He was unacceptable religiously, and he was unacceptable socially. Every aspect of his life, he was unacceptable to the people around him other than those who were just like him. Here we see the absolute scandal of God’s grace. Jesus accepted Levi before Levi did anything for Jesus. His love and his mercy did not have strings attached.
There were no preconditions. Now, when Jesus interacted with people, he did not want them to remain where they were in their sins, but he did accept them where they were at. Jesus didn’t just teach them what was right. He also ate and socialized with them. For Levi, a man who would have been a social outcast, his great wealth would not buy love and acceptance of his community. And for the first time, a holy man, a religious man, move towards him and not away. Think about that. The first time in your life, you’re surrounded by a religious people, a religious community. People in leadership, and every one of them would have moved away from you walking down the street. Jesus moves towards people. He’s not put off by your worst, and he’s not impressed with your best. Here we see then not only the scandal of grace, we see the trouble of the righteous. The scribes and 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? That was that phrase, tax collector and sinners, gets repeated multiple times here.
Make no mistake, this is not some polite question or inquiry. Pray tell, why is Jesus doing this unusual thing. It’s so strange. No, they are making an accusation. They are saying by the question that what he is doing, he’s wrong, they’re scandalized. Now, it’s one thing for a religious teacher to instruct sinners because that’s what they did, too. It’s altogether something else to actually enter into their world and socialize with them. That was not done. In the writings of the rabbis, if a tax collector came to your house, it was ceremonially unclean. You had to have it cleansed because they were just present. These steeds and traitors were not even allowed in the synagogue. They couldn’t give testimony in a religious court. They were hated. Nobody wanted to interact with them and so concerned with not breaking the law that these pharisees made extra rules to keep themselves It’s safe from people like this. It’s likely the name pharasy itself derives from the word to separate. In order to be righteous in their minds, they separated themselves from sinners. Now, before we think about all those people back then, we do the same thing. We separate and we also make rules, fences to help keeping us righteous.
We all know drunkenness is clearly a And so then there are some who say, well, you cannot have anything to drink in terms of alcohol because that might get you too close to the line. Modesty is a virtue. So some justify a form of the Christian burqa to keep from being immodest so that you don’t cause someone else to stumble. And on it goes. We create all kinds of fences like that around the rules, around the law. And of course, not all fences are bad, but not all fences are good. And offense is not a moral law. It’s a precaution. But we make our precautions into rules. And we say, this is an absolute. You can’t break this precaution. See, for a pharisee, you need to get cleaned up before you take a shower. That is how people operate when they base repentance first so that you will be accepted. If that is your operating system, grace is highly troubling. In the prophets and the songs, we hear the Lord say repeatedly, the Hoseia 6, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. The knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. It has always been God is going after the heart, not the externals.
For a pharisee, the thing that you are most worried about is the externals. You’re worried about, I need to move towards God so that he will accept me. Jesus tells them, verse 17, when he heard them talking, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. Now, in past times, the doctor actually came to you. They made house calls. That’s the way it used to be. Jesus is making a commonsensical observation. The doctor goes to sick people, and he speaks of the righteous. He’s not trying to say that there are some who have no need of him because they’re already good enough. He’s saying, there are those who don’t see their sin, and there are others who do. Those who don’t understand the Lord’s transforming grace think that somehow they’re able to do it on their own. You could put righteous in quotes if you want to. No, Jesus did not go around saying at the same time, Yeah, I’m okay. You’re okay. Let’s just celebrate our sinful diversity. That’s not what Jesus is doing either. Jesus called sin, sin.
He forgave sin, and then he would say things like, Go and sin no more. It wasn’t a blind and indulgent acceptance. Real love does not want people to remain the worst version of themselves. Jesus accepts sinners, and he desired to see their lives changed. To be a disciple means to hear the call of Christ, to repent from your sins, to believe and follow him where he leads. This is what Levi does. He doesn’t stay in a morally compromising job. He followed after Jesus. He left everything. In this, there are several challenges for us to consider. First, the world at large thinks of religion as getting yourself right so that you will be acceptable to God. When you talk about religion to the average person around the world, that’s what they think you mean. Do some good things so that God will accept you. When you tell people about free grace, they are thinking that this is either some bait and switch, click bait, or that that just simply means become a better person so that God will like you. How do we overcome this? Well, first, we overcome it by believing what is true, not believing this.
Do this so that God will do this. Start with not putting conditions on other people so that you will accept them. Because if you do that to others, that’s how you see God working in your life. What can that look like? Well, we recognize that people are not projects. We don’t show interest in someone as long as we think they’re a potential convert and drop them the minute they don’t respond in the way that we want to. People know when you’re treating them as a project. Hey, I’m intersecting your life and I’m hoping to bring you to Jesus, and then you’re resistant, resistant, and then they drop them. I’m not really interested in you as a person. And they know that. That’s not the response that God wants from his people. We also We also don’t alienate people when they don’t take our good advice. We don’t break relationship with them until they do what we wanted them to do. I told you what to do and how you need to change things. Well, you didn’t do it. So I’m going to punish you by showing my disapproval. It’s the carrot stick approach to acceptance.
My acceptance as a reward for your good behavior or my being distant and disappointed as the punishment for your not doing what I want you to do, for your bad behavior. Withholding fellowship until the person does what you want them to do is a graceless response. We rightly refer to that as blackmail. Do what I want, nobody gets hurt. Again, we’re talking about a disposition of the heart. If someone is hurting you, you’re not required to stay there taking it to show acceptance. You can’t have an open disposition towards someone, then you may need to step away from them if they’re doing something harmful. Jesus left hostile regions. He didn’t stay there. He went on to other places. But again, it’s a disposition of the heart towards them. Another challenge for us is this attitude we often find, which is something we have to live with, is there people out there who go, Well, if you don’t accept my sin, you don’t accept me. Christians have always made a distinction between loving the sinner and not loving the sin. That’s not acceptable to many people. They say, You must love my sin in order to love me.
They have so identified themselves with their actions, they cannot separate themselves from them. That’s a huge part of the identity crisis that we’re living in. That we call certain behaviors, sinful, is thought of as hateful and intolerant. The motto for many is it’s okay to hate haters. It’s okay to be intolerant of the intolerant. No doubt that’s a major challenge for our time and place, to be sure. But even in this, our responsibility remains the same. Love people call sin, sin. Which brings us to another challenge. When someone’s getting their life together and responding to Jesus, it often takes time, and this work is done slowly. The giant laundry list of behaviors that you want to change can be overwhelming. Don’t throw an anchor to someone out there floundering in the water. Not helpful. It’s often the case that we can forget our own slow growth in grace. We all know the parable of the prodigal son, the younger brothers, his terrible He’s the wayward one, and the older brother is that self-righteous do-gooder. We know that. The strange thing is it often happens that if you were a younger brother, you can turn into an older brother, especially over time.
You can forget God’s mercy and grace in your own life and start making demands that other people change to satisfy you. It’s so easy to move from younger brother to older brother. In the same way. Can’t you just get your act together? You may have been walking with the Lord for 20, 30 or 40 years, forgetting what you were like at the beginning. It’s difficult as a disciple to live this way. Some of you may know who Francis Schafer is. It’s hard to be dating you if you do. A Christian pastor and a writer wrote a lot of influential works. He’s well known for reaching out to lost young people. Young people who might have been raised in Christian homes, who had all kinds of doubts about their faith and their life, and others were just lost souls trying to figure out life in a fallen world. They didn’t know anything. He opened up his home to that. He started a ministry called L’abri. It’s still going today in several places. In his biography, I remember him talking about getting a new sofa, and pretty soon it had cigarette burns from all the young people smoking in his home.
That was more common in the ’60s and ’70s, but people smoking and putting out a cigarette on the sofa or maybe ashes falling. He had a lot of broken damage things in his house because of the constant influx of young people who lived with them or gathered in their house. Some would cuss and say inappropriate things, and no doubt, he and his wife, Edith, had to exercise wisdom on what do we challenge and what do we let go? With some people, you’re like, Oh, just let it go, or no, we need to confront this. The difficulty with that is that those lines people draw in different places. You might be trying to work with somebody over here and then getting criticized because, Oh, you need to jump on that, or, Oh, you need to let it go. It’s hard. Living with people in messy lives is difficult, and it’s hard know the right thing to do always, when and how. Schafer lived this, he and his wife and his family, and it cost him. It cost him food and furniture It costs him as a family in order to be hospitaled by outsiders to let people in, it cost his whole family.
The many people who came through their home, what was expressed was the warmth and the acceptance they received from Francis and Edith. For some, it was the first time in their whole lives that someone accepted them for just who they were with no strength attached. They were not loved as potential converts. They were loved as people made in the image and likeness of God. And This greater love invited them to a greater transformation in Christ Jesus, even if they themselves did not improve much. That’s the difficulty, isn’t it? They’re not moving along as fast as I think they should. Are they still loved and accepted? And the question then comes as a follower of Jesus as a disciple, is your grace scandalous? Because if you’re following Jesus, that’s what your grace is going to have to look like. It’s going to have to look scandalous. That you’re going to have to be willing to extend a love and acceptance, not just to the people who are like you, but to the people you struggle with. Now, think about it. There is a T-shirt with something on it that you hate. I don’t know what it is.
We all have one. That person wearing that T-shirt just, I don’t want to be around that person. It could be political, it could be a sports team, it could maybe pick your thing. There’s a T-shirt you don’t like. What do you do with that? When it comes to extending the mercy and the love and kindness of God to them. By his grace, are you able to overcome the T-shirt hatred? That you can extend that love and acceptance. Jesus didn’t just tell sinners the right things to do. He was eating with them He was laughing in their homes and sharing moments with them. For many of them, that was the first time again that any acceptable person extended that love to them. Trust me, if you’re with certain T-shirt people, you have the other people who dislike that T-shirt who are going to tell you why you shouldn’t be liking them. Don’t you know what’s on their T-shirt? You’ll be criticized for it, and it’s hard. It’s easy to like likable people. That’s why they’re likable. It’s much more difficult when we enter into those arenas of life where it’s like, I just… Oh, that person bugs me.
The other part of that is this starts in terms of discipleship in the closest unit that you have, which is your family, which is some of the hardest places to extend this. So that if someone’s being a knucklehead in your family, they can say, I am a knucklehead, but you know what? My brother loves me. My sister loves me. My mom and my dad love me. My whoever, they love me. Yeah, I’m a knucklehead, but they love me. Unconditionally. They may feel they don’t even deserve it, but they understand it because it’s being shown, it’s being expressed. How hard that is when you have extended good teaching to somebody. You need to be doing this to get your life together, and they don’t do What comes next? Can you eat and socialize in their home to extend that love and acceptance and kindness and grace? Or is there a condition now put on them that they will be acceptable once they get their act together in the way that you want? One of those is scandalous grace, and the other is just performance. Religious people like performance. It’s easy to tally, it’s easy to mark, and it’s easy to push people into a category of sinner.
And put me in a category of saint. And Jesus, the only righteous one, steps into the middle of sinners and embraces them. Not simply saying, Oh, just do whatever. He’s, Follow me. I want what’s absolutely best in your life. And going down that track is going to be sin, misery, and deprivation for you. And I don’t want that for you. I want your greatest and highest good, which is me. I am the one who came to lay down my life for you, that you would not be bound and stuck in a state of sin and misery, but you would be set free, and I’d long for that. But even if you don’t move in that direction, I am not going to reject walking with you here. Follow Jesus. Be fishers of men, women, and children, that they would know and feel this acceptance of Christ ever before they feel the disapproval of their lifestyle. That’s the beauty of the gospel. It changes lives because it is the good news of Jesus who comes into this broken and fallen world to lay down his life for sinners, that we would have life in him an eternal life with that.
Then where we have failed to do this with those near us and dear to us or those that we look at and we hate the T-shirt, we confess that as sin. Father, forgive me. I am really struggling to love this person in the way that you have called me to. Confess that as sin and then take up the mantle of free grace that has been given to you to extend it out. That the name and the person of Jesus would be attractive to sinners, of which you and I are the foremost. That every believer is able to see and recognize. I am the foremost of sinners. And if God was able to break into my darkness, he’s certainly capable and able to break into theirs. And who am I to despise the work that he is doing in them. Father, not only forgive me, but give me a diligence and a heart of prayer instead fastness to believe what is beyond my vision to see. Pray with me. Father, as we come before you this day, we just thank you. Lord, we are the recipients of your mercy, your kindness. And Father, we would ask that you would forgive us where we have.
Father, we have forgotten this, where we have put conditions on others. And Lord, we pray that you would continue to open our eyes to see, Father, the truth, the reality of where we are without you. And Father, the heights of the Majesty and the glory that you’ve taken us through your son. Father, help us to see. Help us to respond supernaturally to those we struggle with. And Lord, we pray that you would continue to bring forth glory to your son, Jesus, by the free offer of his good news extended here in this place and beyond. And all these things we would pray and ask in his mighty name. Amen. Please stand stand.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.