Dinner with Sinners: the Beginning of Righteousness

A vision of discipleship from Mark 2

At the beginning of Mark, Jesus is passing along the Sea of Galilee when he sees two fishermen: Simon (aka Peter) and his brother Andrew. He tells them to follow him, and they drop everything and do just that. A little further up the shoreline he sees James and John, also fishermen. He tells them to follow him and immediately (everything in Mark’s gospel happens immediately), they follow him. 

by Petr Brož. Used with permission.

For the next little while Jesus leads these four fishermen disciples through a series of remarkable encounters in the synagogue, at Simon and Andrew’s house, throughout Galilee, and even in Jesus’s own home. In these encounters Jesus teaches with authority, casts out demons, heals the sick, even forgives sins! Chumming around with Jesus is great fun. Just listen to the enthusiasm of the crowds: 

What is this? A new teaching with authority? (1:27)

We never saw anything like this! (2:12)

Jesus does a lot in these encounters that’s remarkable.

But then he does something unthinkable.

He went out again beside the sea (2:13).

There beside the sea, where Jesus called his first fishermen-disciples, Jesus calls another disciple. This one’s not a fisherman. This one’s a tax collector, named Levi (aka Matthew). 

Everyone knows enough biblical backgrounds to know tax collectors were despised in first-century Palestine. They made a living overcharging the locals for taxes. They collected what Rome required plus a little, or a lot, for their own pockets. Worse, some tax collectors were Jews themselves. They worked for the empire, exploiting their own countrymen for profit. 

But Levi is not a tax collector in the abstract. He’s no random tax collector. If Levi’s tax booth was beside the sea, then it stands to reason Levi made his living taxing people who made their living beside the sea. People like fishermen. Fishermen like Simon and Andrew, James and John. That is, it’s very likely this particular tax collector had been fleecing these particular four fishermen for years. And so it’s remarkable that Jesus, when he passes Levi’s booth, doesn’t flip it over in protest or call down brimstone upon the empire. 

He says, “Follow me.”

And lo and behold, Levi gets up from his booth and follows Jesus. Immediately. 

Jesus’s invitation is scandalous. Levi’s response is surprising. Then things get worse. 

In the very next sentence we find Jesus and his disciples at a dinner party at Levi’s house. At Levi’s house!

Jesus has crossed a line. He’s gone from doing remarkable things—healing, preaching, cleansing, forgiving—to doing forbidden things. He’s eating with sinners. In the eyes of the religious leaders and likely the neighbors and probably even the disciples, Jesus has lost the moral high ground. He’s reclining, dining intimately, with “tax collectors and sinners.” This is the sort of intimacy he will share with his closest disciples on the night he is betrayed, reclining such that the beloved disciple can lay his head on Jesus’s chest (John 21:20). In Levi’s house, he shares this same sort of Intimacy with hookers and shysters. 

He’s crossed a line and everybody knows it. 

So the scribes of the Pharisees ask Jesus’s disciples a question. Notice that the tone has shifted from enthusiasm (“We never saw anything like this!”) to suspicion: Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? (2:16). 

I bet you all the money in my pocket those four fishermen had asked themselves and each other the very same question. How did we get here? What are we doing? Everything was going so well and now here we are. Like the scribes of the Pharisees, these four fishermen had been raised in a religious community that paid careful attention to both ritual and moral purity. Attending Levi’s little dinner party risked both. They had good religious reasons for concern.

More personally, I have to think they looked around the room at the furniture and the fancy food and the free-flowing wine and thought, Our tax dollars at work! When the scribes ask their question—Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?—surely the disciples are thinking, That’s an excellent question, brother. We haven’t the foggiest idea.

See how this episode changes the temperature of Jesus’s story. See what Jesus risks by fellowshipping with these people. He could heal the sick and raise the dead all day long, every day, and nobody minds. But when he stops performing feats of power and starts performing acts of fellowship—breaking bread with these people—he puts everything at risk. A simple meal with the wrong people calls his whole ministry into question.

Anyway, the disciples don’t answer the scribes’ question. I doubt they could. Maybe Jesus knows they couldn’t. So he answers the question for them: “I came not to call the righteous but sinners.” 

That explanation sounds very spiritual to us today, two-thousand years on the other side of this very uncomfortable dinner party. To the apostles I imagine it meant very little. I came not to call the righteous… Cool cool cool. 

Jesus’s disciples didn’t understand Jesus’s behavior any more than the scribes did. This was only the beginning of their discipleship. But catch that: this transgressive dinner with the wrong sort of people was the beginning of their discipleship. What’s more, their journey of discipleship over the span of the next ten years, at least, will feature intimate experiences like these, with the wrong kinds of people: prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritan women, eunuchs, sorcerers, Centurions, and more. This dinner was not an exception, a momentary lapse in judgment. It was the calculated first instance of a pattern Jesus considered critical to their discipleship. The question the scribes ask—Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?—presumes that the path of righteousness requires avoiding tax collectors and sinners. Jesus disagrees. For his four fishermen disciples, and for all of his disciples to come, the path to the Kingdom of God runs through these sinners, not around them.

Disobedience, Discipleship and Disorientation

This story in Mark has become crucial for my understanding of discipleship. Maybe it resonates with me because, like these first fishermen disciples, I was brought up for almost thirty years in religious communities that carefully maintained our moral and doctrinal purity. In the churches of my youth, we did our darnedest to “come out from among them, and be ye separate,” as the Lord commanded, “and touch not the unclean thing” (2 Corinthians 6:17). We touched not the unclean things: not sex before marriage, not drugs or alcohol, not secular media, not the theory of evolution. We likewise carefully avoided the kind of bad company that corrupts good character: we didn’t smoke, cuss, drink or chew—or run around with girls that do.

I don’t mean to paint all churches everywhere with the same brush. You may have had a different experience. This was mine.

I admit there was a change in emphasis during my education. At a Baptist college and at two broadly-evangelical graduate schools I was instructed by professors whose views on these moral matters was more sophisticated. Some of them drank alcohol. They went to movies and listened to secular music. They read widely and engaged in earnest with secular authors. Some considered evolution compatible with the account of creation in Genesis and with the Great Tradition more broadly.

Even so, on balance I absorbed from my instructors a no less serious commitment to doctrinal purity. In some cases, we were warned to avoid certain authors, whose views of Scripture were insufficient, whose foundational presuppositions disqualified both their arguments and conclusions. More often, though, divergent views were left off the syllabus and out of the lectures not on principle but because the goal of the course was to engage the most important and influential and consequential thinkers in our own predominantly white and Western evangelical tradition. Those other writers, if not dangerous or heretical, were nevertheless beside the point.

And so, for seventy-five percent of my life to date, I’ve internalized the assumptions that the path to moral purity entails avoiding certain people and the path to doctrinal purity entails avoiding certain ideas. This makes me more like the scribes and the Pharisees than I’d like to admit.

The shock of the dinner at Levi’s house, then, is that the Way of Jesus leads through this roomful of sinners, not around it. Moral development comes from engaging them, not avoiding them. Not only because they are sick people in need of a doctor. But because they have something to teach those fishermen disciples. Those sinners see something in Jesus neither the scribes nor the Pharisees, nor yet Peter nor Andrew, James nor John, are able to see themselves. A couple years after this dinner party, Jesus will shock everyone by saying, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31). To follow Jesus will require these fishermen to risk their moral purity precisely because they can’t really understand who Jesus is unless they join him in breaking bread with these sinners, their teachers.

It was probably two years ago when I began to intuit that the path of my own discipleship would require me to pass through and journey with people I’d very carefully avoided before now. I began to worry that I may be near the Kingdom but at risk of being oriented away from it, not toward it, if I didn’t start fellowshipping at new tables. That instead of being sirens who wanted to lead me to my demise—or being beside the point—that certain “sinners” and certain writers and theologians who I’d been told to avoid or disregard were actually very much the point. They would be my teachers.

I’ll be honest that because of my upbringing, pulling up a chair at these new tables initially felt like an act of disobedience. Now I’m confident it’s an act of discipleship. Here’s what makes me certain: just like he did with his first fishermen disciples at Levi’s house, Jesus led me to these tables. I didn’t leave him to find new fellowship. I followed him into sometimes-disorienting new relationships. They have helped me see Jesus more fully and gloriously.

Maybe you can relate.

In any case, I hope to begin processing the fruit of these experiences and relationships here in the coming weeks and months. I’d love for you to join me and share your experiences as we go. Subscribe below to come along.