Mark 2:15

This verse comes straight after the healing of the paralysed man in a house, where Jesus forgave the man’s sins and the scribes questioned his right to do so (Mark 2:1–12). Now he goes out again into the open. The verb exérchomai means to go out or depart, and the word “again”, pálin, tells us that he had been by the sea before, as the early days of his work in Galilee show (Mark 1). After the challenge in the house, he carries on teaching in public just as before.

The sea side is the shore of the Sea of Galilee, a busy place of fishermen, merchants and travellers, with towns such as Capernaum along it, where Jesus often based his work. Teachers of the day often taught in the open, where far more people could gather than a synagogue would hold, and a gently sloping shore helped a voice carry to a large crowd. The word for multitude, óchlos, means a large crowd of ordinary people, many of them overlooked by the religious leaders, and Mark says that “all the multitude” came. “Resorted unto him” translates érchomai, to come: they came to him because they wanted to hear him, as the crowds kept following him in John’s Gospel too (John 6:2). This same sea later obeys him when he stills the storm (Mark 4:35–41).

Mark names what Jesus did with the crowd in three words: “he taught them.” The verb didáskō means to teach or instruct, and teaching stood at the centre of his work alongside the healings. His hearers were astonished, because he taught with an authority the scribes never had (Mark 1:22, Matthew 7:28–29), and Luke records that preaching was the work he was sent to do (Luke 4:43). He is the Prophet like Moses whom God promised to raise up from among his people (Deuteronomy 18:15), and he is the Word made flesh (John 1:14), so when he teaches by the sea, God himself is speaking. The crowd on the shore was made up of every kind of person, and the gospel goes the same way: the same Lord is rich toward all who call on him (Romans 10:12–13). After his resurrection he sent his followers to carry on this teaching: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19–20).

As Jesus passes by, he sees “Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the receipt of custom”. The telṓnion was a tax collector’s place of business, a booth or office in public view, so Jesus finds Levi at his work, in the very act that made him despised. The verb for “saw”, eídō, is the ordinary word for seeing, used both of the eyes and of understanding. Jesus knew the man he was looking at, and he chose him there, at the booth.

Then come two words, “Follow me”, with no persuading and no bargaining. The command carries his authority, as the call of Simon, Andrew, James and John had done (Mark 1:16–20). The verb akolouthéō is built from words meaning “together” and “road”, and it means to go the same way as someone, to accompany him. For a disciple it means going where Jesus goes, learning from him and taking up his way of life.

Mark tells the answer as briefly as the call: “And he arose and followed him.” Anístēmi is to stand up, and Levi stands up from his booth and leaves the work that had made him wealthy, to walk a road he did not yet know. Jesus later says plainly what following him costs, when he calls whoever would come after him to take up his cross (Mark 8:34–37).

The call rests entirely on God’s grace and choice. Levi brought no record of righteousness and no standing among his people, and Paul says that God chooses what the world counts foolish and weak (1 Corinthians 1:26–29). The LORD promised through Ezekiel that he himself would search for his sheep, seek the lost and bring them home (Ezekiel 34:11–16), and in Levi we watch him do it. Those who were far off are brought near by the blood of Christ, who is our peace (Ephesians 2:13–16), and God calls his people out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).

The publicans, telōnēs, were tax-farmers. They were Jews who had bought from the Roman government the right to collect taxes in a district, and many of them took more than was due and kept the difference. Their own people despised them as traitors who worked for the occupying power and as cheats. Their dealings with Gentiles made them ritually unclean, they were kept out of synagogue life, and their word was not accepted as testimony in Jewish courts. They were often grouped with sinners and prostitutes.

The word for sinner, hamartōlós, comes from the verb for missing the mark, to sin. As an adjective it means sinful, and as a noun a sinner. All of us have sinned (Romans 3:23), but here it is a label the religious leaders gave to a particular class of people: those known as irreligious or openly immoral, such as prostitutes, those who did not keep the law of Moses and the oral traditions as strictly as the Pharisees did, and those whose work was counted defiling, such as shepherds and tanners. To the Pharisees these people stood outside respectable faith altogether.

“As Jesus sat at meat in his house” places the meal in Levi’s own home, so Jesus walks into the house of a man everyone else avoided. “Sat at meat” translates katákeimai, to lie down, used here of reclining at a meal. People ate lying on couches around a low table, and in that culture a shared meal meant fellowship, acceptance and belonging. To recline at table with someone was to treat him as one of your own.

Around that table were “many publicans and sinners”, Levi’s own kind of people, sitting “together with Jesus and his disciples”. Mark adds, “for there were many, and they followed him.” These guests had come because they were drawn to Jesus, and many of them were following him, so a company of disciples was forming among the very people the religious leaders shut out. Jesus gave them dignity and a place, and in Christ every such barrier comes down, for all who belong to him are one in him (Galatians 3:28).

The meal points ahead. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and the Son of Man who came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). This table in Levi’s house is a foretaste of the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9), where people from every nation who were once sinners will sit at table with Christ, welcomed on the ground of his sacrifice.

The objection comes from the religious authorities. The scribes, grammateús, from gramma, a writing, were trained experts in the law of Moses, who copied it, explained it and taught it, served as legal advisers, and sat on the Sanhedrin. The Pharisees, Pharisaîos, take their name from a Hebrew word meaning to separate. They were a leading sect, zealous for the written law and for a large body of oral tradition, and they worked hard at ritual purity. Many ordinary Jews respected them as the most devout people in the land.

They “saw” him eat, with the same verb, eídō, used of Jesus seeing Levi. Their question names both halves of the meal: he “eateth”, esthíō, to eat, “and drinketh”, pínō, to drink. To them, eating and drinking with publicans and sinners would make Jesus unclean and would look like approval of how these people lived. Their question is a protest, full of disapproval and astonishment, and they put it to his disciples. They may have been wary of facing him, or they may have hoped to unsettle his followers. Mark’s second chapter is a run of such clashes (Mark 2), with the question about fasting coming next (Mark 2:18–22), and the conflict grows through the Gospel until it ends at the cross. Jesus takes up the same quarrel over purity and tradition later in Mark (Mark 7).

People ask whether eating with sinners meant that Jesus approved of their sin. His table was an invitation to new life, as he says in the very next verse, where he calls sinners to repentance. The scribes and Pharisees cared most for outward purity, while God’s law at its heart asks for mercy: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6). In Matthew’s account of this same meal, Jesus sends the Pharisees away to learn what that means (Matthew 9:9–13). Luke tells how publicans and sinners kept drawing near to hear him while the Pharisees and scribes complained that he received sinners and ate with them, and Jesus answered with the parable of the lost sheep and the joy in heaven over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:1–7). Jesus is the true High Priest. He comes into the company of the unclean to purify and redeem them, and their uncleanness leaves his holiness untouched.

“When Jesus heard it”, he answered the scribes and Pharisees himself, with a saying from ordinary life: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.” The word iatrós, physician, comes from iaomai, to heal. Everyone knows that a doctor goes to the sick, and Jesus applies that to himself. Sin is a sickness of the soul that only God can cure, and Jesus has come as the physician who heals it. The publicans and sinners at Levi’s table knew they were sick. The Pharisees counted themselves well, and so they saw no need of him.

Then he states why he came: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” The verb for “came” is érchomai, the same word used of the crowd coming to him in verse 13, and here it speaks of his whole coming into the world on purpose. Paul puts the same truth in a single line when he says that Christ Jesus came to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15).

These five verses show us who Jesus is. He goes out to people where they are, by the sea and at the tax office, and he teaches them with God’s own authority. He sees a man everyone despised, calls him by name, and that man gets up and follows. He sits at table with publicans and sinners, and he lets the scorn of the religious leaders fall on himself. Above all he tells us why he came: to heal the sick and to call sinners to repentance.

That is good news for every one of us, because the only people this physician turns away are the ones who insist they are well. Levi had nothing to offer Jesus but his need, and Jesus called him anyway. The same Lord calls sinners still, and the place at his table is given by grace, now and at the marriage supper of the Lamb.