Partying with Sinners

6 · The pastor deepens the cultural context by explaining the economic mechanics of tax collection in an agrarian society: tax collectors forced people to borrow against their land to pay upfront taxes, and when harvests failed, families lost their land and income, creating generational poverty

And so a tax collector is sort of this cross between a Seth Blatter and a Benedict Arnold. And one of the biggest issues with tax collectors is just this deep, deep corruption in who they are. They make a lavish living by overcharging their own countrymen and neighbors for their taxes. And part of what would happen in this agrarian society and community is people would pay their taxes, based on what they had gathered from the previous harvest. So you had to pay your taxes in some ways upfront. So you'd pay taxes, and then you'd hope you'd have a good harvest. And so a lot of people have to go out, and they have to borrow money. And the only collateral they had to borrow that money to pay the taxes to these tax collectors in the Roman government was to essentially take out loans against their land. And so if the harvest was bad, if there wasn't rain, you would lose your land, and then you lost your source of income. And so that's why these tax collectors have such a bad rap. They're literally taking part in a system that fleeces people, keeps them in poverty, makes them poorer than previous generations.

7 · The pastor highlights the scandal of Jesus' approach by emphasizing that Jesus meets Levi not in a neutral setting but in the very booth where Levi actively practiced corruption

So here's Jesus, and he meets Levi literally while he's sitting in his booth of corruption. He's sitting in the place where he goes and practices underhand things and takes more money than he should. And he's sitting there, and really in some ways I think it's helpful, you almost note like these booths were really just reminders for everyone passing down the road. The Romans rule us and the Romans cheat us. And there sitting in the booth is one of our own countrymen participating in it. And it's in that little booth that Jesus walks up to him. Sees him from a ways off, examines him, kind of observes him, the text says, and walks over and essentially says, come follow and be part of my group. Come and be a part of my community.

8 · The pastor traces the movement from call to celebration, noting that Levi immediately throws a party for 'tax collectors and others'—a phrase Luke uses descriptively but the Pharisees interpret pejoratively as 'tax collectors and sinners

Then to make matters even worse for those who would have seen this as a very uncouth thing to do, Levi decides to throw a party to celebrate his decision to follow Jesus. So Jesus describes, or Luke describes the guests In what way? He says you've got a bunch of tax collectors and others. That says a lot. It's tax collectors and others. This kind of group of social misfits. But when the Pharisees see it, they aren't so nice. They look at it and say, it's tax collectors and it's sinners that are gathered with Jesus. You get the sense that Levi just basically kind of throws open the doors and says, I've met Jesus. I've met the man we've all been hearing about. He came. He approached me at my tax booth like usually people are trying to avoid. They avoid my tax booth. They don't want to pay the taxes there. Jesus sees it. He approaches me and then He tells me to come follow Him. He welcomes me into His entourage. And so then Levi in response throws open the doors to his home and just says, come and feast with me to celebrate.

9 · The pastor pivots from exposition to application, contrasting the Pharisees' animosity with the natural joy of encountering Jesus

And isn't that exactly what you'd want to do if you encountered Jesus? The Pharisees are so out of step with what's happening. They look at what's happening and there's just this growing animosity everything Jesus does and everything the people who encounter Jesus do in response. But that's exactly what you'd do if you encountered Jesus. You would throw a party. You would open the doors and let everyone come to your home to meet this person in whom you had just encountered the grace of God because that's what's happened.

10 · The pastor exposits Jesus' physician statement as a cutting ironic rebuke to the Pharisees' self-righteousness

But for the Pharisees, they're more quick to note that the people who are coming into the house are the wrong people. Jesus, whether He overhears them or just knows what they're muttering in the corner or just muttering in their hearts, comes back with a line that summarizes a key aspect of the Kingdom. 'Those who are well have no need of a physician.' Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 'I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. And it's just dripping with irony. Essentially, Jesus throws their self-righteousness back in their faces. You Pharisees are sitting here in the corner and you're judging everyone at this party. You're judging Me. You're judging My disciples for associating with them. Well, if you're so immaculate, you need to understand I haven't come to offer you anything. You need nothing that I'll give if you're as perfect as you claim to be.

11 · The pastor signals a structural shift from critique of the Pharisees to positive exposition of the grace in Jesus' mission statement, promising to return to the Pharisees' self-deception later in the sermon

We'll get back to the Pharisees' self-assessment in a moment though. First, let's not lose sight of just the obvious grace of Jesus' words. This little summary statement of why He's come and who He's come for.

12 · The pastor makes a doctrinal assertion about the nature of Jesus' mission: God the Father sent Jesus specifically for the broken and outcast, not the respectable and religious

God didn't send His Son to collect all the people who have their act together. Jesus doesn't arrive and He doesn't examine the landscape of Judea and Galilee and look for the most religious people, look for the most fit people, the most well-established people. People with most respectable lives. That's not what happens at all. It's quite the opposite. Jesus comes sent from the Father to find the broken, to find the limping, to find people like Levi who are social outcasts, who live on just the fringes of society. And He doesn't just send Jesus to sit with them in the dust either. Jesus says the Father has sent him. The reason that he's here is he's come as a physician. He's come to make people well. He's come to heal their, their physical wounds and their psychological wounds, and he's come to change their hearts. And that's really incredible news.

13 · The pastor applies the doctrine of Jesus' mission to visitors and marginal attenders, directly addressing those who feel like they don't belong in church

If you're sitting here this morning and you've come— and sometimes we'll just invite folks at the start of service and recognize maybe you haven't come to church in a while. Or maybe this is a totally new thing for you. Or maybe you've been coming for a while, but you come late and you duck out early because you just don't feel like you're supposed to be here. You don't feel like you really fit or this is really a place for you. This passage in Luke 5 says quite the opposite. It says Jesus came specifically for people who feel like they don't really fit, who feel out of step. Who feel unworthy. Jesus doesn't want you to remain in your sin and your brokenness. He wants to offer you a fresh start, and He also promises not to leave you where you are.

14 · The pastor continues the application, weaving in a doxological reference to a communion hymn to reinforce that Jesus alone satisfies human longing

I love the song that we sang during communion when we sang during the bread. He's the one that we crave. He's the one that satisfies. And if we turn to him with repentance and faith, he's promising here as he promised to Levi, come follow me. And Levi senses there's something to this man that captures me. I want to go and I want to know it. And there's this crowd of people in this house, these broken misfit, just unwelcome people who have come to encounter Jesus and sensing in him that there's grace and there's mercy. The possibility of a fresh start.

15 · The pastor pivots back to the Pharisees, signaling a shift from the grace available to sinners to the self-deception of the Pharisees

But that party itself is a pretty scandalous thing. If we go back to the Pharisees, part of the paradox of Jesus' comments is that the Pharisees aren't nearly as healthy as they think they are, right? And we all sort of implicitly get that as soon as we read the story. There's an irony in Jesus' statement. I haven't come for those who are well, I've come for those who are sick. And really those who are well aren't quite as well as they think they are. It reveals something broken about their worldview, about how they see the world, the lens through which they view reality around them.

16 · The pastor explains the Pharisees' perspective: they view Jesus' association with tax collectors as scandalous because tax collectors are religious outcasts, barred from the synagogue

The major issue with what Jesus is doing for them is that He's associating with the trash. He's associating with the riffraff. More than just being corrupt traders, tax collectors, or these religious outcasts, they're not even allowed to go to the synagogue. So if you imagine what it's like in that day, it'd be like saying you almost have to have a pass at the doors of the church to get in. You have to be the right kind of person to even come into our worship service. And tax collectors are not the right kind of person.

17 · The pastor uses a personal story from his wife Hannah to illustrate the social status of tax collectors: like the father of a high school classmate who was an abortionist—wealthy but utterly ostracized and loathed by the community

I was talking with Hannah last night. How do you get the sense of just how uncouth it is to be around a tax collector? What's it like to be These people who actually make a lot of money, but in making money, they are completely pushed outside the religious community, and they are really just loathed by everyone around them. And it actually reminded me of a story she had told me. She had a girl classmate in high school whose father was an abortionist. And everyone just knew, it's a small town, that this guy is an abortionist in a hospital down the road. It's just this unspoken thing that everyone knows about. And so he has a nice house, makes good money, but very much pushed to the outside of society. Not one that you associate with. I'm not trying to minimize the horror of abortion or equate doing improper things financially with murdering unborn children, but I think that gives you a sense of how far to the fringes of society Levi and his friends are.

18 · The pastor synthesizes the Pharisees' dual outrage: first, that Jesus would attend such a gathering at all, and second, that Levi (supposedly repentant) would immediately invite other notorious sinners

And so the Pharisees are looking at Jesus thinking, 'You're going to hang out with him? You're going to go into his house and hang out with his abortionist colleagues?' It's that sort of event that's happening. And that's half the problem. The Pharisees are ticked that Jesus would go to a party like this, and they're also ticked that these supposedly repentant tax collectors has invited this whole rabble with them. And so there's this reality, the people that are in the house with Jesus are people that according to their whole thought process, He shouldn't be caught dead with.

19 · The pastor explains the cultural significance of table fellowship in first-century Judaism: sharing a meal signifies approval and solidarity

There's this thing that happens in that society when you break bread with someone, when you go to somebody's house, you're essentially sanctioning who they are. You're sanctioning the way they live their life. We don't always necessarily think of it that way. But that's what's happening is Jesus is going to the house and He's saying it's okay to associate with these people. You get that idea, you have to understand that the Pharisees are essentially separatists. There's actually parts of how their name even works in the language that underscores this idea. They're intentionally seeking to separate themselves from unsavory elements in the culture.

20 · The pastor steps outside the expositional flow to offer a moment of pastoral nuance, urging the congregation not to caricature the Pharisees

And they get this terrible rap, don't they, Pharisees? But the Pharisees aren't intentionally leading people astray, that they're trying to restore Israel. They believe they're protecting Israel and that they're bringing needed moral purification in the midst of this collision with an ungodly society that's overwhelming what they would view as a biblical worldview. Maybe we can have a little bit of sympathy for them as we think of that, right? That's what they're trying to do in their society.

21 · The pastor articulates the Pharisees' theological error: they believe moral purity is achieved through separation and quarantine from sinners, constructing a system of external standards that functions as gatekeeping

The way that they think they can accomplish this, though, is to completely separate themselves from sinners, to quarantine themselves from contagious, unholy people in the world. And so you see the tragedy of what Jesus is doing. He's going into a house full of sickness, full of contamination. To accomplish their quarantine, they developed this rigorous system to determine what was pure and what wasn't, what's socially acceptable and what isn't, because they want to protect the ethical and religious purity of their people. It's a bit like no shirt, no shoes, no salvation. You have to look the right way, you have to act the right way to be presentable to God, to enter into the synagogue, to be a part of this society. That's their view of the Kingdom. No shirt, no shoes, no salvation. You can't come to church unless you've got yourself straightened out. Access to God is barred unless you have the right friends, the right lifestyle.

22 · The pastor uses Trevin Wax's article on the Josh Duggar scandal to illustrate the Pharisees' fundamental theological error: they believe sin is primarily an external threat that can be quarantined through separation and rule-keeping

The real tragedy of what the Pharisees are doing though is they've completely failed to understand where the real threat of sin is coming from, haven't they? I was reading this week— what you read, you find an article that just so perfectly dovetails with the text you're looking at for Sunday, and that happened this week. I was reading an article on the Gospel Coalition website by Trevin Wax, and Trevin just noted how shocked the evangelical world has been by the recent revelation of Josh Duggar. For those who aren't familiar, he's the adult son on the family of 19 kids and counting. The Duggars. So this is family with just this large number of children, and they've really become a shining example to many people of, of what a conservative Christian family looks like and what they do. And so this shocking revelation came out recently that Josh, their oldest son, their married son, when he was a teenager, had molested multiple girls. The entire situation is sad and it's heartbreaking. It reveals sinfulness at its most rotten levels. There are little girls who have been horribly harmed by what happened, but more than really digging into all those details, what I appreciate about Trevin's article is that he noted what really shocked us. What really shocked so many people in the conservative evangelical world is that something like this could happen to a family like that. It seems so out of step. This family who had gone to such great lengths to shelter their kids from the evil of the world, and so there was careful modesty of dress and limited access to the internet limited access to the media, even though they were on a reality TV show. Very public discussions about the promotion of high standards of sexual purity. The parents speaking publicly about abstinence-only sexual education. Josh and his then-fiancée even saved their first kiss for the altar. They never dated except with chaperones. This is what they went about. And so there were these people that were just shocked that a family that was so careful could have something so horrible happen within their home. But the mistake that we often make, I think the Duggars are guilty of making, that the Pharisees make, is this assumption that sin is something that's out there. Sin is something that's out there and something you can quarantine to sort of stave off infection. But Trevin in his article makes a great point when he says, 'The reality, however, is that sin is not primarily something we need to be sheltered from, but delivered from.'