Connor Coskery: Good evening. I am glad to be with you tonight. If we haven't met, my name is Connor Coscary. I have the privilege of serving as youth minister here, spending time with our teenagers, and tonight, we're going to continue our series through the gospel of Mark. So if you wanna go ahead and turn to Mark chapter 2, we're gonna focus on verses 13 through 17.
So Mark chapter 2 verses 13 through 17. And to catch you up, if you haven't been with us to where we're at, the past several weeks, we've been looking at, the beginning, the start of Jesus' public ministry. He's proclaimed that the kingdom of God is here and that our response to that kingdom being here is to repent, to turn from ourselves, and to believe the gospel. Jesus calls his first disciples, which is a group of fishermen, and then he begins healing those who are both physically and spiritually sick. And these various scenes, these various encounters that we see, with Jesus, they're meant to demonstrate Jesus's authority.
Jesus has the authority to call disciples, and they drop everything, and they follow him. Jesus has the authority to heal the sick. He has the authority to cast out demons. In these moments, they they build all the way to what we looked at last week where Jesus identifies himself as the son of man. Jesus is the prophesied savior from the book of Daniel, the son of man who has absolute authority to rule the future everlasting kingdom of God's people.
And Mark, like a good storyteller, he is he's building tension. He wants his readers to keep asking the question, who is this Jesus? Who is this guy who can both heal the sick and forgive sins? In each of these scenes, we see follows a similar pattern. Jesus is going to do something that's surprising.
The scribes or the Pharisees, they're going to not like it, They're going to challenge Jesus, and then Jesus is going to respond in a way that silences them. And we see that same pattern tonight in these verses that we're gonna look at. We're gonna see that Jesus calls an unlikely disciple, and then he dines, he feasts with an unlikely bunch. And the scribes and the Pharisees, they do not like it. It's a brief scene.
It might even be a familiar scene, but it carries radical implications. So let's read together Mark chapter 2 verses 13 through 17. And let's do listen carefully, for this is God's word. Verse 13. He, Jesus, 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 physician, but those who are sick.
I came not to call the righteous but sinners. This is the word of the Lord. This is to God. Let's pray together. Kinda thank you for, this evening, for the opportunity to gather together, to pay attention to what your word has to say.
Lord, there's a lot of other things that we could be doing right now, But this group is gathered in this place at this moment, at this time in history to hear from you and to hear from your word. So, lord, would you speak, for your servants are listening. We pray this in the name of the father, son, and holy spirit. Amen. So starting in verse 13, we see that after Jesus heals the paralytic, he goes to the shores of g of Galilee, and there are crowds of people coming out to hear his teaching.
And along the way, he notices Levi, son of Alphaeus, sitting in his booth collecting taxes. In the 1st century, tax collectors, they solicited money from travelers in a similar way to the modern day toll booth. So today, when you're traveling, there are various states that require you to pay a toll or a small fee in order to use certain roads. It's typically inconvenient. We don't like it.
And the the money that's collected from these tolls, is used to maintain infrastructure and to fund other projects for the Department of Transportation. And the Romans, who were occupying this land at this time, they, they did something similar. They would set up booths at the borders of their different territories, and they would require travelers to pay fees to cross from one land to the other. It was an easy way to raise money, to build their empire, and to keep their people in check. This was a relatively new rule, and the people of Israel didn't like it.
They could remember a time when they could freely travel from one territory to the next, but now they had to pay. Tax collectors were not well liked as you can imagine. Within the community, the tax collectors were on the bottom rung. The Romans, when they were employing tax collectors, they preferred to hire locals because locals were familiar with people, that that roam these lands. They were familiar with the land and they were familiar with, the community's customs.
So most tax collectors were Israelites working directly for Rome. As a perk, the tax collectors, they would enjoy a level of autonomy, and they possessed power that their friends didn't have. And what we see when we read about tax collectors is that they often use that power to cheat and steal. It was a common occurrence for a tax collector to deliberately overtax a fellow Israelite in order to make greater profit. So there was a community dimension that made them, untasteful.
There was also a spiritual dimension. The Jews, they expected their messiah to come and overthrow the Roman Empire and to reestablish their kingdom. To work for Rome meant to side with the wrong team. It meant forsaking your allegiance to your community and to your God. So they were seen as cheats, as traitors, and as enemies.
And this is who Jesus calls to be his disciple, Levi, the tax collector. As an aside, you may notice that in Mark and Luke, this story about Levi the tax collector, is, is with the name Levi in the gospel of Matthew. The same exact story is, is actually used. It replaces the name Levi with Matthew. And what we think is going on, we're not entirely sure, but we think that, since tax collectors were Greek speaking Romans, it's likely that this were was the same person with 2 different names.
That Levi was his Hebrew name and Matthew was his Greek name. But it's important to note that if this is indeed Matthew, that this is Matthew who would become an apostle, who would write the gospel according to Matthew. So, little fun fact there. I find that interesting that when you if you if you go to another gospel and you read this and you don't see Levi, same person. Before we look at how Levi responds, Let's consider together what must have been going through Levi's mind when Jesus approaches him.
With what we know about tax collectors, it's safe to assume that most of his interactions with other people was unpleasant. More than likely, he was on the receiving end of constant choice words, frustration, name calling, and insults for most of his days. But then Jesus came by. It's likely Levi had heard about Jesus, this mysterious miracle worker from Nazareth. If anything, from the masses of people that were coming through his boot that he was collecting taxes from.
And Jesus approaches Levi quietly without grumbling, and then he does something totally unexpected. He looks at Levi, and he says, follow me. Perhaps for the first time in a long time, Levi is seen as a person instead of an enemy. We don't know a lot about Levi, but from what we know about tax collectors, we can infer that he participated in plenty of corrupt, greedy, scandalous behavior. In all likelihood, Levi was a rough guy who hung out with a shameful crowd and Jesus sees him.
He doesn't shame him. He doesn't ask him if he's considered a lifestyle change. He doesn't try to reason or persuade him. Jesus says, follow me. He doesn't ask.
He commands with authority. And when Jesus calls his disciples, follow. Jesus shows us what it looks like to become his Jesus, Jesus calls us by his grace and we follow. When Jesus calls Levi, it's important to note that he's not doing something new. Instead, he's simply continuing the work that he's done from the beginning of scripture, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in unison have been doing this, have been calling people in the same way from the beginning of time.
Listen to how pastor theologian, J. I. Packer, describes how God relates to his people by grace. And I quote, the grace of God is love freely shown towards guilty sinners. Contrary to their merit and indeed in defiance of their demerit.
It is God showing goodness to persons who deserve only severity and who had no reason to expect anything but severity? Is God's God showing goodness to persons who deserve only severity and who has no reason to expect anything but severity. This is how God related to Abraham, to Moses, to David, and even the entire nation of Israel themselves. All of them were called by grace. It's never based on what they had to offer, but based on the gracious initiative of their covenant making and covenant keeping God With the simple words, follow me, Jesus met Levi's life of severity, and he met it with grace and mercy and compassion, and Levi's life is transformed.
He drops everything and he follows Jesus. His enemy status is exchanged with friend. And Jesus shows us in the when we when we move on that this is cause for celebration. The Pharisees had been keeping a close eye on Jesus. Him interacting with tax collectors was scandalous enough but Jesus is going to up the ante.
Jesus invites Levi, and not just Levi, Levi and all of his friends to dinner in his home. Let's let's read verses 15 through 17 again just to, to refresh as this as the scene shifts. Verse 15 says, as and as he reclined at the table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for they 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 physician, but those who are sick.
I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. So after Jesus calls Levi, he shifts the scene to a feast that's taking place in Jesus' home. Feast, feasting, having a big dinner party wasn't abnormal, for the scribes and Pharisees. Meals were an important part of their culture. Their issue is who's invited.
Jesus has invited many of his followers who happen to be the lowest of the low, sinners and tax collectors. By sharing a meal together, Jesus was communicating the fact that this is in his home. He's communicating that these people were like family. Mark even mentions, twice in verse 15 that they were reclining. Reclining was this posture.
It was a it was a custom that was reserved for the wealthy and for the only only the most festive of meals. Everything here suggests that this was more than just evening supper. This was a celebration of a transformed life. This meal was filled with joy, with merriment, and the scribes and the Pharisees are shocked. They literally didn't have a category for this sort of gathering.
This meal wasn't just odd, it was offensive. Why was this meal so offensive? At this time in history, 1st century Judaism, its dietary laws had been warped and become even more detailed than originally instructed in the Book of Leviticus. The Book of Leviticus, a book in the Old Testament that provides a lot of instructions for how God's people who are unholy can become holy and interact with a holy God. The Pharisees who, were an alternative lay movement within the nation of Israel, they had worked these laws and they they believed that Israel had to become totally pure before the nation would be restored.
Therefore, they changed the laws. They tweaked the laws and created radical restrictions to help enforce stronger boundaries with the outside world. Listen to how one commentator describes the Pharisees, and I quote, the Pharisees exhorted all Jews to observe voluntarily the purity code that the Torah required only of priests, and to do so all year round. The tables in their homes were seen as surrogates, as as substitutes to the altar in the temple in Jerusalem, and therefore, they strove to maintain in their households and among their eating command companions the state of ritual purity required by priests in the temple services. End quote.
The Pharisees, they lived in a world filled with fear, with rules, with striving for strict purity, and their dining tables were sacred. They were meant to be kept holy at all times. The meals, their meals, the times when they dined were one of the, primary places they could ensure that they didn't encounter people who would make them unclean. Do you see, given that context, why this meal with Levi and his friends is so offensive? Jesus is breaking all of the rules.
His table is surrounded by what they would consider the societal filth, And you know what? He's doing it on purpose. He's showing the scribes how the old their old categories, these categories that they have formulated in their mind, they no longer fit. He's doing this, and he's been doing this, and he's going to keep doing this. We see something similar when, when Jesus heals the leper in Mark 1.
We studied this a few weeks ago. Just like their table fellowship, the Pharisees had lots of rules and restrictions to prevent them being in the presence of a leper. They spent lots of energy avoiding even being in their presence and their reasoning was that if you, in some cases, even saw 1, but especially if you touched a leper, which is which is a general term for someone who had a had a skin disease at that time, then you would become unclean. But what happens when Jesus touches the leper? Instead of Jesus becoming unclean, the leper becomes clean.
Jesus isn't rejecting the old Levitical purity laws. He's showing everyone that he has come to fulfill the purity laws. Those laws show the need for a holy people, and Jesus is the one who will fully and finally make his people holy. Jesus is superseding the laws of old, and he is declaring the kingdom of God has arrived. God has come to his people.
The friend of sinners has prepared a feast, and everyone he calls is invited, not just the religious elite. So Jesus responds. He hears the Pharisees grumbling. Mark indicates that Jesus responds by simply further clarifying what he has come to do. His mission isn't to come as a wise sage or a political revolutionary.
Jesus has come to be a kind of doctor. And what use is a doctor if he's only around healthy people? The doctor is only helpful if he is with the sick. Jesus' whole ministry is to bring salvation to the lost, to restore health not only to the physically sick, but to the spiritually sick. And when Jesus eats with Levi, he makes his mission crystal clear.
He has come for sinners. He has come for the outcast, the forgotten, the filthy, the ordinary, and the confused. The sinner, capital s, is who is invited to Jesus' feast. The only people who are left out of that feast are those who don't think that they need God's help. As I was studying this passage, I I kept coming back to the parable of the prodigal son.
There's a lot of similarities between, between the two stories and what's going on. If you aren't familiar, the parable of the prodigal son or the parable of the 2 sons, it's found in the gospel according to Luke and it tells the story of a father who has 2 sons. And the the younger son, he he asked for his inheritance early. And he wants to and he and his father graciously gives him his inheritance and he takes his inheritance, and he goes, and he parties, and he squanders all of it. And he's literally down in the dumps about to feast on the same food with the pigs where he realizes, what am I doing?
And so he gets up and he decides to go home. And all the while, he, he doesn't know it, but his father has been sitting there looking and waiting in the distance for his son to come home. And when he finally sees his son coming towards him, he drops everything. He runs, which is unheard of for a patriarch in that time, and he embraces his son. He embraces his son, and he says, we're gonna kill the fattened calf.
We're gonna kill, I think I just went out. Out back. We're gonna we're gonna kill the prize animal of this family and we're gonna throw a party. And meanwhile, during all of this, the older brother has been living a life of great choices. He's been following all the rules.
He's been doing his jobs. And he is furious at how the father responds to the younger son coming back. This celebration that the father is forming, it makes him feel like his work, everything that he's been doing is meaningless. And his father compassionately engages his older son's frustration, and he says to him, son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead and is alive.
He was lost and is found. The parable, it ends abruptly. It ends without, we're never told if the older brother goes into the feast, and Jesus does this intentionally. He wants to turn it back onto his audience, which at this time would have mostly been Pharisees. He wants them to be left with the question, would you have gone into the party?
Pharisees are the older brothers in that story. In the same way that they were confounded at the father's grace in that parable, their pride in this story at Levi's feast at Jesus' house, their pride blinded them from seeing the glory of God's grace. In seeing a sinner who was lost and has been found, who was dead and is now alive. Both of these stories show us that God is on a mission to seek and save the lost. He didn't come to call the righteous, but sinners.
Jesus' kingdom is upside down in the eyes of the world because his kingdom belongs to those who have nothing, have nowhere else to go, and only see their need for a savior. But in having nothing, when they place their faith in their savior, they're given everything. This is the kingdom of God that is that he is building through Jesus. We read later in, from the apostle Paul, who was responding to the Ephesian church, which was really struggling to reconcile how this hodgepodge community of, of Jews and Gentiles were gonna coexist, and he encourages them. He says, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.
Levi, assuming that he is Matthew, is one of those apostles. He's one of those apostles who is described as being on the foundation stone. He's a foundation stone of the household of God. Levi, the tax collector. This is who Jesus calls to himself by grace.
And this community that he calls, he then sends out to be conduits for his great of his grace for the world. The body of Christ, the church, we who are gathered here right now, this is where Jesus continues to seek and to heal his people. As one wise person once said, and I quote, the church is not a museum for saints, but it's a hospital for sinners, end quote. The church is a place where we go and we experience a triage of our symptoms and we receive the healing balm of the gospel. If that's the case, this means that the church is a place for for the imperfect and the incomplete.
It means that we should consider how we show what is required to be a part of our community. The gospel should challenge and should change how we do church. Is this place more of an ingrown club, or is this a safe place for sinners, for broken people, for cultural misfits? We need to examine our own hearts and weed out any self righteousness that looks down on others. Even as we consider this story, we have to be careful not to become Pharisees ourselves and read ourselves into the hero of the story.
We miss the point if we leave here only with benevolent strategies. We are the sinners and tax collectors in this story. We are the ones who need Jesus to see us and to call us. We need the grace that Jesus offers and the friendship that he extends. That is our greatest need.
So tonight, if you resonate with the sinners and tax collectors, there is grace for you. Or if you are a recovering Pharisee, there is grace for you as well. Jesus ate with both. One author said, Jesus isn't self righteous about self righteousness. God graciously welcomes everyone to his feast.
The only requirement is to turn from yourself and trust in Christ because Jesus, the true righteous one, he is treated as a sinner so that sinners can be treated as righteous. That's the gospel. That is the good news of the gospel. The cross reminds us that when we don't measure up, we aren't condemned. Instead of condemning us, God is condemned in our place.
As the author of Hebrews describes, Jesus suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. In other words, Jesus suffered in the place of shame, which is outside the gate. That's where the lepers, that's where the those who were unclean, they were sequestered. They were told, that's where you have to hang out. And Jesus suffered outside the gate so that he could bring all of those outcasts in, that he could adopt them into his family.
Are you afraid that God can't handle your story? Take heart, the story of Levi, the call of Levi shows us that that that that Jesus can. He can handle it. I would love to sit down with Levi and hear about all of the terrible things that he's done and how, in a moment, all of that was transitioned by by by Jesus looking at him and saying follow me. And in the same way, if you are trying to earn God's favor with all of your good deeds, with with all of your striving, your life's stop striving.
Jesus calls. We follow. Salvation is by grace through faith. And all of this brings us to this table. I love how Jesus, before he is about to leave his disciples, instead of giving them theories on the atonement, he gives them a meal to share.
At this table, we look back with gratitude at what Jesus has done for us on the cross. We look around at the body of believers that we share this meal with. We look up to Christ who has ascended and is ministering on our behalf this very moment, and we look forward to Jesus's return. God gives us this meal to nourish our souls and prepare us for the great feast of the marriage supper of the lamb. And until that day, these ordinary elements of bread and wine, they are a means by which we receive God's grace.
He works through ordinary means in order to deliver his grace to us. The prophet Isaiah, gives us a picture of that future banquet because always keeping in mind that future banquet, that gives us present motivation to live. And that future banquet he describes in his 25th chapter, On this mountain, the Lord almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain, he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations. He will swallow up death forever.
The sovereign lord will wipe away the tears from all faces. Catch this. He will remove his people's disgrace from all the earth. This is the feast that is coming. Our disgrace, everything that creeps close behind, all of our disgrace will be cast away.
This table that we are going to celebrate tonight, this is not for the perfect. It is for everyone who sees their sin and need for a savior. So on the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it, and he said, this is my body given for you. After giving thanks, he said, do this in remembrance of me, and in the same way, he took the cup. After giving thanks, he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.
And together, as he said, as often as you eat of this bread and drink of this cup, you proclaim the death until he comes again. And church, we believe, we long for the day that he will come again. Amen? Amen. Here's how we're gonna take tonight.
We'll have 4 stations, standing up here. We'll start with the balcony. If the balcony wants to come down first, you'll walk forward, you'll tear off a piece of the bread, you'll dip it in the wine, this is non alcoholic wine, and you'll hear this is Christ's body given for you. And then you'll hear the blood of Christ shed for you. And you can you're welcome to take it back to your seats or take it right there.
Let me pray, and then our communion servers can come forward. God, we thank you for your goodness and your grace, for your kindness and your mercy. Lord, for how you call, you still call, and we follow, lord, and you you sustain us by your grace. Lord, that same grace that, that infuses us and, leads us to drop everything and follow you, Lord. That is the same grace that sustains our faith even in times that are really really hard.
Lord, I pray that this simple meal, together as a family of faith, lord, would nourish our souls, would strengthen our faith, and lead us to leave here as ascent people, as conduits for your grace to the world. So, Lord, would you bless this time? And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.