Mark 2:13-17
Dinner at the Tax Booth
13Once again Jesus went out beside the sea. All the people came to Him, and He taught them there.
14As He was walking along, He saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth. “Follow Me,” He told him, and Levi got up and followed Him.
15While Jesus was dining at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with Him and His disciples—for there were many who followed Him.
16When the scribes who were Pharisees saw Jesus eating with these people, they asked His disciples, “Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
17On hearing this, Jesus told them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Berean Standard Bible
Rome ran the country, and Rome needed money. The way it collected that money was to sell the job. A local man paid the sum up front, then took whatever he could get out of his own town, and everything above the figure Rome wanted was his to keep. So a tax collector was a Jewish man making a living off his neighbors with the occupying army standing behind him.
He was not disliked the way we dislike people who annoy us. He was a traitor with a desk.
Mark has Jesus out beside the sea with a crowd around him, teaching. Then he is walking along, and he sees Levi sitting at the tax booth, and he tells him to follow. Levi gets up and goes.
Compare that with what Simon and Andrew left at 1:18, which was their nets. If the fishing came to nothing, the water was still there in the morning. A tax booth was a bought position, so the day Levi stood up and walked off, somebody else took it, and there was no old trade waiting to have him back either.
The next thing Mark reports is dinner at Levi's house, and the dinner is what caused the trouble. Sitting down to a meal with somebody in that world was a statement about them. It said you accepted the person across the table, and everybody watching read it exactly that way. Jesus is eating in a room full of tax collectors and people the town had already written off.
The scribes do not take it to Jesus.
When the scribes who were Pharisees saw Jesus eating with these people, they asked His disciples, “Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Given how they understood holiness, it is a fair question. You stayed clean by staying away from what was unclean. A teacher eating at that table had put himself on the wrong side of that, in public, on purpose.
Jesus hears them and answers with something a child could follow.
It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.
There is a hook in the second half of that. He never says there are no righteous people. He says they are not the ones he came for, and the men who asked the question are left to work out later, on their own time, which group they had been putting themselves in.
How We Know
Verse 14 gives the tax collector a father: Levi son of Alphaeus. The name turns up again in the list of the Twelve at 3:18, where one of them is James son of Alphaeus. Mark never connects the two and never explains the repetition. He supplies a patronym he has no use for.
That is consistent with material carrying more detail than the writer is working with.
The tax booth has a setting too. Capernaum sat on the north shore of the lake, close to where the Jordan flows in, and that river divided Herod Antipas's Galilee from the land his brother Philip ruled. Josephus records Philip building up Bethsaida, across the water, into a city he renamed Julias. A toll post belongs on a line like that.
- Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.28.
Questions
1 Tax collectors were hated, and it went further than the money. Why?
AnswerThey collected for Rome, the empire occupying their own country, and they kept whatever they could squeeze out above what Rome asked for. A tax collector was a Jewish man making a living off his neighbors with an army behind him.
2 Simon and Andrew left their nets by the sea. What did Levi leave that was different from that?
AnswerA way back. Nets and water wait. A tax booth was a bought position, and once he walked away somebody else was sitting in it, and no honest trade in town would have taken him on either.
3 Who is the person at your school or your work that nobody wants to sit next to? Jesus chose a table like that on purpose. Why did sharing a meal matter so much then?
AnswerBecause eating with someone said, publicly, that you accepted them. Everyone in that culture could read it. Jesus was not paying a quick visit to these people. He sat down and ate where the whole town could watch him do it.
4 Jesus says he came for the sick and not the healthy. Is he telling the scribes they were fine as they were?
AnswerThe text does not say that, and it is better not to add it. What he says is who he came for. Whether the men asking thought of themselves as healthy is a question he leaves sitting in their laps.
What This Means for Us
The scribes were not wrong that Jesus was doing something risky. They had the risk pointing the wrong way. They believed a person stays clean by staying apart, and Jesus keeps walking into rooms that should have ruined him and coming back out with the room changed instead.
There is a table in your life with somebody at it you have quietly decided is not worth the trouble. Somebody difficult, somebody who has done real damage, somebody whose history makes them easier to avoid.
Eat with them. You do not have to fix anything, and you do not have to raise the subject. Sit down.
Prayer
Father, thank you for coming to look for people who knew they were sick, and for sitting down at tables where nobody respectable wanted to be seen. We are quicker to protect ourselves than to go looking. Send us toward somebody this week, and keep us there long enough to matter. Amen.