God Saves the Sick

Did God save you from something, or did you become a Christian because that's what good Christians do?

Mark 2:13Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. 14As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector's booth. "Follow me," Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.

15While Jesus was having dinner 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 teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the "sinners" and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: "Why does he eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"

17On hearing this, Jesus said to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

I've been going through a study on the book of Mark. (The entire study can be downloaded at: http://www.xenos.org/teachings/nt/mark/dennis/index.htm). The pastor through his exposition pointed out just how radical this calling of Levi (Matthew) was.

Tax collectors were hated by their own people. First of all, if you were walking down the road, and a tax collector saw you, they would make you pay. But you could run into another tax collector 20 minutes later and he would make you pay too. There was no checks and balances on this system. Furthermore, tax collectors were allowed to keep everything above the Roman quota they were required to collect. That means, they would cheat their own people in order to make money.

So you had these cheating low-lifes taking money from their own people; of COURSE the Jews hated them. Therefore any self-respecting Jewish religious person would not let a tax collector buy any of their merchandise. But that wasn't all. The Romans resented them for the same reason. Any person who could do this to his own people was not fit to buy from the Romans either. Think of the name "Benedict Arnold" and you start to get the feeling associated with publicans.

So here you have these guys who are getting filthy rich off their own people, who are not only forbidden to spend money among their own people, but also among the oppressive nation for which they work. So where do they spend money? Naturally, they would only be able to buy from people who were even lower on the "sin" level than themselves: prostitutes, pimps, and sinners. I love how paintings from the Renaissance give us this picture that Levi and the "sinners" at his house were these pious-looking scholarly male inquirers rather than the drinkers, revelers, and party animals they really were. Some of these pictures I find for this blog . . . they just make you laugh.

Jesus even going to Levi's house was a huge deal because of the "sin" he was infecting Himself with by being there. In that day, it was thought that after breathing the same air as a prostitute, you would have to undergo a full religious bath. Not for hygiene's sake, but because you might catch some of their sin through the air. What a terrible view of humanity, right? That there are "good" people and "bad" people? But we do the same thing today.

So this is the context of just where the Pharisees were in their spiritual dilemma. When they saw Jesus sitting there, they were appalled to the highest (or maybe lowest) degree. How could someone calling Himself equal with and a person of a Holy Godhead POSSIBLY think that this was appropriate behavior. Obviously, God wants all of us to live holy, pristine lives, right?

This is why Jesus brings up the point (I love when Jesus talks. He's just so dry and to the point.) If you are so healthy in your "goodness" then you can't be helped. When people realize their sin is the only time God can fix anything because they know they need fixing. If a person has a broken leg and they refuse to see it as broken and they continue to walk on it without medical help, they will never be fixed.

Blessings to God. If He is able to raise even Himself from physical death, He can surely save a spiritually dying people.

Anyways, as I listened to this teaching a rhetorical question popped into my head:

Did God save you from something, or did you become a Christian because that's what good Christians do?