Dinner with the Wrong People

There was a man named Levi, and everybody knew what he was.

He was a tax collector. He sat at his little table by the road and took money from his own people to hand to the soldiers who ruled them. And he took a little extra for himself. Most of them did.

So the people walked past Levi's table and would not look at him. They pulled their coats in a little tighter, the way you do when you don't want to touch something dirty. To them, Levi wasn't a name anymore. He was just a bad word, a word like cheater.

I wonder if Levi believed that word too. I wonder if he sat there counting his coins and felt the empty seat beside him. No one came to his house for dinner. No one ever would.

Then one ordinary day, a teacher came walking down that road. His name was Jesus, and crowds went wherever he went. Levi must have ducked his head. Surely a teacher would walk past, the way they all walked past.

But Jesus stopped.

He stopped right at the little table where the wrong man sat. And he looked at Levi. Really looked. The way you look at someone you have been hoping to find. And then Jesus said two small words.

"Follow me."

He did not tell Levi to clean himself up first, or to prove he was good enough. He just said, "Follow me. Come and be mine."

And Levi stood up. He left his coins right there on the table, and he went.

Do you know what Levi did that very night? He threw a great big dinner, and he filled his house with all his friends. And who were Levi's friends? Other tax collectors. Other people the town called wrong. All the ones nobody else would eat with.

And Jesus sat down right in the middle of them, passing the bread, laughing at their stories, staying long after the plates were empty.

When the careful, important people saw it, they were upset. "Why does he eat with people like that?" they whispered. "Doesn't he know what they are?"

Jesus heard them, and he answered.

"It isn't the healthy who need a doctor," he said. "It's the sick. I didn't come for the ones who think they're fine. I came for the ones everybody gave up on."

He had already shown them what he meant. Only a little while before, when four friends dug through a roof to lower their friend down to him, Jesus had looked at a man who could not walk and healed the hidden part first. Now he was doing it again. The crowd looked at Levi's table and saw the wrong people. Jesus looked at that same table and saw exactly the people he had come all this way for.

That is God's heart, little one. He does not stay far off where it is clean and safe. He comes looking. He walks straight to the table where the lonely one sits, the one who is afraid his name is only a bad word now, and he pulls out a chair, and he sits down close.

Because he is gathering a family, and he will not come home missing a single one, not even the one everybody gave up on.