Dinner with the Wrong People

Somebody in Capernaum still had a hole in the roof to patch when Jesus walked out of town again, down to the shore of the lake. The crowd came after him, of course, and he taught them there by the water.

Beside the lakeside road sat a man named Levi, behind a table stacked with coins. Levi was a tax collector. Every fisherman with a basket of fish and every trader with a loaded donkey had to stop and pay him, and the money went to the rulers who bossed the land. Plenty of tax collectors charged extra and kept it. So people paid Levi, but they did not like him. They dropped their coins on his table and walked off muttering, "Cheat."

(When a whole town calls you a cheat, the dinner invitations stop coming.)

Jesus came along that road with the crowd behind him, and he stopped at Levi's table. Everyone waited. Would the teacher scold him? Would he make Levi hand the money back?

Jesus looked at him and said, "Follow me."

That was all. Levi got up, left everything sitting there, and followed him.

Soon afterward Levi threw a great feast at his house, all in honor of Jesus. He invited everyone he knew, and the people Levi knew were tax collectors and others the town called sinners. Jesus' followers came too.

"Come in!" Levi must have called at the door. "Come and meet him!"

(In those days people ate lying on cushions around a low table, propped on one elbow. Picture a room crowded with cheats and troublemakers, stretched out like cats, and Jesus right in the middle, passing the bread.)

Outside stood some Pharisees and teachers of the law. Pharisees worked very hard at keeping every rule, and they kept well away from anyone who didn't. They would not have set foot in Levi's house for a mountain of gold.

They caught Jesus' followers at the door. "Why does he eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?" they grumbled.

Jesus heard them, and he gave the answer himself.

"People who are well don't need a doctor," he said. "Sick people do. I have not come to call the ones who are already right with God. I have come to call sinners to turn around and come back to him."

(A doctor who only visited healthy people would have a very easy job and a very empty waiting room.)

The Pharisees were sure they were already right with God, so they went off grumbling. The Bible says no one is truly good, not even one. There was a cushion for them too. Levi had another name too: Matthew. Christians have long believed he is the same Matthew who wrote down the first book about Jesus in the New Testament. If so, the man who used to keep careful lists of who owed what ended up writing the story of the doctor who came to his table.

But a feast lasts one night. By morning Levi's friends were still called cheats, and some of them still were. One supper could not make a whole room well.

So Jesus went on to more towns and more tables, and the Pharisees' muttering followed him to every one. People started calling him "a friend of tax collectors and sinners." They meant it as an insult, and Jesus never once said it was untrue. He kept talking about a great feast still to come in God's kingdom, with every seat filled.

Picture that table. Cushions as far as anyone can see. Bread going round. Levi there, and the friends who turned back with him, and no one muttering at the door. To set that table, the doctor would give his own life on a cross, and his wounds would make sick people well.

Levi had thrown that party, but all along the guest of honor was the one doing the inviting.