Reading: Mark 2:13-3:6
Context: Why would eating with “tax collectors and sinners” be particularly offensive to the Pharisees?
As holy people and the standard-bearers of righteousness, the Pharisees had a clear insight into who was acceptable and who was unacceptable. A bit like the issue of the clean and the unclean. So the Pharisees knew that those tax collectors and sinners were not the sort to be eating with. Righteous folks know better. We have to keep ourselves pure from the filth of the world, and these sinners and tax collectors didn’t get that memo. So to see Jesus purport to be someone speaking on God’s behalf and eating with these types was odious to them.
And it goes deeper than mere social discomfort. In the ancient Jewish world, sharing a meal was far more loaded than grabbing a sandwich with someone you barely tolerate. A shared table was a shared life. It was a statement of acceptance, of solidarity, of “you are my kind of people.” The Pharisees understood that perfectly well. Which is precisely why it was so scandalous. You don’t sit down with the morally compromised and call yourself a teacher of the Law. You certainly don’t do it repeatedly, publicly, and apparently with great enjoyment. That was the affront. It wasn’t just that Jesus was eating with the wrong people — it was that He looked perfectly at home doing it.
I am so glad that we don’t have that attitude today … wait, what? To be fair, I can sympathise with the Pharisee position. I certainly held a similar view when I was younger. It was important to evangelise to those types of people, but to eat with them, be around them on a social basis, interact and engage with them as though they are friends – nah, that wasn’t for me, because they were the great unwashed and I was among the holy, set apart crew. They could get a handout, and it would be good if they could get a wash and get baptised as well and join us civilised folks. But how offensive and repugnant it would be to deign to spend quality time with them. I am confident that this was not an attitude that I had on my own. I am also confident that this attitude has not died out.
The tragedy is that this posture is often dressed up in the language of holiness. “We must guard against contamination.” “We must keep the standard.” And there is, of course, a truth in there — the Scriptures do call us to holiness. But holiness was never designed to be a fence that keeps the needy out. It was designed to be a light that draws the lost in. Jesus managed to be both utterly holy and wonderfully accessible to broken people. That is the model. That is the challenge. That is the goal.
God had mercy on me and opened my heart and eyes. I trust Him to have mercy on us all.
Content: What three specific conflicts with religious leaders does Mark record in this section?
Teehee. Those religious leaders really had a problem with Jesus. First, there was Jesus knocking about with the sinners and tax collectors – relaxing and eating with them. The religious rulers criticised that. Then they saw Jesus’ disciples getting something to eat by plucking corn … on the Sabbath. The religious rulers criticised that. Then they paid attention to see what else Jesus would do to mess up the Sabbath, and He had the temerity to call them out on it when it came to the man with the withered hand. He challenged them, but they said nothing in response, and He went on to work a healing on the Sabbath. It was rather like the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule. As soon as they saw this, they knew it was time to sort this guy out once and for all.
But notice the trajectory there, because it tells us something important about how religious opposition hardens. The first conflict is about social behaviour — who you eat with. That is concerning but manageable. The second is about law observance — are you keeping the Sabbath? Now we’re getting serious. The third is a confrontation — Jesus actively challenges them in public, in the synagogue, in front of everyone. He asks them a direct question. Silence. They had no answer, because the truth was that the Law was never meant to leave a man with a withered hand if something could be done about it. Their silence said everything.
And Mark tells us something chilling at the end of that third strike — the Pharisees went out and immediately began plotting with the Herodians to destroy Him. The Pharisees and the Herodians were natural enemies in every other respect — politically, socially, ideologically. But nothing unites unlikely allies like a shared threat. Jesus was that threat. Three conflicts, a hardened heart, and a conspiracy. That escalation from criticism to conspiracy didn’t happen overnight in their hearts. It had been building. We would do well to watch our own hearts when they begin to stiffen against the grace of God at work.
Concept: Jesus states He came to call “sinners, not the righteous.” What does this reveal about grace and human need?
Grace is not passive. Grace isn’t a rosy, cosy picture of someone waiting on a park bench, hoping something pleasant will happen as the lovely melodies swell on a wonderful spring afternoon. Grace is active. Grace is assertive. Grace is calling. Grace is looking. Grace is reaching. Grace is on a mission to address those who have that fundamental need – the need to be reconciled, renewed, and redeemed. This need is at the core of every member of the human species. We need these things because we’re sinners. We need these things because we have no righteousness of our own of any worth when it comes to the true standard of righteousness. When we recognise this position, we’re in the right place to receive the grace that calls, the grace that looks, the grace that reaches. This posture of humility appeals to grace, and so it’s a good way to start the day to recognise our need for His grace and be thankful for the grace that restores, redeems and renews.
What Jesus is also doing in that statement is exposing a profound irony. The “righteous” in His audience — the ones who thought they were fine, the ones who had no awareness of their need — were actually in the more dangerous position. It’s a bit like someone who is seriously ill but feels no pain. The absence of symptoms doesn’t mean the problem is absent. In fact, it makes it worse because they’re not looking for the cure. Self-diagnosed righteousness is one of the most effective barriers to the grace of God. It was then. It still is.
And what about Matthew? Here is a tax collector, a man whose very occupation put him in the category of traitor and sinner in his community’s eyes. Jesus walks past and says, “Follow me.” Not “clean yourself up and come back,” not “prove yourself first,” not “let’s talk about your past.” Just — follow me. And Levi gets up. Just like that. There’s something in that immediate response that speaks to how grace works. When you know you need it, you don’t deliberate long over the offer. Levi knew. He got up. May we know our need as clearly as Levi knew his.
Conclusions: How do religious traditions sometimes conflict with the heart of God’s kingdom? How can we guard against this?
Whenever a religious tradition opposes grace, conflict arises. And religious tradition – as with any man-made construct – is at risk of opposing grace, because grace is God’s action and man-made tradition – well, it’s in the label, it’s man-made and often resistant to God. That operates at all levels, my individual attitudes, our conduct, the convention of the gathering, etc. To combat this, we must continually examine our motives. We have to check if what we’re doing rolls with grace and flows from grace. We must continually submit our hearts and minds to the Spirit of God and ask Him if we’re in line with His grace, if we are moved and motivated by it. Or are we getting stuck in our way and preferring to lean on our own understanding? We are prone to it, and we have to be careful to keep checking.
It’s worth pausing to ask — how does a tradition even start to oppose grace? It rarely begins with a dramatic rebellion. It usually begins with a reasonable-sounding principle that quietly takes precedence over people. The Pharisees didn’t set out to leave men with withered hands unhealed. They set out to honour God through Sabbath observance. That is not a bad starting point. But somewhere along the line, the tradition became the master rather than the servant. The rule became more important than the person the rule was meant to serve. Jesus had to point that out directly — the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. When we flip that around in any area of our traditions, we’ve drifted.
The safeguard, then, is exactly what Jesus modelled — keeping the person in view. Not the principle in isolation, not the tradition in abstraction, but the actual human being in front of you with actual needs. That requires a softness of heart that only the Spirit of God can sustain. We can’t manufacture it by trying harder or having better theology. We need Him to keep us tender. And we need the Word to keep showing us where we’re getting rigid, so we can repent before the rigidity becomes a conspiracy.
Next time:
Episode Six: Kingdom Community
Reading – Mark 3:7-35
Thank God that He has mercy on our capacity to be self-righteous, and as we spot it, we can repent of it as we observe Jesus showing the truth of the situation. This is another reason to get the Word In so we can get the Word Out.
For His Name’s Sake
C. L. J. Dryden
Shalom
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