Who Are The Sick: Mark 2:15-17
How do you respond when you are sick? I like to try and heal myself. I sleep more, take my favorite cold medicine, and hope it gets better. I loathe going to the doctor, and I like going to an urgent care even less. I don’t have trouble acknowledging that I am sick; my issue is taking the time to get outside help.
In today’s passage, Jesus goes to Levi’s house for dinner. Since Levi was having guests, he invite even more people over. He invites tax collectors, they were probably his best friends. The Bible doesn’t say what other kind of sinners were invited, but a fair guess is the invitees included the guards the tax collectors employed to keep the collection safe and other people relatively loyal to the Roman Empire. You wouldn’t find a good Jewish boy eating dinner with Roman conspirators like tax collectors.
This scenario plays out well. Through Levi, Jesus gets introduced to a different crowd. Rather than Jewish people crowding around to see displays of power, Jesus gets an opportunity to meet people who ordinarily wouldn’t have been interested in Jesus. You never know how the connections between people will work. More to the point, you never know how God will use the connections people have for His purposes.
It is surprising, though, that there are scribes in the vicinity. It is not surprising that the scribes find access to Jesus’ disciples rather than Jesus. It is likely than Peter, Andrew, James, and John may have felt more than a little uncomfortable around the friends of Levi. Out of respect for Jesus, I could see them at the party hanging out near the fringe. This would have made them ample targets for the scribes.
Earlier in Mark, the scribes pondered in their hearts. Now, the scribes question out loud. If nothing else, they have learned the lesson Jesus taught them earlier. They voice their doubts rather than keeping them inside! They go to Jesus’ disciples and ask what on earth Jesus is thinking by hanging out with Levi’s associates.
I love Jesus’ response. Jesus hears them and answers very plainly. Jesus tells the scribes that those who are healthy don’t need a doctor, but the sick do. Therefore, Jesus is hanging out with the sick. Naturally, we understand that nobody is righteous and we are all in need of Christ’s sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin. But the scribes wouldn’t have seen it that way. The scribes would have understood themselves as righteous because they belong to the lineage of Moses. The scribes would have heard Jesus telling them that He came for the rest of the world.
Jesus came for the tax collectors. Jesus came for the Roman citizens. He came for the lepers, the lame, the demon-possessed, and the physically ill. He came for Levi, Peter, Andrew, James, and John. He came for me. He came for you.
How do you respond when you are sick?
