Take a few deep breaths to center your heart and your mind as you prepare to meet with God.

Meditation on God

In Mark 1:11, God says to Jesus, “You are my dearly loved Son, and you bring me great joy.” God is a God full of emotion, from sobriety to jealousy, and from anger to joy. Take a moment and ask yourself this question: What is it that brings God great joy?

Teaching

“Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that were coming to him. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be my disciple,” Jesus said to him. So Levi got up and followed him. Later, Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.) But when the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?” When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.” (Mark 2:13-17)

I went to public school in Saint Louis County, and my classmates were made up of all different ethnicities, nationalities, social classes, interests, and different cliques, and all of us were trying to figure out who we were going to choose to be. There were the jocks, the pot heads, the straight A students, the cheerleaders, the drama kids, the band geeks and the orc dorks to name a few. While everyone from every group held each other with different levels of respect, there was an informal food-chain of people’s value, putting people with higher grades, better looks, and more developed skills at the top.

In Jesus’ day, this food-chain was based on religious purity. The Pharisees and other religious leaders were at the top because they spent their entire lives trying to abstain from unclean acts with all their might and purifying themselves every chance they got. On the bottom of the food-chain were “tax-collectors and other disreputable sinners.” While the sinners were so because they did not take their ritual cleanliness very seriously or had been ostracized because of deeply unclean things in their past, tax collectors were lumped in with that same group because they were Roman sellouts. They took tax money for the Roman government, and their own personal salary came out on top of what was required. People viewed them as cheats, liars, and deeply unpatriotic.

It is in light of this that Jesus’ decision to come have a meal with these misfits seems incredibly out of line to the religious leaders. They storm into this sinner’s potluck, indignant and ready to catch Jesus in the act of His own sin, but something interesting happens. Jesus, staying totally pure, says that “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do.” While Jesus came to die for the sins of everyone who would accept Him, Jesus’ target audience was those people farthest down the food-chain. He specifically goes after the people that everyone else gives up on and hopes to forget. This move gives me hope. Not only is Jesus willing to associate with people who are deeply unworthy, but he believes in them. While we don’t know much about the fate of Jesus’ partymates, the text says that many who followed Jesus already had lives like them. On top of this, Levi the tax collector who hosted the party turns out to be Matthew: a disciple of Jesus’ and the writer of the gospel according to Matthew, one of the four gospels in the Bible. Jesus was recruiting some of his most faithful followers in the places where the religious leaders of his day had given up hope, and he is not done doing that today.

Examination

Take a moment to think about something in your life, whether it be a past experience or a lack of time reading your Bible or praying, that you would assume would disqualify you from being a person Jesus wants to be near.

In the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life on Earth, it seems to be the case that the more of these “disqualifications” that people had, the more Jesus would seek them out and hang out with them. Take a moment and think about the fact that nothing that you think could disqualify you from Jesus is more powerful than Jesus Himself.

Memory Verse

One verse or a partial verse

Find a handful of moments today to take this Verse from Mark 2 to heart.

“Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.” (Mark 2:17)