Calling All Sinners

 DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE

CALLING ALL SINNERS

Luke 5:27-39

27 After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. "Follow me," Jesus said to him, 28 and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. 29 Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. 30 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and 'sinners'?" 31 Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."  33 They said to him, "John's disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking." 34 Jesus answered, "Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? 35 But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast."  36 He told them this parable: "No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. 38 No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'The old is better.'" 

Now that we are following Jesus, we need to look at this banquet and what happened there. First, Jesus was eating with tax collectors, the worst of the worst among the Jews because they worked or were willing to be employed, used by Rome, in cahoots with their occupiers. When questioned about his eating with such awful people by those who thought themselves to be righteous through the law, Jesus told them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinner to repentance.” The question is who was he referring to, those tax collectors he was eating with, or those who complained to Jesus’s disciples? Did the law forbid them to eat with people of their own faith? Did they think the tax collectors rejected the law, just because they appeared to be sympathetic to Rome, but collecting taxes for Rome. But the point is that Jesus came for us, sinners who were in some sense living under the law of sin and death. He redeemed us and set us free from our captivity. We were desperately in need of a doctor, for we were not healthy and doomed to die from the sickness we were infected with sin. We do not understand why the Pharisees and the teachers of the law thought they were righteous. If they had studied the law, they would have seen that it was impossible to adhere exactly to it, that they needed a sacrifice, the spilling of blood to atone for their sin. But they made up their own law, rules, and regulations to which they could follow and thus made themselves righteous. It is always simpler to make up our own rules and regulations because we make them for ourselves, knowing we can fulfill our own rules. However, when we fellowship with Jesus, when we sit with him at the banquet, dining on his words, digesting the word of God, then we fully understand that Jesus came for us sinners. However, we praise His holy name, for we are saved by grace, and not by our works, so that we cannot boast in ourselves, like the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. However, we can boast in Christ because he came to call us sinners to repentance, to change the way we think, that is we cannot heal ourselves by any means, we need Jesus for He is calling all sinners.