Dining with Jesus – Matthew, pt 1
God willing, over the next few weeks, we will be bringing a series entitled Dining with Jesus. We will be looking at passages in Luke’s gospel where Jesus shared a dining experience with his followers. Today, we begin with Luke 5, Dining with Matthew.
…Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi (Matthew) sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow me.” So, leaving everything behind, he got up and began to follow him.
Then Levi hosted a grand banquet for him at his house. Now there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others who were guests with them. But the Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus replied to them, “It is not those who are healthy who need a doctor, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Luke 5:27-32
The problem with these Pharisees was they didn’t understand that they too were like Matthew. Many of us may be tempted to criticize them while sharing their delusion that we are not like Matthew either.
Jesus tells the story of the man who says, “Lord, I thank you that I’m not like other men. I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, I don’t do that or the other.” Jesus said although the man in the story thought he was praying, he was really just talking to himself. And then, Jesus says that there was a sinner in the back, too ashamed to lift his head; he beat on his chest and said, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.” Jesus said that man went home justified.
Before the dinners when Jesus will meet with the Pharisees and rebuke their self-righteousness, Jesus dined with Matthew. And when the Pharisees criticized him for eating with sinners, Jesus did not say, “Hey, don’t talk that way about my friend Matthew. He’s just practicing an alternate lifestyle.” Instead, Jesus says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Jesus compares sin to sickness.
We are living in a culture where the tide that keeps washing over our televisions, our radios, our newspapers, our magazines, and many pulpits is a message that says, “Well, maybe we need take a fresh look at this thing. We ought not to judge.” We live in a culture today where it’s not just those outside the church who are saying you shouldn’t call sin, sin. In fact, in many of our churches the only thing we’re allowed to call sin is being “judgmental” or “intolerant.”
Jesus comes along and says, “I’m going to have dinner at Matthew’s house, and I’m going to have dinner with Matthew‘s friends. I came for the sick people.”
If you don’t know you’re sick, you’re really not going to appreciate what Jesus came to do. If our churches no longer proclaim that sin is sin and that sin is like a sickness and is deadly in its consequence, we are not going to have any Good News to proclaim to the culture. It’s a false gospel that says, “Hey, you’re okay just like you are.” Many of our churches tell this lie in an attempt to make people feel comfortable and at home in church. That is not kind. It is not love. That lie simply greases the skids for people on their way to hell. There is a Judge and eternal judgment is coming, but for many it will be too late to repent.
Jesus welcomed Matthew. Matthew felt accepted by Jesus, but not because Jesus accepted his behavior. Jesus compared Matthew and his friends to those who are sick and said, “I’m the physician. I’ve come to bring healing.”
The church must offer the healing of God‘s grace to people who are sick. We must honestly give testimony to what He has done to bring healing in our lives. If instead, we parrot the world’s lie telling people, “You’re not really sick. You don’t need to change,” we won’t have helped anybody. We need to point them to Jesus who loves them and is the only One who can truly change us from the inside out.
