The King for Losers

In teen church at the moment we're slowly making our way through Mark's Gospel. I'm enjoying Mark's pace and matter-of-fact way of communicating what he knows about Jesus. On Wednesday we were in Mark 1:40-2:17, and we'll see Mark help us to unpack what 'the Kingdom of God is at hand' means, and continue to drive us towards an answer to the question, 'who is Jesus?'

The final incident in this group is found in verses 13-17. Lets read them together. These verses sum up what Mark is telling us about Jesus in this passage. Jesus is back at home, walking by the sea, He sees a tax collector, Levi, who is Matthew who wrote Matthew’s Gospel, and He calls him to follow Him. Just like James and John and Andrew and Peter last week, he does. But what is a tax collector? He was the enemy, he was hated by both the Romans and the Jews, if the leper and the cripple were outcasts because of their disabilities, and the tax collector was an outcast because of his job. But Jesus is no respecter of tradition, or social opinion, or anything like that. He calls him and Levi follows.

And not just Levi, but any number of tax collectors and sinners come and eat with Jesus. Sinners here doesn’t really mean ‘the lowest of the low,’ it just means people who didn’t follow the covenant, people who didn’t wash their hands when they returned from the market for example. But still people low enough on the scale that it annoyed the Pharisees. Why was He with them? For the same reason He touched a leper and didn’t complain when a cripple bust through His roof! Because Jesus came to call the righteous, not sinners.

This is the Kingdom, and it belongs to the broken, the sick, the sinners.

It belongs to those who know they have a problem. It belongs to losers, it belongs to ‘them.’ Kingdom life is admitting you’re a sinner and coming to Jesus to sort it out. Kingdom life is admitting you’re not perfect and letting Jesus change you. Only Jesus can do this. Only Jesus can cleanse a leper and allow Him close to God, only Jesus can heal a cripple and bring Him close to God, only Jesus can deal with our problems as we bring them to Him, and bring the Kingdom of God into our hearts.