For Sinners, Christ Came

⁹ As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him. ¹⁰ And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. ¹¹ And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples,“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹² But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³ Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” – Matthew 9v9-13

In this passage we catch Jesus doing Jesus-y things per usual. There’s that Jewish Rabbi breaking all historical, culural, and societal norms and boundaries again. Jesus wasn’t supposed to call tax collectors for the Roman Empire to be his disciples. Jesus wasn’t supposed to then go to their house and have dinner parties with all their sinner friends. But that’s exactly where we find him. As we know, all those dinners with sinners really irked the Pharisees.

But, Jesus didn’t do things like this in order to cause a ruccus or to offend the earlier generations of religious leaders simply for the sake of offense. What Jesus is doing here is not merely a culture shock. What Jesus is doing is profoundly theological. And the Pharisees understood this. Which of course, is why they ended up killing Jesus.

You see, Jesus did this thing where he went around and claimed to be God. Then after all the God talk he would then proceed to go have dinner with really sinful people, forgive their sins, and then state that these were exactly the people he came for.

This type of thing disrupted all that the religious pharisees thought that they knew about God. For centuries beforehand they understood that God was holy. They understood that sin had a high price to pay. Throughout the Old Testament when God would bring judgment on sinners by striking them dead on the spot, they knew God was just in doing so. They understood the meticulous nature of the sacrificial system and all the blood that had to be spilled for sins.

So there’s reason for the outrage when this guy Jesus had the audacity to claim to be God and then go socialize with sinners. However, the Pharisees only had half the story right. And in this case, being half right, is, as they say, being completely wrong. They had a Christless religion. They missed the prophecies and promises of a Messiah to come. They ignored the promised Christ. They dismissed the promised Redeemer.

The Pharisees had a high view of God’s holiness, but it wasn’t high enough. They thought their upstanding lives of moral religiosity of being better than the average sinner on the street would earn them the thumbs-up from God. In reality, their high view of God, was terribly low. Couple this with a terribly inflated view of self and you have someone with no apparent need of Christ. But oh how needy they actually were for him.

It was for sinners that Christ came. And here, Jesus is trying to break down the faulty worldview of the Pharisees. Many, like the Pharisees believe their morality will earn them the favor of God. On the contrary! Christ came for sinners. Until we realize that we are the tax collector in this story, that we are the sinner, we will remain a Pharisee. As for me, a sinner, I’ll take Christ.