Today's Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 5 verses 27 through 32:
27 After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” 28 And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.
29 And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. 30 And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” 31 And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
It is impossible to understand the radicality of this story without knowing the degree to which tax collectors were despised in Jesus' day. Though we may joke about IRS agents today, tax collectors in Jesus' day were seen as political opportunists, betrayers, and scalawag collaborators.
Just how dangerous it must have been for Jesus to associate with tax collectors came home to me several years ago at the bedside of a dying Vietnam veteran. Cancer would soon take his life and he wanted to come clean about something which had deeply troubled his conscience since the war.
He told me he had been in a South Vietnam village when he witnessed a Viet Cong collaborator who had been caught by the villagers. With a very serious protection racket, the man had been extracting tolls from his own village in exchange for not letting troops in to attack it. When the villagers caught him unprotected, they drug him into the middle of the village and tortured and then executed him full public view.
In his confession to me, the dying veteran told me that he had always felt guilty for not doing something to intercede. But this was war; and in the villagers' words, this was a "tax collector".
Jesus came to save even tax collectors.
We can hardly imagine how disturbing that really was, and how much it would cost him.
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