Stories of Jesus: Luke 5:27-32: Jesus Calls Levi

Levi had a nasty job. The decent people shunned him. But Jesus was different. Jesus found a friend in Levi and Levi found a friend in Jesus. In this story we learn something about ourselves and even more about Jesus.

LUKE 5:27-32: JESUS CALLS LEVI

INTRODUCTION

Hardly anyone has a good word to say about the taxman. Through the ages people have over and over expressed dislike for and often rebelled against the people who collected the taxes.

One man said that although he knew his next door neighbor well, he never seemed to be able to find out what the man did for a living. Then somehow he learned why his neighbor didn’t talk about his work. His neighbor worked for the IRS. He feared that if people found out what he did for a living, they wouldn’t like him.

In the early days of our nation, when we were still colonies of England, the protests against taxes sometimes led to tarring and feathering the revenue agents who worked for the English government.
And when the United States became a nation, the people began protesting against the taxes the new government tried to collect.

Levi had a nasty job. He was the tax collector who collected taxes for the Roman occupiers of Galilee.

Read: Luke 5:27-32. (Levi evidently had two names. He is called Matthew in Matthew’s gospel.)

I. Levi was a tax collector.

A. Here is how the Roman’s tax system worked.

A prominent man would bid to collect the taxes in a certain district. He was known as a “tax farmer.”
He would agree to pay the Romans what they required and then collect from the people whatever he could, taking the extra for himself.
But the people who actually did the dirty work of shaking down the people for their taxes were Jews the tax farmer hired to work under him.
These men also had to make a living, so they also would ask for more than was actually owed.
It was like the Mafia collecting the taxes.
Tax collectors such as Levi were considered to be in the same class as prostitutes and robbers and adulterers. They weren’t allowed to attend synagogue worship. They had no part in the community life of the town.
They were especially shunned by the religious people, the Pharisees and scribes.
If you can imagine a Norwegian or a Frenchman working for the Nazis by collecting taxes from his countrymen, you can imagine the hatred that Levi and his fellow tax collectors felt from their fellow Jews.

B. Levi lived in Capernaum. Capernaum had become Jesus’s “hometown” after he left Nazareth to begin his ministry.

This is the city where Peter’s house was. You remember that it was here that Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law.
Capernaum was the city where Jesus was when the paralyzed man came through the roof to meet Jesus.
Capernaum was where Jesus healed the nobleman’s son.

Capernaum lay on the road running along the north shore of the Sea of Galilee.
It was near the border between two provinces in the Roman Empire.
One of the ways Romans collected taxes in their empire was to collect import and export duties on goods that were carried across borders.
So Levi’s tax booth was a busy place.

C. Because Jesus was often in Capernaum and did many miracles there, Levi had no doubt heard about Jesus’s miracles and heard some of his teaching.

Jesus had dropped by tax booth and become acquainted with Levi.
Jesus was friendly, even with tax collectors. Levi appreciated that.
Somewhere along the way, Levi came to faith.
Jesus saw in Levi the qualities that would make him a good disciple and apostle.
So when one day Jesus dropped by the tax booth and invited Levi to follow him, Levi was ready to go.

D. We read that Levi “got up and left everything and followed him.”

We’re not to suppose that Levi just left the money in the drawer and walked off his job. Surely he let his supervisor know that he was quitting.

What the gospel writers want us to understand is that Levi didn’t hesitate to give up all his possessions and all his security and all his riches and become a follower of Jesus.

Levi’s decision was more dramatic than that of James or John or Peter or Andrew. They were fishermen, and they could go back to their former occupation any time they wanted to. And sometimes they did go back to fishing, even one time after Jesus’s resurrection.
But Levi had burnt his bridges behind him.
He had nothing to go back to.

We wish we knew more about Levi’s career as an apostle, but apart from this story we know nothing. We do have the tradition that he wrote the gospel of Matthew. Islam has preserved a tradition that Matthew and Andrew carried the gospel to Ethiopia.

II. But the most interesting part of the story is what happened after Levi’s call.

A. Jesus told his fishermen disciples to follow him, and he would make them fishers of people.

Levi lost no time in starting his “fishing for people.”
He gave a party and invited all his low-life buddies: “Then Levi made him a great feast in his house; and there was a large company of tax collectors and others sitting at table with them.”
I can imagine a rowdy crowd of tax collectors and other sinners and their girl friends.
Evidently when Levi liquidated his assets to followJesus, he set aside some of the money for this banquet with which to introduce his friends to Jesus.

B. Jesus loved to be in the company of sinners, outcasts of society, and others who decent people avoided.

But he didn’t love them in their sin. He loved them because he had a better life to offer them.
When Jesus won the friendship of rogues and thieves and loose women and people in trouble, it wasn’t to leave them in their misery.
His mission was to call them to repentance—as we saw in the last verse I read.
Jesus never supposed that a relationship with him was enough. He was always calling sinners to repentance.

In his book, Loving God, Charles Colson tells the story of a Hollywood gangster named Mickey Cohen, who attended a Billy Graham crusade and decided to “accept Christ.”
Later, when one of Graham’s associates told him that as a new Christian he needed to cut his mob ties, Mickey was incredulous.
“You never told me that I had to give up my career. You never told me that I had to give up my friends. There are Christian movie stars, Christian athletes, Christian businessmen. So what is the matter with being a Christian gangster? If I have to give up all that—if that’s Christianity—count me out.”

I don’t know how much Jesus enjoyed the company with the losers of the world.
I worked with convicts in prison and with mental patients and addicts in a mental hospital and with people in poverty. I didn’t find many kindred spirits among them.
They weren’t people I would naturally seek out for my friends. But it was an opportunity to love people who needed love. It was an opportunity to serve them and to express to them the love that Jesus had for them. Some of them became close friends.
That’s what Jesus was doing at Levi’s party.

A childhood friend of mine was a kid named Warren. Warren grew up to become a committed Christian.
One of the things he did was start a mission in San Francisco to minister to the prostitutes and pimps and workers in the strip joints.
Warren didn’t go to those places because he enjoyed the atmosphere there. He went to those places because he loved those people and wanted to win them for Jesus.
He told me that one time he as explaining the way of salvation to the owner of owner of these striptease clubs.
As he was explaining God’s gift of eternal life to the owner of the club, the man he was talking to was—as he listened—working the dials controlling the lights playing on the dancer on the stage.

Jesus called sinners but he didn’t leave them that way. When they responded to his love, their lives were changed.

C. But Levi’s party got Jesus into trouble.

The “good people,” the religious people, the church people—they were called Pharisees in those days—thought it was awful for Jesus to friendly with these sinners.
Their idea of holiness was to quarantine themselves from evil by avoiding having anything to do with sinners.
But Jesus had another idea. His idea was to go to the sinners and become their friend—not so that he could be like them, but so that he could show them the way back to God.
When the righteous people criticized Jesus for keeping company with bad people, Jesus had an answer for them.
He told them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick: I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance” (vv31-32).
Jesus compared himself to a doctor, and doctors go where the sick people are.

Actually, we all need Jesus because none of us is truly righteous.
Those in his day who thought they were righteous needed Jesus, but they just didn’t know it.
Levi and his buddies knew it. They knew they needed what Jesus had to offer.
They needed forgiveness. They needed salvation.

CONCLUSION

When Jesus says, “I have not come to all the righteous, but sinners to repentance,” he is inviting you and me to examine ourselves and see that we also are ”sick” and need to repent.
This is the lesson for us from the story of Levi’s call.
Sometimes we good people congratulate ourselves because we have responded to Jesus’s call.
We’ve learned about God. We’ve prayed. We’ve read our Bibles. We’ve overcome some bad habits. We’ve become better people. And when we see that we are advancing in holiness, we are in great danger of congratulating ourselves.

Righteous people, discerning people, knowledgeable people, people who love the truth are in trouble when they use their discernment and their wisdom to feel superior and to point to the faults of other people.
No matter how holy we become, we can still be proud, unloving, critical, complaining, and all wrapped up in ourselves. And those are sins. So we always need to repent and come to Jesus for forgiveness.