Jesus: The Friend of Sinners

Jesus, in this event, tells us the Messiah calls and eats with sinners, extending forgiveness to all who would follow Him. The meal itself was something of a foreshadowing and anticipation of the great Messianic banquet at the end of the age (Rev 19:9), when persons from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation who have experienced this scandalous grace, including the unlikely and the undesirable, will recline with King Jesus at a great banquet that will never end.

Mark 2:16-17

In verse 16 we are introduced to a group that is not happy with what Jesus is doing and who will consistently oppose Him throughout His ministry, all the way to the cross: “the scribes and the Pharisees.” Though not all Pharisees were scribes, most of them were. These scribes were most likely outside the home, looking through the windows or the open door. They did not like what they saw.

In response to Jesus’ apparent comfort, the scribes interrogate His disciples as to why He would lower Himself to eat with tax collectors and sinners—those who do not follow their traditions and rules. Before we see the answer Jesus gives, it might be helpful for us to further explore the identity, origins, and practices of the Pharisees

The Pharisees were the pious Jews who rigorously followed the law of Moses and opposed Greek and Roman influence. Josephus claims they numbered about six thousand in Jesus’ day. While the Sadducees were mostly upper-class aristocrats and priests, the Pharisees appear to have been primarily middleclass laypeople, perhaps craftsmen and merchants. The Sadducees had greater political power, but the Pharisees had broader support among the people.

The most distinctive characteristic of the Pharisees was their strict adherence to the law of Moses, the Torah. They carefully obeyed not only the written law but also the oral law, a body of extrabiblical traditions that expanded and elaborated on the Old Testament law (e.g., “the tradition of the elders” in Mark 7:3). The Pharisees’ goals were to apply the Torah’s mandates to everyday life, and to “build a fence” around the Torah to guard against any possible violation. Hands and utensils had to be properly washed. Food had to be properly grown, tithed, and prepared. Since ritual purity was so important, the Pharisees refused to share table fellowship with those who ignored these matters. The common “people of the land” were often shunned, and the Gentiles even more so!

In contrast to the Sadducees, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:8), and they steered a middle road between the Sadducees’ belief in free will and the determinism of the Essenes. They hoped for the coming of the Messiah, the Son of David, who would deliver them from foreign oppression. This made them anti-Roman but with less inclination to active resistance than the Zealots and other revolutionaries.

Jesus condemned the Pharisees for raising their traditions to the level of Scripture and for focusing on the outward requirements of the law while ignoring matters of the heart. For their part the Pharisees denounced Jesus’ association with tax collectors and sinners, and they deplored the way He placed Himself above Sabbath regulations.

Despite these differences Jesus was much closer theologically to the Pharisees than to the Sadducees, sharing similar beliefs in the authority of Scripture, the resurrection, and the coming of the Messiah. Conflicts arose because He challenged them on their own turf, and He was a threat to their leadership and influence over the people.

Today the term Pharisee is often equated with hypocrisy and legalism but not so in first-century Israel. The Pharisees were held in high esteem for their piety and devotion to the law. Indeed, the Pharisees’ fundamental goal was noble: to maintain a life of purity and obedience to God’s law.

51The Old Testament law forbids work on the Sabbath, but it gives few details (Exod 20:8-11; Deut 5:12-15). The rabbis, therefore, specify 39 categories of forbidden activities. So, while knot-tying is unlawful, certain knots, like those which can be untied with one hand, are allowed. A bucket may be tied over a well on the Sabbath but only with a belt, not a rope. While such minutiae may seem odd and arbitrary to us, the Pharisee’s goal was not to be legalistic but to please God through obedience to His law.

Jesus criticized the Pharisees not for their goals of purity and obedience but for saying one thing but doing another, for raising their interpretations (mere “tradition of men”) to the level of God’s commands (cf. 7:8), and for becoming obsessed with externals while neglecting justice, mercy, and faith. They “strain out a gnat, yet gulp down a camel” (Matt 23:23-24). Of course such hypocrisy is not unique to the Pharisees but is common in all religious traditions, including ours! It is easy to follow the form of religion and miss its substance. (This discussion of the Pharisees draws heavily on Strauss, Four Portraits, 132-33.)

Jesus hears the Pharisees’ criticism. He responds with a proverb that explains His mission and justifies His actions: “Those who are well don’t need a doctor, but the sick do need one. I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners” (2:17). Jesus uses irony to expose the hypocrisy of His detractors. The Pharisees, the religiously moral and upright, were just as needy of a spiritual doctor, healing, and medicine as the tax collectors and wicked. Sadly they did not recognize that they, too, had a spiritually terminal disease that only the Great Physician named Jesus could heal.

In essence Jesus says, “To those who think they are righteous I have nothing to say. To those who know they are sinners in need of salvation I have come, to heal them and call them to Myself.” You must see yourself as lost before you can be saved. You must know you are spiritually sick before you can be spiritually healed. You must know you are spiritually dead in sin before you can be made spiritually alive by a Savior!

Jesus was a friend of sinners. He called the seemingly unlikely, reached out to the socially undesirable, and healed the spiritually unhealthy. He cared for them, He spent time with them, and He loved them. If this is true of our Master, then it should also be true of us.