Jesus: The Friend of Sinners

Jesus! What a Friend for sinners! Jesus! Lover of my soul!

Friends may fail me, foes assail me, He, my Savior, makes me whole.

Jesus! What a Strength in weakness! Let me hide myself in Him;

Tempted, tried, and sometimes failing, He, my Strength, my vict’ry wins.

Jesus! What a Help in sorrow! While the billows o’er me roll,

Even when my heart is breaking, He, my Comfort, helps my soul.

Jesus! What a Guide and Keeper! While the tempest still is high,

Storms about me, night o’ertakes me, He, my Pilot, hears my cry.

Jesus! I do now receive Him, More than all in Him I find,

He hath granted me forgiveness, I am His, and He is mine.

Refrain

Hallelujah! What a Savior! Hallelujah! What a Friend!

Saving, helping, keeping, loving, He is with me to the end. (J. Wilbur Chapman, “Jesus! What a Friend for Sinners,” 1910)

47Are you a friend of sinners? Do you spend time with persons who do not know Christ, whose lives may be offensive to you, and whose reputation among “good people like us” is an embarrassment and even a scandal? Do you love sinners, care for sinners, reach out to sinners, and serve sinners? Are you—am I—a friend of sinners? Are you—am I—like Jesus?!

This section of Mark, what some have called “the scandal of grace” (MacArthur, “Scandal”), has the potential to bring great conviction to the hearts of many of us. Why? First, many if not most of us do not spend much time with sinners. Second, many of us think like modern-day Pharisees. We are like the Pharisee of Luke 18:11 who said, “God, I thank You that I’m not like other people—greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” Instead, we imagine ourselves to be supersaints, and God is fortunate to have us on His team. “I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of everything I get” (Luke 18:12).

How much better would it be for us to pray like the tax collector in Luke 18:13: “God, turn Your wrath from me—a sinner!” We are sinners in desperate need of the mercy of God instead of entitlement. Thankfully we are forgiven sinners through “the scandal of amazing grace,” and that grace should lead us, like Jesus, to be a friend of sinners.

In this text we see Jesus, the friend of sinners, as He reaches out to the seemingly unlikely, the socially undesirable, and the spiritually unhealthy. Look carefully at all the characters in the story and ask, “With whom do I most identify? Am I loving and serving sinners as Jesus did?”

Jesus Calls the Seemingly Unlikely to Follow Him

Mark 2:13-14

Jesus is again doing what He loved doing: teaching the Word and calling disciples to follow Him (cf. 1:16). He left the small house for a large open area where the crowds could get close to Him and hear Him. The crowd kept coming to Him, and He kept on teaching.2 Thus, Jesus is out among the people, with those who need His touch and His teaching. There is a simple principle here: to reach the lost, you have to be with the lost, and you must share the gospel.

Jesus purposefully crosses paths with a tax collector named Levi. This is almost certainly the man we know as Matthew (cf. Matt 9:9). His name means “gift of God.” The one who had been a thief will now receive a gift48 from God and become a gift of God to the people whom he had previously swindled. What a transformation!

Now, why would I call him a thief? Tax collectors were notorious in that day and were hated by the Jewish people as traitors and abusers of their own people. They were a mafia-like organization in the first century. They served Rome, the Gentile occupying power of Israel. They were like dishonest IRS agents who overcharged the people for their own profit. The Jewish writings known as the Mishnah and Talmud set them beside thieves and murderers. They were expelled and banned from the synagogue. The touch of a tax collector rendered a house unclean. Jews could lie to a tax collector with impunity. With money as his god, Levi was a social pariah who was spiritually bankrupt, having sold his soul to sin and self. His was a soul in need of a touch from Jesus.

With amazing brevity a shocking scene unfolds. Jesus sees this man named Levi and says, “Follow Me.” In response to Jesus’ direct imperative, Levi gets up and follows Him. By calling Levi to follow Him, Jesus once more commits a scandalous act. It would rival His touching a leper. But He refuses to yield to social pressure. He came to call sinners to Himself, and that is what He was going to do!

Levi counted the cost, took the risk, and followed Jesus (Luke 5:28). This was a radical decision! He gave up his lucrative business and all of his stuff, and there was no going back. He turned his back on his former way of life for a completely new one.

Why would Levi leave everything and follow Jesus? Even more, why would Jesus invite such an outcast to do so? Levi saw something in Jesus that he wanted to join, and Jesus saw in Levi what he could become. Jesus saw a sinner in need of salvation, not a lowlife deserving condemnation. Jesus saw not the wicked life of a tax collector and extortionist but the changed life of a disciple, an evangelist, an apostle, and a Gospel writer. That’s the scandal of grace! Jesus sees in us what no one else can see and turns us into what we were intended to be—mature image bearers who reflect His glory. All this is made possible by scandalous grace and His choice to be the friend of sinners!

Jesus Calls the Socially Undesirable to Follow Him

Mark 2:15

Now we find Jesus in Levi’s house, sharing a meal and having a good time. This is appropriate because the day of salvation should be a day of celebration (Luke 15:7, 10, 32). Levi must have owned a large home because he invited a large number of friends and acquaintances over to the house to49 eat and meet with Jesus. It was surely an impressive banquet (Luke 5:29). Perhaps it was a farewell party. Perhaps it was to celebrate his new life and calling. In any case there is no doubt that it was to honor Jesus and to share Jesus with his friends.

The term “sinners” may be a technical term for the common people who did not live by the rigid rules of the Pharisees. They were alienated and rejected. These are people who needed God’s grace and knew it. They were no doubt stunned that the famous young Rabbi would share table fellowship with them. And they weren’t the only ones: the religious leaders shared their amazement. But while the “tax collectors and sinners” were humble and thankful, the religious hypocrites were offended and angered.

Though not the main point of this passage, these religious leaders show us an important truth: bigotry is always ugly and pathetic. It betrays the fear and depravity of our hearts and is clear evidence that we are sinful people that desperately need the scandal of grace in our own lives, even as we proclaim that grace to others. Jesus will certainly welcome the targets of such prejudice as honored guests and beloved members of God’s family, provided they come through faith in Him.

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.

Jesus Calls the Spiritually Unhealthy to Fellowship with Him

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

Who Are the Pharisees?

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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’ Mission

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!

Conclusion

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.

Reflect and Discuss

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1. What kinds of “sinners” are you reluctant to befriend? What kind of weakness or fear keeps you from showing the love of Jesus to them?
2. In what ways do you identify with Levi, the outcast tax collector? What do you appreciate about God’s grace?
3. Do you know someone like Levi, who most people would think is not worthy of a call to follow Christ? Why might they in fact quickly and eagerly respond to an invitation?
4. Have you ever been offended when you saw a fellow Christian reaching out to a certain class of people?
5. Which people do you think Jesus would hang out with today?
6. What is commendable about the Pharisees’ teaching and practice?
7. What aspects of the Pharisees’ teaching and practice did Jesus condemn?
8. In what ways do some Christians act like Pharisees, whether the good aspects or the bad? Have you ever found yourself doing these things?
9. Do you know someone who does not realize he or she is spiritually terminally sick? What might you say that could convince them of their condition?
10. Negatively, the unsaved are spiritually terminally sick. Positively, the gospel offers salvation from sin and death. Which motivates you more for evangelism and missions?