Righteous or self- righteous?  Saturday, 1^st week in ordinary time-Mark 2: 13-17

We enter into the second of the five conflict stories that appear one after the other in Chapters 2:1-3:6. The opponents here are the ‘scribes of the Pharisees’. The scribes were the interpreters and the teachers of the Old Testament law; for them this was an occupation. Then there were the Pharisees who were a fraternity of pious persons. The ‘scribes of the Pharisees’ were a group of people who did both; they merged business with faith.

The text of today’s Gospel also introduces us to the fifth disciple. So far in 1:16-20, Jesus has called Peter and Andrew, James and John. He is now walking by the Sea of Galilee when He sets His eyes on a toll collector in the service of Herod Antipas.  While no ‘Levi ‘exists in the list of twelve apostles, Matthew’s Gospel resolves the problem by naming himself as the tax collector thus indicating that Levi and Matthew are the same person.

The choice of Levi, a tax collector must have come as a shock to most of the conservative Jewish establishment and may I dare say even to his own disciples. The term sinner, hamartoloi in Greek, which translates more accurately as ‘missing the mark’ ,  were persons whose occupation or life-style prevented them from full observance of the Jewish Law. A good example was the shepherds who could not attend synagogue services because they were out in the pastures tending sheep or were ritually unclean as a consequence of it.

Though there were other ‘sinners’ who were notoriously immoral, the term ‘sinners’ were more a social characterization than a moral judgment. Levi would be considered both a social characterization and also a notoriously immoral person making his call to be a disciple extremely controversial.

Tax collectors were considered among the most notorious sinners and were particularly despised in Israel. They were viewed as collaborators with the Roman occupiers, who placed a heavy tax burden on the people. Because they dealt with Gentiles and Gentile money, they were considered unclean. They were also known to be greedy. They were assigned a region and a fixed sum to collect, and were allowed to collect as much additional money as they could for profit.

To compound an already hard choice that Jesus makes, He sits down to table with Levi. While this may raise no eyebrows in the twenty first century it was hair-raising in the first century. Sharing a banquet with someone was more than just a social affair it was an invitation into an inner circle of one’s family. Jesus is now consorting with those who were both social sinners and immoral people making them His family. This was a double whammy.

But Mark, in 1:15 has already made clear the mission of Jesus. He has come, “proclaiming the Good News” for the “time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the Good News.” In less than a chapter, in a flick of the page of the Bible he reiterates this point for the second time; he has come to “call not the righteous but sinners” making his presence among them the greatest proof that He means business.

This call of Jesus is to repentance and not just to some happy-clappy affair. The call to repentance is in preparation for God’s kingdom which he has already proclaimed at the beginning of His Galilean ministry. Thus the words of Jesus, calling the scribes ‘righteous’ is ironic and more tongue in cheek. Jesus is not giving them a certificate of ‘righteousness’ as much as he is exposing their self-righteous behaviour in considering themselves to be righteous.  Their sin was that they failed to acknowledge God as the source of genuine righteousness

Fr Warner D’Souza

NOTE

References from the JBC

Your comments are most welcome and encouraging.