Episode Details

[unedited transcript generated by AI]

If you want to turn to Mark chapter 2, we aren't going to spend a ton of time in the sermon portion of the service this morning, but I do want to look at Mark 2 and our text is going to be verses 13-22.

And we're going to see two questions that are asked in this text, and they might at first seem unrelated.

The two questions are, why did Jesus ate with the people he ate with?

Why did he keep bad company?

And the second question is, why didn't his disciples fast?

And to just set those questions out there, they might seem unrelated.

But in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, these stories are tied together.

They're not just both in those gospels, they're there in the same order.

There's actually this whole cluster of stories that we see here in Mark chapter 2 are all tied together in the Synoptic Gospels.

And so there's something that God wants us to see about how they're related, how they're tied together.

The chronology doesn't necessarily flow, so there's something important about these two questions that they need to sit next to each other in our minds as we think about them.

Why did Jesus hang out with who he hung out with?

And why didn't his disciples fast?

So first, verses 13 and 14, we see kind of the setting of the story.

He went out again beside the sea and all the crowd was coming to him and he was teaching them.

And as he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax booth.

And he said to him, follow me.

And he rose and followed him.

And so Jesus is back by the sea of Galilee again, just the same place where he had called James and John and Andrew and Simon.

where they had been out fishing.

Jesus is now going out to that same shoreline and he's walking the shore and he's teaching which is a positive turn in Mark's gospel because remember earlier in Mark chapter 1 the people had crowded him but were so concerned with physical healing and so concerned with him performing exorcisms that they'd quit listening to the teaching and that's why he had to leave Capernaum to start with.

Well now he's back in Capernaum and the people are swarming to him

But they're listening to his teaching.

They're listening to what he has to say.

And as he passed by, he sees Levi, the son of Alphaeus.

And as we think about the word here, tax booth, you shouldn't think of some kind of fancy building.

It's like a lemonade stand.

At Christmas time, a lot of churches have these little stables that they put together with ropes and

Sticks that don't look anything like where Jesus actually would have been born but they look a lot like if you put a table up there probably about what this tax booth would have looked like is that little it's just a shanty where it would have been near a thoroughfare where people are passing by frequently and close to centers of commerce so like people coming off the lake and then Capernaum itself it would have been the first major city that you entered into when you came into Herod Antipas' region that he ruled for the Romans.

And so these tax collectors, they would bid on a spot.

Like they, they would go to the higher up, whoever it was in this case, Herod and say, I think I can collect this much in taxes from this area.

And that's how you would bid is whoever said, I can, I can collect the most.

They got the bid is the opposite of how our government does bids, right?

You know, so the bid goes to the highest bidder and, and so he gets it and

And the way that that worked is built into that would, you would get a cut, right?

You would get a percentage of however much you collected would be your salary, but nobody knew how much your bid was.

And so you could collect, if you could collect over what you had told the governme