The Calling of Levi and the Party That Followed (4 of 6)

Jesus walks past a toll booth, says two words, and a man gets up and leaves the money on the table.

Then the meal happens, and the meal is what starts the argument.

Who Did Levi Work For?

Probably Herod Antipas, not Rome directly, and the geography explains it.

When Herod the Great died in 4 BC his kingdom was split between three sons. Archelaus took Judea in the south. Antipas took Galilee. Philip took the territory to the north and east.

The border between Antipas’s land and Philip’s was the Jordan running south from Mount Hermon into the lake. And the last town going east out of Galilee, or the first coming west into it, was Capernaum.

So Levi sat at a crossing point, taking a toll for the privilege of moving between two parts of what had recently been one kingdom. Plenty of people could remember when that journey was free.

Why Was He Hated?

Because he was the face of it.

Wright’s comparison is a parking attendant, and it holds. All day long your job is to take money from people who resent paying it, for a rule they consider recent and unjust, on behalf of a government they would like to be rid of.

The Herodian family was disliked and resented by most ordinary Jews, but they were in power, Rome was backing them, and there was nothing much anyone could do about it. Levi absorbed that daily.

We do not know whether he chose the work. It may have been the only job available. What we know is that he sat there and took the anger into himself.

What Made Him Get Up?

Being addressed as a person.

Jesus did not shout, swear or grumble. He said follow me. Wright’s reading is that it was perhaps the first time in a long while that anyone had treated the man as a human being rather than as a piece of dirt.

There is a second layer under it. Levi had been working for a man who styled himself King of the Jews. He was now going to work for someone else with royal aspirations, which is where Mark is heading when Peter finally says it out loud in chapter 8.

Why Was the Meal the Problem?

Because eating together was a statement, not a courtesy.

Jesus ends up at table with a crowd of tax collectors and sinners, and the legal experts ask his disciples why. Not why does he teach them, which would have been respectable. Why does he eat with them.

Sinners was an easy label. It covered anyone failing the strict religious requirements of the law or the strict political expectation of opposition to Herod and Rome. Levi failed both at once.

Wright’s summary of how Jesus looked at that moment is the useful one. Not a would-be king, not yet. An odd combination: a doctor throwing a great party.

Why a Doctor and Why a Party?

Because both were deliberate.

A doctor, because he went around healing, and not only physical ailments. Levi was a social outcast because of the work he did, and that is the condition being treated.

A party, because Jesus’s picture of the kingdom, like that of some of the prophets, was a great feast with everyone invited.

And Jesus’s answer to the sneering is the doctor line. There is no point in a physician keeping company only with healthy people. The doctor has to be where the sickness is.

What Was the Real Objection?

Not the theology. The company.

Would you want to go to a party full of traffic wardens? For Jesus to invite men like Levi to a feast in his own home was outrageous by ordinary social reckoning, and everyone knew it.

Which is why Mark puts this scene where he does. The opposition is building at every level at once, social, cultural, political and religious, and it is the long build-up of tension that finally explodes in Jerusalem.

The comfortable move was to label people outcasts and ignore them afterward. Jesus made that impossible by sitting down to eat.

Part of a series on the conflict with the Pharisees. See also the paralytic and the authority to forgive.

Footnotes2

1. The border detail is what makes the hostility specific rather than general. This was not an ancient tax that everyone had grown up with. It was a charge for crossing a line that had been drawn inside living memory, collected at the point where people crossed it.
2. That the objection is about eating rather than teaching is the whole of it. Table fellowship in that culture was a declaration of shared identity, which is why the complaint is phrased the way it is and why Jesus answers with an image about who a doctor sits with.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone (SPCK, 2001), on Mark 2:13-17. Supports the identification of Levi's employer as Herod Antipas, the geography of the Capernaum border crossing, the parking attendant comparison, the reading of the call as being treated as a human being, and the doctor and party framing. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Mark 2:13-17, Matt 9:9-13, Luke 5:27-32, and Mark 8:29.

Where the sourcing stops: whether Levi is the same man as Matthew the apostle is a separate question handled in the post on Matthew, and the identification is not assumed here. Whether he chose the work is not recoverable.