October 8, 2025 • 26 mins
JesusX30 Challenge—Scene 8: THE ENCROACHMENT
1. Key Texts
• Mark 2:1–17—Healing of the paralyzed man & calling of Matthew.
• Luke 5:12–32—Leper healed and banquet with tax collectors.
• Matthew 9:9–13—“Follow me.”
• Leviticus 13–14—Purity laws behind exclusion.
• Isaiah 58—True fasting: justice, mercy, liberation.
2. Outline / Notes
Date & Place
• Winter 27 → Spring 28 AD.
• Still based in Capernaum, but Jesus’ reach is spreading across Galilee.
• Rainy season slows travel = more people in towns = larger crowds ready to listen.
Main Account
• Jesus passes a tax booth and calls Matthew (Levi) to follow him (Mark 2:14).
• Tax collectors = symbols of Roman oppression and economic injustice.
• Calling Matthew wasn’t a gesture of niceness—it was a strategic recruitment.
– Matthew knew Rome’s trade routes, tax systems, and official networks.
– His connections could help Jesus navigate political tensions.
• Matthew hosts a banquet with other tax collectors and “sinners.”
– In that culture, table fellowship = shared status.
– Jesus publicly aligns himself with outsiders, not elites.
• Religious leaders object: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
– Jesus responds: “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Mark 2:17)
– This becomes a mission statement: God heals by inclusion, not exclusion.
• Surrounding scenes intensify conflict:
– Healing a leper (Luke 5:12–16): touch restores health and social belonging.
– Forgiving a paralyzed man (Mark 2:5): claims divine authority over sin and Temple.
– Healing on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1–6): declares God’s law meant to give life, not control.
• Religious and political leaders join forces to oppose him (Pharisees + Herodians).
• Amid rising tension, Jesus keeps building a movement from the margins.
Meanwhile
• Each miracle restores both health and dignity—a social revolution in motion.
• By calling Matthew, Jesus merges mercy and strategy—compassion with planning.
• The dinner table becomes a symbol of God’s new order: outsiders now insiders.
• Matthew’s skills and connections become tools for the Kingdom.
• Like William Wilberforce’s “Clapham Circle,” Jesus gathers a team of unlikely allies to confront injustice together.
3. Main Point
• Jesus wasn’t just welcoming outsiders—he was building with them.
• Matthew represents how Jesus redeems even compromised people and turns their experience into Kingdom assets.
• His table fellowship is revolution over a meal—God’s new society taking shape in real time.
4. Exegetical Insight
• Mark 2:14—akolouthei moi (“Follow me”)—an imperative of total allegiance, not mere belief.
• Mark 2:17—ouk ēlthon kalesai dikaious alla hamartōlous—“I came not to call the righteous but sinners.” Jesus redefines holiness around mercy.
• Leviticus 13–14—purity laws that excluded the “unclean”; Jesus reverses them by touch and table.
• Meals = microcosms of society; Jesus uses them to model God’s inverted kingdom.
5. Reflection Questions
• Who would your community be shocked to see you eat with—and why?
• What “Matthew” in your life might God be inviting you to welcome or learn from?
• When have you felt like an outsider Jesus called in and given purpose?
• How can your past or skills be redeemed for God’s movement today?
6. Action Step / Challenge
• Share a meal or conversation this week with someone outside your usual circle.
• Ask God to show you how your “ordinary” experience could serve his mission.
• Remember: you’re not just saved for later—you’re sent for now.
Buy the books!
This 30-day challenge is based on my book trilogy entitled Jesus: The Strategic Life and Mission of the Messiah and His Movement (3 Volumes, Hekhal Publishing Co., 2025).
You can buy or borrow the trilogy at:
Hekhal Publishing Co. (look for free samples of each book as well)
Amazon (print or ebook)
Barnes & Noble (print or ebook)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
So let's be honest, if you were launching a movement to shake up
the world, and you were doing soin a relatively small town, you
probably wouldn't start by recruiting the most hated guy in
town, right? You'd want someone popular, well
connected, maybe even a little squeaky clean, but that's
exactly what Jesus does. What's up everybody?
(00:32):
I'm Tyson put off and this is scene 8 of the Jesus X30
challenge. Today we're looking at the
moment Jesus calls a tax collector, someone that almost
everyone in the Galilee despised, and then immediately
throws a party with him and his friends.
So it's not just a story about personal redemption.
(00:54):
It's not just Jesus being nice to someone who's unpopular.
This is part of the story. But even more, this is a
calculated strategic move in themiddle of Jesus's messianic
campaign, his campaign, as we saw in the last episode, that is
aimed at unseating the powers ofsin and death in the spiritual
(01:14):
realm and confronting their proxies here on earth, which in
Jesus's day would be Rome, and since then would be every other
earthly empire that uses fear and greed and control to run
human society. So we're now in the rainy
season. We're in winter 27 AD heading
(01:35):
into the spring of 2880, and Jesus is still operating out of
Capernaum. But the campaign is starting to
spread across the Galilee. So rainy season slows down
travel roads get muddy, streams get flooded, and long distance
caravans move at a lot slower pace.
But that also means that a lot of the local tradesmen,
(01:57):
fishermen, farmers, builders areless busy.
And when people aren't working sunrise to sunset, they're
available to listen, to attend synagogue, to socialize in the
marketplace, in gossip. Jesus knows this, and he knows
that this is the perfect moment to start making bolder and
bigger moves in front of larger crowds and more talkative
(02:19):
crowds. And in calling a tax collector,
Jesus knew that this was a move that was guaranteed to stir the
pot. So let's start with the moment
itself. Jesus walks past a tax booth and
calls Matthew, also known as Levi, to follow him.
Now, if you grew up hearing thisstory, Jesus's calling of
Matthew or calling of Levi, the tax collector, if you grew up
(02:41):
hearing it, it's typically taught as Jesus meeting another
center. And this is just one of another,
another instance in which Jesus calls someone who doesn't
deserve access to God. Right?
Because because tax collectors were evil and they were bad
people and they were of the world and they don't deserve to
meet God the way Jesus invites them in.
(03:03):
But in the 1st century, this was, this was a political
scandal. Matthew worked for Rome.
His, his job was actually to collect tolls and tariffs on
goods moving along trade routes.And and remember that Capernaum
was a bustling little town on a major trade route in the
Galilee. And Matthew's job was to tax the
(03:23):
trades coming through. Tax collectors were notorious
for padding the bill, too. They charged extra and they kept
the surplus and it was OK. Rome didn't care as long as they
got their money, their taxes. And obviously the local
communities that were taxed under this system absolutely
hated it, and so they hated the tax collectors for doing so.
(03:45):
Tax collectors were seen as collaborators with the enemy.
Imagine someone in your town working openly for an occupying
army, skimming money off of yourneighbors to fund that army, and
then living comfortably while the rest of you scrape by.
That's how people saw Matthew. In other words, Matthew wasn't
just disliked. He wasn't just a Sinner that
(04:06):
Jesus had mercy on and said, hey, you have been kicked out of
your friend group because you'vedone some bad things and I'm
going to invite you back to God.That's not that's not what's
what's going on here. Matthew was disliked because he
was a symbol of the entire corrupt system that people
wanted God to come in and overthrow.
(04:27):
And yet Jesus stops. He looks at Matthew and he says,
hey, follow me. He doesn't negotiate.
He doesn't go home and and thinkabout it.
Apparently he gets up, he leaveshis booth, and he follows Jesus
and, and again, this is not justa spiritual turning point, this
is a political and a social shift.
(04:47):
By recruiting Matthew, Jesus gains someone in his inner
circle who understands Rome's economic machinery from the
inside. Matthew would have known the
networks of trade, the flow of goods, the local and imperial
offices who profited from him. He would have had connections to
people in power, connections that could slow down opposition
(05:10):
or at the very least keep Jesus informed about who was watching
him and why. That's the strategic layer here.
Remember, Jesus is building a movement, and Jesus knows that
he has to be strategic in order to secure his movement before he
goes to the cross. So there's a strategy to whom he
(05:30):
calls as much as there's genuinemercy, genuine grace, genuine
extension of God's presence to those people and genuine
healings, genuine concern for the well-being of people.
But he also knows that there's strategy involved to build his
movement strategically. Jesus knows that he needs more
than preachers. He needs more more than just
(05:52):
religious folk and worshippers. He needs more than miracle
workers. He needs people who know how the
system works. And Matthew is perfect for this
role. And then comes the dinner party.
So remember this, after Jesus calls Matthew, go go back and
look at scene 8 in the the, the course of events that we we
discuss in scene 8 of my books. After Jesus calls Matthew, they
(06:16):
have a dinner party. Matthew actually invites Jesus
and Jesus's disciples to his home, along with a room full of
other tax collectors and what the Gospels kind of politely
call sinners. In the social code of the day,
eating with someone was a publicstatement of approval.
(06:36):
You didn't just share food. You you didn't just go to dinner
randomly and haphazardly with people.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, Hable Fellowship is what
we call it was a was a really big deal.
Meals weren't just about eating,They were about identity.
Who you ate with signaled who you belonged to.
(06:57):
So stepping back, if you're reading the gospels or really if
you're reading anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament
all the way through the New Testament, whenever you hear
about eating and meals and you read events in the Gospels in
which Jesus is eating with someone, there's always more
going on than just the meal. Who you ate with signaled who
(07:20):
you belong to. So Pharisees and other religious
leaders often kept their dinner tables as what what we might
call a purity zone. They only invited those who met
their standards of law, keeping social standing, political
status, economic status. But Jesus takes the opposite
approach. His table becomes a place where
(07:42):
outsiders are actually brought inside.
So it's no wonder the leaders pull some of Jesus's followers
aside and ask him, why does yourteacher eat with tax collectors
and sinners? In Mark 2, Jesus hears them and
he responds with the line that it's kind of become one of the
clearest mission statements in the Gospels.
(08:02):
He says in Mark 2, it's not the healthy who need a doctor, but
the sick. I haven't come to call the
righteous, but sinners. This isn't just a warm
sentiment. It's a public challenge.
Jesus is forcing everyone to decide what kind of God they
believe in. OK, listen, listen closely.
He's putting people in a position to decide, what do I
(08:26):
believe about God? Is God a God who protects the
boundaries and keeps people out?Or is God a God who tears down
those boundaries and invites people in?
This move with Matthew comes in the middle of a stretch where
Jesus is consistently reaching for people that others avoided.
So earlier in this same season, he heals the man with leprosy.
(08:50):
In our context, leper is almost kind of a metaphor.
We we've heard so many stories and and in pop popular culture
and just general ideas about Jesus healing the lepers.
But in the 1st century world, this was a lived reality of
exclusion. Skin diseases literally made you
richly unclean under the law of Moses, according to Leviticus
(09:14):
1314, which meant a lot of things.
You couldn't enter the temple. Often you couldn't even live
inside the town walls. You were cut off from worship,
community life, familial ties were strained and possibly to
the point where they were cut off.
So when Jesus touches and heals this man, this leper in this
other scene, he doesn't just restore his health, he restores
(09:36):
his place in society. And he does it in a way where
everyone can see, in a way that makes everyone watching question
the rules that kept this man outin the first place.
I think we need to pause for a second here because sometimes we
read these stories through a purely religious lens and we
miss how actually disruptive they are.
(09:58):
In Jesus world, the Torah wasn'tjust a set of spiritual
teachings, OK, this is kind of aChristianized approach to the
Old Testament law, the Leviticallaw.
The the Torah wasn't just this religious thing, it was the law
of the land, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Exodus.
These were the civil and judicial and moral frameworks of
(10:20):
Jesus society. So they weren't just restricted
to how I behave in a religious setting.
These were how I behave in the world.
These were actual laws. So when Jesus challenges or
reinterprets these laws, he's not just pushing back on what we
call legalism in a modern kind of churchy sense.
(10:43):
He's confronting the governing authorities of his people.
He's calling out the very systemthat claimed the right to decide
who was in and who was out. He's not just challenging
religious laws or spiritual lawsor things that pertain to what I
feel in my heart or think in my head.
(11:03):
Jesus is challenging the laws ofthe land, and it's that
combination, his talk about God's Kingdom and his criticism
of how the law was being used and his announcement of an
economic and social jubilee, it turns in from just another
interesting teacher and a reallyclever rabbi into an existential
(11:25):
threat. And I think this brings us to
another flashpoint in the same period, the same scene, and
that's the healing of the paralyzed man.
Remember the story? And it's also in Mark two of the
gathering at which Jesus is teaching.
And he's so surrounded, he's inside the house, and he is so
(11:46):
surrounded by people that that the friends of the man who is
paralyzed can't get the paralyzed man in to see Jesus.
So they go up on the top of the roof, they tear through the
roof, and they lower him down infront of Jesus.
And before Jesus actually heals him physically, remember what
Jesus says, Mark 25, Jesus says your sins are forgiven.
(12:09):
So that statement is a powerful statement.
And it's enough to start a riot in a room full of religious
lawyers. So forgiving sins wasn't just a
spiritual act, it was something only God had the authority to
do. And if Jesus could do it, that
meant the entire priestly systemwas no longer the only bridge
between God and humanity. What that does is it takes the
(12:33):
power and the right and the religious authority out of those
who had long only been allowed to do that, and only been given
authority by God to do that. This is a big deal.
It's often used as just a kind of a defense of, well, Jesus is
claiming to be God here. I mean, we can make that case,
(12:54):
but the bigger point is the strategic nature of what Jesus
is doing here. He's effectively challenging
those at the top of the social and religious and political and
economic order who hold the keysto access to God.
And when Jesus says your, your sins are forgiven, he's saying
you've got access to God now. So from here, the tension keeps
(13:17):
rising, right? The more Jesus heals, forgives,
includes, the more the establishment feels the ground
shifting under their feet. They start accusing them of a
blasphemy, not just in the senseof using God's name carelessly,
not just a claiming to be God, but in this this heavier sense
of claiming divine authority in ways that threaten the political
(13:39):
and economic and social and religious establishment, those
who already have control. And so we see this throughout
the Gospels. The Sabbath, Shabbat becomes one
of Jesus's favorite battlegrounds in this season and
especially of his public campaign.
So he doesn't just happen to heal on the Sabbath.
(13:59):
He chooses the Sabbath knowing full well that it's going to
cause a stir and and not in someback alley where word might
spread. He does it in the synagogues, in
front of the crowds, right in the spaces controlled by the
very people who are trying to contain him.
So in one case, there's a man with a deformed hand, and the
(14:20):
religious leaders are watching closely.
They're almost hoping that Jesusis going to heal him because
that'll give him some ammunitionto accuse Jesus of breaking the
law. And then they can move forward
with prosecution. And Jesus calls the man forward,
and he turns to the leaders and asks.
This is in Mark 3, which is lawful on the Sabbath.
(14:42):
To do good or to do evil, to save a life or to kill.
Mark 3-4 in the room, silent. They don't know what to say.
Their attempt to trap Jesus turns into Jesus trapping them
in front of the crowds. So Jesus goes ahead and he heals
the man right there in front of everyone and and his message is
clear. And they understood it, that
(15:03):
God's law was meant to give life, not to become a tool for
policing compassion for the leaders.
This is infuriating. Every public Shabbat
confrontation chips away at their authority.
Every healing is another headline moment where the crowd
leaves talking about Jesus instead of them.
And every time he links his actions to the arrival of God's
(15:25):
Kingdom, the empire of God, it becomes harder to write him off
as just another wandering teacher.
So it's around now that the opposition starts getting
organized. Mark tells us that the Pharisees
begin to plot with the Herodians.
These are these are otherwise political rivals, but they don't
like Jesus, and that's a mutual connecting point between them.
(15:48):
So their common goal becomes stopping Jesus before his
influence gets completely out ofcontrol.
So now all of that happens in this scene.
Back to Matthew's calling or in scene 8.
All of this, the leper, the paralyzed man, the Sabbath
confrontations, it's the backdrop for why calling Matthew
(16:08):
is so disruptive. So Matthew's not a charity case
that Jesus feels sorry for. OK, we've talked about that.
He's a high value recruit. By bringing him in, Jesus sends
a message to both the religious establishment and the Roman
aligned elite. No one gets to draw the boundary
lines of God's Kingdom except God himself.
(16:29):
And Matthew doesn't fade into the background.
He becomes part of Jesus's innercircle, the group that will one
day take this movement from the Galilee to the ends of the
earth. In fact, the Gospel that bears
his name is going to carry Jesus's teachings to generations
far beyond this moment. When you think about it, that
dinner party at Matthew's house is the perfect picture of
(16:50):
Jesus's campaign strategy. It's kind of a microcosm of of
Jesus's campaign strategy as a whole.
It's mercy and subversion at thesame table.
It's compassion for the outsider, and it's a tactical
use of relationships to give themovement room to grow.
In the ancient world, a meal could cement alliances.
(17:12):
Here's the thing. Jesus wasn't just welcoming
outsiders, he was building with them.
Matthew isn't just a look who got saved story, he's part of
the core team. Jesus is flipping the system
upside down. The unclean are now the
insiders, the untouchables are at the center, and the
overlooked are carrying the mission forward.
(17:35):
And I think that tells us something about the shape of
God's Kingdom. It's not about grooming the next
set of religious elites. It's about raising up people,
the world, and sometimes even the church, has already written
off. When Jesus goes and eats with
these people, it's not just fellowship, it's a revolution in
the form of a meal. Jesus meets people in the
(17:58):
middle, including us in the middle of our own mess.
But he doesn't just pull us out,he pulls us in, OK, into his
mission, into his movement, intohis strategy.
And that means that when he shows compassion to you, he's
also recognizing something strategic in you.
Remember, this is a genuine moment of compassion.
(18:20):
Jesus genuinely heals people, genuinely lifts people up,
genuinely welcomes people into God's Kingdom.
But he's also doing so strategically because in every
person who enters God's Kingdom,Jesus sees potential.
And so when he shows you and me compassion, he's also
recognizing something in US strategically, something in your
(18:43):
experiences, your skills, or even your mistakes that have
uniquely shaped you to offer something valuable in the
advancement of God's Kingdom. Matthew's skill set wasn't
religious. He wasn't a rabbi.
He wasn't a thinker. He wasn't a teacher.
(19:04):
Matthew's skill set was administrative, financial.
He was connected to systems mostpeople didn't understand.
And Jesus redeems it for his Kingdom.
And I know a lot of us feel likespiritual outsiders or that
we've been kind of sidelined by by our Christian culture, But I
think Matthew's story sort of subverts that narrative.
(19:25):
Jesus doesn't need you to get cleaned up first.
He calls you now. He didn't go and tell Matthew,
hey, Matthew, you need to resign.
You need to mend all of the bridges that you've burned.
You need to go and repay. You need to do this or that.
He just says, come, follow me. And Matthew does it exactly how
he is. Do you think Matthew had this
miraculous one off change of heart, this enormous religious
(19:48):
conversion right at that moment?According to the text, we don't,
we can't say that he did, but what we can say is in the
condition that he was in at the moment Jesus called him, He went
and followed. And I think if you follow him,
not just believing a few ideas about him, but actually altering
the shape of your life to move with him, He sends you out as
(20:10):
part of his active campaign. And it starts at the moment He
calls you. You're not just saved for later
until you get things cleaned up.You're sent for now.
You're part of a movement that'sstill overturning the old orders
and planting outposts of God's reign in ordinary places.
So in the early 1800s, William Wilberforce, cool name.
(20:32):
A lot of you know that name. If you don't, he became the face
of the fight to abolish the British slave trade.
So he was a big deal. But what a lot of people don't
realize is, is that Wilberforce didn't do it alone.
He had a circle of friends and allies who were as unlikely a
(20:53):
reform team as you could imagine.
They called him the Clapham Circle, named after the
neighborhood where many of them live in the UK.
This group included fellow politicians, writers, business
leaders, pastors, and even former enslaved people.
Some were respected members of Parliament.
Others were social outsiders whohad seen injustice first hand
(21:16):
and wanted to do something aboutit.
And Wilberforce knew he needed all of them.
He needed the insiders who couldnavigate political systems.
He needed the outsiders who lived the pain of those systems
and could speak with moral authority because they had seen
it first hand. And together, this group pushed
forward for decades. It took a long time against
(21:39):
overwhelming resistance from people in power who were making
a fortune off of slavery. In 18 O 7, the British
Parliament finally voted to abolish the slave trade.
A a victory that never would have happened if Wilberforce had
only surrounded himself with acceptable voices, with cleaned
up people, with people. People just like him.
(22:02):
I think this is a good picture of Matthew's dinner table and
more broadly of Jesus building amovement where the respected and
the rejected sit side by side for the sake of the Kingdom.
I know this isn't an easy concept to accept, especially if
you carry these deep seated negative views of yourself or a
(22:23):
low sense of worth which we all struggle with, but some of us
struggle with it even more. It can feel almost impossible to
picture yourself as a Matthew, can't it?
Someone with a messy path and maybe even a not so great
present. You're still a mess.
Someone whom Jesus is actually inviting to play an essential
(22:46):
role in his movement. I joke sometimes that I have 3
YouTube subscribers, two of which are probably me from old
accounts I can't access anymore,and I don't know who the third
is. If you're looking at raw
numbers, I'm not in influencer territory and I don't have any
grandiose claims of being a social media influencer or New
(23:07):
York Times bestselling author. I just don't.
Those things don't motivate me. If I ever am, I've got to stop
giving books away for free. Still, I'll be honest.
I struggle on a daily basis withseeing the reality of my past,
of my insecurities, my lowly social media presence and fame,
(23:29):
my inadequacies. Reconciling all of that with
pastors or friends or mentors orinfluencers saying, yeah, God's
called you to do great things inthe Kingdom.
I struggle with all of that daily.
But here's what I've learned. God doesn't measure influence
the way we do. More than once I've gotten a
message from someone, some sometimes in another state,
(23:52):
sometimes in another part of theworld, who stumbled across a
video of mine or a book of mine and said, you know what?
That was exactly what I needed to hear today.
You know what, maybe they move on the next day, they're back on
to, to something else. And, and, and that's fine
because at least for that moment, God was able to use
something that I've done to helpsomeone that I don't even know.
(24:16):
Or I get an e-mail from a student I have, I have the
privilege of teaching courses onreligion and Bible and Jesus and
ancient stuff at a large public university with some amazing
people. And that student says, hey,
thank you for teaching that, this or that subject and, and
not being judgmental or abrasiveabout it.
(24:37):
And then they tell me that they grew up in an extremely
conservative home in which they were not allowed to ask
questions and they were not allowed to think critically or
analytically about the theological points that were
that were put upon them. And it just caused them not to
understand why God would be so harsh with them if all they
(25:02):
wanted to do was know more aboutit.
And that's when I remember that Jesus launched his movement out
of Capernaum, not Jerusalem. And he started with fishermen
and tax collectors and people with no platform.
Why call a tax collector? Because Jesus was serious about
flipping the world's power structures.
And he started by rewriting the guest list.
(25:25):
The challenge, I think for us issimple to say but hard to live.
The question, I think, is who's on your guest list?
Who's on my guest list? Who would the respectable
religious crowd in your world frown at if they saw you eating
with them? Are you willing not only to
welcome them, but to build with them?
(25:47):
And maybe even more personal, are you willing to see yourself
as Matthew? Someone Jesus sees not only with
compassion but with strategy? Someone whose life, your past,
and your present can be turned into a tool for building the
Kingdom right where you are? Lake Omad.
Go and learn. Come back for Scene 9 of the
(26:09):
Jesus X30 Challenge.
So let's be honest, if you were launching a movement to shake up
the world, and you were doing soin a relatively small town, you
probably wouldn't start by recruiting the most hated guy in
town, right? You'd want someone popular, well
connected, maybe even a little squeaky clean, but that's
exactly what Jesus does. What's up everybody?
(00:32):
I'm Tyson put off and this is scene 8 of the Jesus X30
challenge. Today we're looking at the
moment Jesus calls a tax collector, someone that almost
everyone in the Galilee despised, and then immediately
throws a party with him and his friends.
So it's not just a story about personal redemption.
(00:54):
It's not just Jesus being nice to someone who's unpopular.
This is part of the story. But even more, this is a
calculated strategic move in themiddle of Jesus's messianic
campaign, his campaign, as we saw in the last episode, that is
aimed at unseating the powers ofsin and death in the spiritual
(01:14):
realm and confronting their proxies here on earth, which in
Jesus's day would be Rome, and since then would be every other
earthly empire that uses fear and greed and control to run
human society. So we're now in the rainy
season. We're in winter 27 AD heading
(01:35):
into the spring of 2880, and Jesus is still operating out of
Capernaum. But the campaign is starting to
spread across the Galilee. So rainy season slows down
travel roads get muddy, streams get flooded, and long distance
caravans move at a lot slower pace.
But that also means that a lot of the local tradesmen,
(01:57):
fishermen, farmers, builders areless busy.
And when people aren't working sunrise to sunset, they're
available to listen, to attend synagogue, to socialize in the
marketplace, in gossip. Jesus knows this, and he knows
that this is the perfect moment to start making bolder and
bigger moves in front of larger crowds and more talkative
(02:19):
crowds. And in calling a tax collector,
Jesus knew that this was a move that was guaranteed to stir the
pot. So let's start with the moment
itself. Jesus walks past a tax booth and
calls Matthew, also known as Levi, to follow him.
Now, if you grew up hearing thisstory, Jesus's calling of
Matthew or calling of Levi, the tax collector, if you grew up
(02:41):
hearing it, it's typically taught as Jesus meeting another
center. And this is just one of another,
another instance in which Jesus calls someone who doesn't
deserve access to God. Right?
Because because tax collectors were evil and they were bad
people and they were of the world and they don't deserve to
meet God the way Jesus invites them in.
(03:03):
But in the 1st century, this was, this was a political
scandal. Matthew worked for Rome.
His, his job was actually to collect tolls and tariffs on
goods moving along trade routes.And and remember that Capernaum
was a bustling little town on a major trade route in the
Galilee. And Matthew's job was to tax the
(03:23):
trades coming through. Tax collectors were notorious
for padding the bill, too. They charged extra and they kept
the surplus and it was OK. Rome didn't care as long as they
got their money, their taxes. And obviously the local
communities that were taxed under this system absolutely
hated it, and so they hated the tax collectors for doing so.
(03:45):
Tax collectors were seen as collaborators with the enemy.
Imagine someone in your town working openly for an occupying
army, skimming money off of yourneighbors to fund that army, and
then living comfortably while the rest of you scrape by.
That's how people saw Matthew. In other words, Matthew wasn't
just disliked. He wasn't just a Sinner that
(04:06):
Jesus had mercy on and said, hey, you have been kicked out of
your friend group because you'vedone some bad things and I'm
going to invite you back to God.That's not that's not what's
what's going on here. Matthew was disliked because he
was a symbol of the entire corrupt system that people
wanted God to come in and overthrow.
(04:27):
And yet Jesus stops. He looks at Matthew and he says,
hey, follow me. He doesn't negotiate.
He doesn't go home and and thinkabout it.
Apparently he gets up, he leaveshis booth, and he follows Jesus
and, and again, this is not justa spiritual turning point, this
is a political and a social shift.
(04:47):
By recruiting Matthew, Jesus gains someone in his inner
circle who understands Rome's economic machinery from the
inside. Matthew would have known the
networks of trade, the flow of goods, the local and imperial
offices who profited from him. He would have had connections to
people in power, connections that could slow down opposition
(05:10):
or at the very least keep Jesus informed about who was watching
him and why. That's the strategic layer here.
Remember, Jesus is building a movement, and Jesus knows that
he has to be strategic in order to secure his movement before he
goes to the cross. So there's a strategy to whom he
(05:30):
calls as much as there's genuinemercy, genuine grace, genuine
extension of God's presence to those people and genuine
healings, genuine concern for the well-being of people.
But he also knows that there's strategy involved to build his
movement strategically. Jesus knows that he needs more
than preachers. He needs more more than just
(05:52):
religious folk and worshippers. He needs more than miracle
workers. He needs people who know how the
system works. And Matthew is perfect for this
role. And then comes the dinner party.
So remember this, after Jesus calls Matthew, go go back and
look at scene 8 in the the, the course of events that we we
discuss in scene 8 of my books. After Jesus calls Matthew, they
(06:16):
have a dinner party. Matthew actually invites Jesus
and Jesus's disciples to his home, along with a room full of
other tax collectors and what the Gospels kind of politely
call sinners. In the social code of the day,
eating with someone was a publicstatement of approval.
(06:36):
You didn't just share food. You you didn't just go to dinner
randomly and haphazardly with people.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, Hable Fellowship is what
we call it was a was a really big deal.
Meals weren't just about eating,They were about identity.
Who you ate with signaled who you belonged to.
(06:57):
So stepping back, if you're reading the gospels or really if
you're reading anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament
all the way through the New Testament, whenever you hear
about eating and meals and you read events in the Gospels in
which Jesus is eating with someone, there's always more
going on than just the meal. Who you ate with signaled who
(07:20):
you belong to. So Pharisees and other religious
leaders often kept their dinner tables as what what we might
call a purity zone. They only invited those who met
their standards of law, keeping social standing, political
status, economic status. But Jesus takes the opposite
approach. His table becomes a place where
(07:42):
outsiders are actually brought inside.
So it's no wonder the leaders pull some of Jesus's followers
aside and ask him, why does yourteacher eat with tax collectors
and sinners? In Mark 2, Jesus hears them and
he responds with the line that it's kind of become one of the
clearest mission statements in the Gospels.
(08:02):
He says in Mark 2, it's not the healthy who need a doctor, but
the sick. I haven't come to call the
righteous, but sinners. This isn't just a warm
sentiment. It's a public challenge.
Jesus is forcing everyone to decide what kind of God they
believe in. OK, listen, listen closely.
He's putting people in a position to decide, what do I
(08:26):
believe about God? Is God a God who protects the
boundaries and keeps people out?Or is God a God who tears down
those boundaries and invites people in?
This move with Matthew comes in the middle of a stretch where
Jesus is consistently reaching for people that others avoided.
So earlier in this same season, he heals the man with leprosy.
(08:50):
In our context, leper is almost kind of a metaphor.
We we've heard so many stories and and in pop popular culture
and just general ideas about Jesus healing the lepers.
But in the 1st century world, this was a lived reality of
exclusion. Skin diseases literally made you
richly unclean under the law of Moses, according to Leviticus
(09:14):
1314, which meant a lot of things.
You couldn't enter the temple. Often you couldn't even live
inside the town walls. You were cut off from worship,
community life, familial ties were strained and possibly to
the point where they were cut off.
So when Jesus touches and heals this man, this leper in this
other scene, he doesn't just restore his health, he restores
(09:36):
his place in society. And he does it in a way where
everyone can see, in a way that makes everyone watching question
the rules that kept this man outin the first place.
I think we need to pause for a second here because sometimes we
read these stories through a purely religious lens and we
miss how actually disruptive they are.
(09:58):
In Jesus world, the Torah wasn'tjust a set of spiritual
teachings, OK, this is kind of aChristianized approach to the
Old Testament law, the Leviticallaw.
The the Torah wasn't just this religious thing, it was the law
of the land, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Exodus.
These were the civil and judicial and moral frameworks of
(10:20):
Jesus society. So they weren't just restricted
to how I behave in a religious setting.
These were how I behave in the world.
These were actual laws. So when Jesus challenges or
reinterprets these laws, he's not just pushing back on what we
call legalism in a modern kind of churchy sense.
(10:43):
He's confronting the governing authorities of his people.
He's calling out the very systemthat claimed the right to decide
who was in and who was out. He's not just challenging
religious laws or spiritual lawsor things that pertain to what I
feel in my heart or think in my head.
(11:03):
Jesus is challenging the laws ofthe land, and it's that
combination, his talk about God's Kingdom and his criticism
of how the law was being used and his announcement of an
economic and social jubilee, it turns in from just another
interesting teacher and a reallyclever rabbi into an existential
(11:25):
threat. And I think this brings us to
another flashpoint in the same period, the same scene, and
that's the healing of the paralyzed man.
Remember the story? And it's also in Mark two of the
gathering at which Jesus is teaching.
And he's so surrounded, he's inside the house, and he is so
(11:46):
surrounded by people that that the friends of the man who is
paralyzed can't get the paralyzed man in to see Jesus.
So they go up on the top of the roof, they tear through the
roof, and they lower him down infront of Jesus.
And before Jesus actually heals him physically, remember what
Jesus says, Mark 25, Jesus says your sins are forgiven.
(12:09):
So that statement is a powerful statement.
And it's enough to start a riot in a room full of religious
lawyers. So forgiving sins wasn't just a
spiritual act, it was something only God had the authority to
do. And if Jesus could do it, that
meant the entire priestly systemwas no longer the only bridge
between God and humanity. What that does is it takes the
(12:33):
power and the right and the religious authority out of those
who had long only been allowed to do that, and only been given
authority by God to do that. This is a big deal.
It's often used as just a kind of a defense of, well, Jesus is
claiming to be God here. I mean, we can make that case,
(12:54):
but the bigger point is the strategic nature of what Jesus
is doing here. He's effectively challenging
those at the top of the social and religious and political and
economic order who hold the keysto access to God.
And when Jesus says your, your sins are forgiven, he's saying
you've got access to God now. So from here, the tension keeps
(13:17):
rising, right? The more Jesus heals, forgives,
includes, the more the establishment feels the ground
shifting under their feet. They start accusing them of a
blasphemy, not just in the senseof using God's name carelessly,
not just a claiming to be God, but in this this heavier sense
of claiming divine authority in ways that threaten the political
(13:39):
and economic and social and religious establishment, those
who already have control. And so we see this throughout
the Gospels. The Sabbath, Shabbat becomes one
of Jesus's favorite battlegrounds in this season and
especially of his public campaign.
So he doesn't just happen to heal on the Sabbath.
(13:59):
He chooses the Sabbath knowing full well that it's going to
cause a stir and and not in someback alley where word might
spread. He does it in the synagogues, in
front of the crowds, right in the spaces controlled by the
very people who are trying to contain him.
So in one case, there's a man with a deformed hand, and the
(14:20):
religious leaders are watching closely.
They're almost hoping that Jesusis going to heal him because
that'll give him some ammunitionto accuse Jesus of breaking the
law. And then they can move forward
with prosecution. And Jesus calls the man forward,
and he turns to the leaders and asks.
This is in Mark 3, which is lawful on the Sabbath.
(14:42):
To do good or to do evil, to save a life or to kill.
Mark 3-4 in the room, silent. They don't know what to say.
Their attempt to trap Jesus turns into Jesus trapping them
in front of the crowds. So Jesus goes ahead and he heals
the man right there in front of everyone and and his message is
clear. And they understood it, that
(15:03):
God's law was meant to give life, not to become a tool for
policing compassion for the leaders.
This is infuriating. Every public Shabbat
confrontation chips away at their authority.
Every healing is another headline moment where the crowd
leaves talking about Jesus instead of them.
And every time he links his actions to the arrival of God's
(15:25):
Kingdom, the empire of God, it becomes harder to write him off
as just another wandering teacher.
So it's around now that the opposition starts getting
organized. Mark tells us that the Pharisees
begin to plot with the Herodians.
These are these are otherwise political rivals, but they don't
like Jesus, and that's a mutual connecting point between them.
(15:48):
So their common goal becomes stopping Jesus before his
influence gets completely out ofcontrol.
So now all of that happens in this scene.
Back to Matthew's calling or in scene 8.
All of this, the leper, the paralyzed man, the Sabbath
confrontations, it's the backdrop for why calling Matthew
(16:08):
is so disruptive. So Matthew's not a charity case
that Jesus feels sorry for. OK, we've talked about that.
He's a high value recruit. By bringing him in, Jesus sends
a message to both the religious establishment and the Roman
aligned elite. No one gets to draw the boundary
lines of God's Kingdom except God himself.
(16:29):
And Matthew doesn't fade into the background.
He becomes part of Jesus's innercircle, the group that will one
day take this movement from the Galilee to the ends of the
earth. In fact, the Gospel that bears
his name is going to carry Jesus's teachings to generations
far beyond this moment. When you think about it, that
dinner party at Matthew's house is the perfect picture of
(16:50):
Jesus's campaign strategy. It's kind of a microcosm of of
Jesus's campaign strategy as a whole.
It's mercy and subversion at thesame table.
It's compassion for the outsider, and it's a tactical
use of relationships to give themovement room to grow.
In the ancient world, a meal could cement alliances.
(17:12):
Here's the thing. Jesus wasn't just welcoming
outsiders, he was building with them.
Matthew isn't just a look who got saved story, he's part of
the core team. Jesus is flipping the system
upside down. The unclean are now the
insiders, the untouchables are at the center, and the
overlooked are carrying the mission forward.
(17:35):
And I think that tells us something about the shape of
God's Kingdom. It's not about grooming the next
set of religious elites. It's about raising up people,
the world, and sometimes even the church, has already written
off. When Jesus goes and eats with
these people, it's not just fellowship, it's a revolution in
the form of a meal. Jesus meets people in the
(17:58):
middle, including us in the middle of our own mess.
But he doesn't just pull us out,he pulls us in, OK, into his
mission, into his movement, intohis strategy.
And that means that when he shows compassion to you, he's
also recognizing something strategic in you.
Remember, this is a genuine moment of compassion.
(18:20):
Jesus genuinely heals people, genuinely lifts people up,
genuinely welcomes people into God's Kingdom.
But he's also doing so strategically because in every
person who enters God's Kingdom,Jesus sees potential.
And so when he shows you and me compassion, he's also
recognizing something in US strategically, something in your
(18:43):
experiences, your skills, or even your mistakes that have
uniquely shaped you to offer something valuable in the
advancement of God's Kingdom. Matthew's skill set wasn't
religious. He wasn't a rabbi.
He wasn't a thinker. He wasn't a teacher.
(19:04):
Matthew's skill set was administrative, financial.
He was connected to systems mostpeople didn't understand.
And Jesus redeems it for his Kingdom.
And I know a lot of us feel likespiritual outsiders or that
we've been kind of sidelined by by our Christian culture, But I
think Matthew's story sort of subverts that narrative.
(19:25):
Jesus doesn't need you to get cleaned up first.
He calls you now. He didn't go and tell Matthew,
hey, Matthew, you need to resign.
You need to mend all of the bridges that you've burned.
You need to go and repay. You need to do this or that.
He just says, come, follow me. And Matthew does it exactly how
he is. Do you think Matthew had this
miraculous one off change of heart, this enormous religious
(19:48):
conversion right at that moment?According to the text, we don't,
we can't say that he did, but what we can say is in the
condition that he was in at the moment Jesus called him, He went
and followed. And I think if you follow him,
not just believing a few ideas about him, but actually altering
the shape of your life to move with him, He sends you out as
(20:10):
part of his active campaign. And it starts at the moment He
calls you. You're not just saved for later
until you get things cleaned up.You're sent for now.
You're part of a movement that'sstill overturning the old orders
and planting outposts of God's reign in ordinary places.
So in the early 1800s, William Wilberforce, cool name.
(20:32):
A lot of you know that name. If you don't, he became the face
of the fight to abolish the British slave trade.
So he was a big deal. But what a lot of people don't
realize is, is that Wilberforce didn't do it alone.
He had a circle of friends and allies who were as unlikely a
(20:53):
reform team as you could imagine.
They called him the Clapham Circle, named after the
neighborhood where many of them live in the UK.
This group included fellow politicians, writers, business
leaders, pastors, and even former enslaved people.
Some were respected members of Parliament.
Others were social outsiders whohad seen injustice first hand
(21:16):
and wanted to do something aboutit.
And Wilberforce knew he needed all of them.
He needed the insiders who couldnavigate political systems.
He needed the outsiders who lived the pain of those systems
and could speak with moral authority because they had seen
it first hand. And together, this group pushed
forward for decades. It took a long time against
(21:39):
overwhelming resistance from people in power who were making
a fortune off of slavery. In 18 O 7, the British
Parliament finally voted to abolish the slave trade.
A a victory that never would have happened if Wilberforce had
only surrounded himself with acceptable voices, with cleaned
up people, with people. People just like him.
(22:02):
I think this is a good picture of Matthew's dinner table and
more broadly of Jesus building amovement where the respected and
the rejected sit side by side for the sake of the Kingdom.
I know this isn't an easy concept to accept, especially if
you carry these deep seated negative views of yourself or a
(22:23):
low sense of worth which we all struggle with, but some of us
struggle with it even more. It can feel almost impossible to
picture yourself as a Matthew, can't it?
Someone with a messy path and maybe even a not so great
present. You're still a mess.
Someone whom Jesus is actually inviting to play an essential
(22:46):
role in his movement. I joke sometimes that I have 3
YouTube subscribers, two of which are probably me from old
accounts I can't access anymore,and I don't know who the third
is. If you're looking at raw
numbers, I'm not in influencer territory and I don't have any
grandiose claims of being a social media influencer or New
(23:07):
York Times bestselling author. I just don't.
Those things don't motivate me. If I ever am, I've got to stop
giving books away for free. Still, I'll be honest.
I struggle on a daily basis withseeing the reality of my past,
of my insecurities, my lowly social media presence and fame,
(23:29):
my inadequacies. Reconciling all of that with
pastors or friends or mentors orinfluencers saying, yeah, God's
called you to do great things inthe Kingdom.
I struggle with all of that daily.
But here's what I've learned. God doesn't measure influence
the way we do. More than once I've gotten a
message from someone, some sometimes in another state,
(23:52):
sometimes in another part of theworld, who stumbled across a
video of mine or a book of mine and said, you know what?
That was exactly what I needed to hear today.
You know what, maybe they move on the next day, they're back on
to, to something else. And, and, and that's fine
because at least for that moment, God was able to use
something that I've done to helpsomeone that I don't even know.
(24:16):
Or I get an e-mail from a student I have, I have the
privilege of teaching courses onreligion and Bible and Jesus and
ancient stuff at a large public university with some amazing
people. And that student says, hey,
thank you for teaching that, this or that subject and, and
not being judgmental or abrasiveabout it.
(24:37):
And then they tell me that they grew up in an extremely
conservative home in which they were not allowed to ask
questions and they were not allowed to think critically or
analytically about the theological points that were
that were put upon them. And it just caused them not to
understand why God would be so harsh with them if all they
(25:02):
wanted to do was know more aboutit.
And that's when I remember that Jesus launched his movement out
of Capernaum, not Jerusalem. And he started with fishermen
and tax collectors and people with no platform.
Why call a tax collector? Because Jesus was serious about
flipping the world's power structures.
And he started by rewriting the guest list.
(25:25):
The challenge, I think for us issimple to say but hard to live.
The question, I think, is who's on your guest list?
Who's on my guest list? Who would the respectable
religious crowd in your world frown at if they saw you eating
with them? Are you willing not only to
welcome them, but to build with them?
(25:47):
And maybe even more personal, are you willing to see yourself
as Matthew? Someone Jesus sees not only with
compassion but with strategy? Someone whose life, your past,
and your present can be turned into a tool for building the
Kingdom right where you are? Lake Omad.
Go and learn. Come back for Scene 9 of the
(26:09):
Jesus X30 Challenge.
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