Who I Ate With

Words to Know

Tax collector — a local man who collected money for the occupying empire and kept a cut. A collaborator.

Sinner — in the gospels, usually a social category, not a moral judgment. Someone kept outside.

Table fellowship — the old term for who you were willing to eat with. It was a public statement about who your people were.

If you had asked the respectable religious people of my day what was wrong with me, they would not have said my theology.

They would have said: look who he eats with.

That was the charge. It comes up over and over (Mark 2:15–17, Luke 15:1–2, Luke 19:7).

You need to know why that was serious.

In your world, eating with someone means almost nothing.

In mine, a shared meal was a declaration. Who you ate with was who you belonged to.

There were rules about it, and I want to tell you exactly what kind, because this is easy to overstate and I would rather you had it straight.

There was no law with a penalty. Nobody was ever arrested for having dinner. What existed was three things stacked on each other. There were food laws about what could be eaten at all (Leviticus 11). There were purity rules under which uncleanness travelled — by touch, by a shared dish, by the cushion somebody had sat on (Leviticus 15). And there were tithing rules, which meant that in a careless man’s house you could not be sure the food on the table had ever been tithed at all.

Put those together and eating at the wrong table did not make you a criminal. It made you unreliable — a man that other careful men would not eat with either.

That is a real cost. It is the cost of a reputation, and in a village a reputation is most of what a man has.

Which is why the objection to me was raised as a question and never as a charge: why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? (Mark 2:16). Nobody prosecuted it. They just said it, in front of people, until it stuck.

A respectable man did not sit down with people who would compromise him.

And I sat down with everybody.

Who they actually were.

Tax collectors. Not accountants. In Galilee these men worked for Antipas, not for Rome — they bought or were granted the right to collect the tolls on a road or a harbor, paid a fixed sum up the chain, and kept whatever they could squeeze above it. In Judea, under Rome, the same trade ran on Rome’s account; the man at Jericho whom Luke calls a chief tax collector had other collectors working under him (Luke 19:2).

They were collaborators and they were extortionists. Both of those are literally true. People hated them and had good reason — and had nowhere to complain, because a collector’s superior was the government.

“Sinners.” This word does not mean what you think. It was not a comment that everybody falls short. It was a label, used by respectable people about other people, for a job, a condition, or a reputation that put you outside.

I will be honest about how much is known here. Nobody has a list of these jobs written down in my lifetime. What we have is the gospels putting the word next to the toll men (Mark 2:15–16) and onto a woman known around her town (Luke 7:37), and Jewish legal writings from a couple of centuries later listing trades that were looked down on — the tanner, who handles dead animals, and the herdsman, who is assumed to be grazing on somebody else’s land.

What you can see plainly in the texts you already own is who decided. Not a court. There is no trial anywhere in any of this. It was decided by comfortable people about uncomfortable people, and it stuck because nobody ever made them prove it.

And some were in debt to people they could never repay — which, after Lesson 3, you can now finish for yourself: the field gone, the sons hired out by the day, and jail or sale waiting at the end of it.

Women, at a table, in a mixed group. Some of them paid for the whole operation out of their own money — Luke names three of them and says they supported us out of their own means (Luke 8:1–3).

I should say that that verse is about the money and the travelling, not about a table. For the table, read Luke 7:36–50. A woman with a reputation walks into a dinner party she was not invited to and puts her hands on me, and the host’s reaction tells you everything about what was expected. He does not say she should not be in here. He says, to himself, if this man were a prophet, he would know what she is.

What I was actually doing.

Not outreach. Not a project. Not a demonstration to make a point.

I sat down and ate. In my country that meant one thing: these are my people, and I am theirs. If you have a problem with them, you have one with me.

How I answered the complaint.

I did not defend myself with a doctrine. I told three stories in a row, and every one is about somebody looking for something (Luke 15).

A man loses one sheep out of a hundred, and leaves the ninety-nine to go find it (Luke 15:3–7).

A woman loses one coin, lights a lamp, and sweeps the whole house until she finds it (Luke 15:8–10).

And a younger son asks his father for his share of the property while the father is still alive (Luke 15:11–32). Do not skip past that. In front of the neighbors, the son said he would rather have the money than the man. Then he took it, spent it, and came home to beg for work.

And the father, who must have been watching the road, sees him coming from a long way off and runs.

Running is the part the first listeners flinched at. A man of standing did not run anywhere. He walked, and people came to him. That father threw away his dignity in the road in front of the whole village.

Hold on to that third one. It comes back in Lesson 19, and it overturns something very large.

Notice what is missing.

There is no assessment in any of it.

Nobody is asked what they will do with the meal. Nobody has to prove they have changed first. The father does not wait for the apology. He interrupts it.

The kingdom was never going to be a reward handed out after a review.

It was going to be a room with the wrong people already sitting in it, eating, and nobody at the door.

That is a very hard thing to build an organization on. In Unit Two you will see exactly how that problem got solved.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Luke 15:1–2.

You will find: the exact complaint against me, stated in one sentence, right before I tell three stories in a row.

The Short Version

• The main charge against me was the company I kept at dinner.
• Sharing a meal was a public statement about who your people were.
• I ate with collaborators, outcasts, and women — with no conditions first.
• Nobody had to qualify. That is the part that is hard to organize.

Think About It

1. Who would your church find it awkward to have at a shared meal?
2. Why is “no conditions” difficult for any organization to run on?