Life of Christ #7 -Why Jesus Felt at Home With Sinners and Outcasts

We’re looking at the life of the Lord only as we focus on His relationship to the Father, an indwelling Father in Christ; Christ’s subjective internal experiences as He lived His life on this earth. We seek to see His life from a totally different perspective and maybe learn a little about the Christian life, because after all, He is the first Christian, and this is how He lived the Christian life.

The story is of the Lord returning from the land of the Gerasenes; He has stepped off the boat. The Sea of Galilee is not far from Capernaum, and He has obviously returned to Capernaum. It doesn’t say so, but it says to His own town, and that’s Capernaum, no longer Nazareth. The citizens of the city meet Him with glee. They’re very happy at His return. I don’t know if this is the beginning of a new day or a continuation of the same day that He healed the Gerasene demoniac. I feel it’s probably a different day because, one way or the other, it is the longest day recorded in the New Testament. I believe I’m correct.

The people are gleeful. There is an almost banquet atmosphere, but it seems that, just as you always have the poor, you also always have the Pharisees. You have the religious, and you have the professional minister who’s always coming along, muddying up people’s relationship to the Lord and making it complex.

What’s happening here is something quite natural, and that is… an enthusiastic follower of the Lord Jesus Christ wants to lead his friends to the Lord, so he’s thrown a banquet. His name is Matthew Levi, and he has invited every tax collector he can find. They must be a very sordid lot, because they’ve obviously brought in the rest of the dredges of the area. I’ve always imagined this as a banquet in a house, because a banquet is supposed to be in a house, but this may have taken place outside. No law says it had to be inside. There is some indication it might have been along the seashore there, but we’ll come to that later. Anyway, let’s at least imagine it in a very large courtroom: an open court with no doors and no roof above it.

Some way or other, either the Pharisees are present, or they’re watching the people go in. It seems they are also part of the festivities. They either are, or they’ve intruded, or they have watched the people go home and now, one way or the other, they are there.

I went to seminary. At no time in my seminary did any professor ever say at the end of a lecture, “Well, now let’s go out and make this practical,” and take the class out on a weekend trip while he demonstrated to us what he was doing. Now, I don’t doubt that something like that was done once a semester, perhaps at my seminary, but that will never excuse what we’re doing today. Brothers, these men are following the Lord constantly. His disciples are with Him all the time. Here is the confrontation with the Pharisees, and they need that. They need to know the results of the ministry.

You know what the results of the ministry are? It’s confrontation of the Pharisees. That’s one of the biggest things that comes out of ministry. It’s not all fun. All these wonderful people around, everybody enjoying themselves, a beautiful banquet, and there’s a bunch of old sourpusses who want to cause problems. And you remember the sourpusses long after you’ve forgotten the banquet. These people who are enjoying themselves, they’re just enjoying themselves. These people who are provoked, they’ll kill you, and there’s a world of difference. We don’t know what happened to the people at the banquet, but we know what happened to the disgruntled people: a day later, they crucified Him. And the others didn’t stop Him. The banquet people didn’t stop Him.

A peripatetic ministry, a confrontation with Pharisees that came out of, for them, on-the-job training. It came out of the Lord’s natural ministry, and they were front and center when it happened. A classroom nullifies all hope of that. I’m going to get way out here on thin ice. Scripture gives no grounds for classrooms in the kingdom of God. Yet, we hold the classroom as though it were the peripatetic ministry, and we have neglected the peripatetic ministry as though it was as unscriptural as the classroom is.

Did you follow that? Did you get that? We have chased after what is unscriptural as though it were scriptural, and we have neglected what is scriptural as though it were unscriptural. Where in the history of the kingdom of God in the last 1800 years have you seen a peripatetic ministry? I have never, never read about it, never heard of it. It is gone, and yet we are looking not at an oriental custom; we are looking at God’s sovereign, purposeful, deliberate way of raising up Christian workers. Walking and learning. Day to day. 24-hour classroom. Seven days a week. Following a man wherever he went; it happened twice in the New Testament. I have to stop to say that.

Now then, to that young brother sitting out there, I would like to say something to you. You feel called of the Lord, and the very first thing you think is that you want to honor and be committed to Scripture, and you want to do the scriptural thing, and you want to be in your New Testament, and you want to bring forth again a really biblically based faith. Brothers and sisters agree with you and encourage you to get training in the ministry. Somewhere along the line, you will face pressure to go to Bible school or seminary, possibly even from the Bible school or seminary, and it is because these people say you need to be grounded in Scripture so that you can grow up in the ministry scripturally. Still, the first thing you are invited to do is something unscriptural. The first thing you do in your commitment to be scriptural is to do something that couldn’t be further from scriptural. You haul off to a seminary. The entire history of evangelical seminaries is less than 200 years old. You might want to think about that a little bit, brother.

Now we come to the banquet. This is… beautiful. It gives us one of those personal glimpses of who is following the Lord. It’s also arresting to recognize that right here in this city right now, there are probably a lot of people who would be interested in Jesus Christ if they could get Him outside a church building. That would include prostitutes, truck drivers, longshoremen, sailors, but there is a religious world that has built something around Him that makes Him distasteful to the masses.