Luke 15:1-7 ...and Jesus welcomed them.
(Back-to-back with Luke 14… hmmmm)
Who are the “Tax Collectors and sinners” in our lives? What makes them such?
What made Jesus attractive?
Why would anyone flock to Him?
Tax collectors - a publican, gathering public taxes from the Jews for the Romans
· The tax-collectors were, as a class, detested not only by the Jews but by other nations also, both on account of their employment and of the harshness, greed, and deception, with which they prosecuted it W. Barclay
Sinners - sinful, depraved, detestable, heathen (Matt 5:3; Rom 5; Eph 2)
· specifically, of men stained with certain definite vices or crimes, e. g. the tax-gatherers
Welcome - hospitality, accept, allow
· to receive to oneself, to admit, to give access to - to admit one, receive into contact and companionship
· To admit (accept) hope, not to repudiate but to entertain, embrace its substance
· Not to shun, to bear, an impending evil
Muttered, grumbled, murmured
· Constantly, intensely murmur
· An intensified from of murmur, in this context “heavy complaining”
· Murmur is an uncommonly used Greek term, this intense version is even rarer “more expressive”
“It was an offence to the scribes and the Pharisees that Jesus associated with men and women who, by the orthodox, were labelled as sinners. The Pharisees gave to people who did not keep the law a general classification. They called them “the People of the Land”; and there was a complete barrier between the Pharisees and the People of the Land. To marry a daughter to one of them was like exposing her bound and helpless to a lion. The Pharisaic regulations laid it down, “when a man is one of the people of the Land, entrust no money to him, take no testimony from him, trust him with no secret, do not appoint him guardian of an orphan, do not make him the custodian of charitable funds, do not accompany him on a journey.”
“A Pharisee was forbidden to be a guest of any such man or to have him as his guest. He was even forbidden, as far as it was possible, to have any business dealings with him. It was the deliberate pharisaic aim to avoid every contact with people who did not observe the petty details of the law...
The would have shocked to the core at the way in which Jesus companied with people who were not only rank outsiders, but sinners, contact that would necessarily defile.”
W. Barclay
To the Jew, the parable would have been a shocked… as Jesus states:
“There will be joy in heaven over one sinner who repents”
The teachers of the Law were known to say (as a strict Jew)... “There will be joy in heaven over one sinner who is obliterated before God”
“The Jews looked sadistically forward not to the saving but the destruction of the sinner.”
W. Barclay
