Hank's Bible Study Resources

We’ve been holding one word up to the light through this whole series. Skandalon. A stumbling block, the thing you trip over in the dark. The most Bible-soaked men who ever lived tripped over Jesus again and again, and every time it was because he refused to fit inside the box they had built for a holy man. He kept breaking their categories. And there was one category he broke so often, so publicly, that it became the standing charge against him. He ate with the wrong people.

So let’s watch him do it.

The scene

Mark sets it down without softening a thing. Jesus walks past a tax booth and sees Levi sitting there, a man collecting money for Rome off his own countrymen, a man his neighbors would have crossed the street to avoid. And Jesus says two words. “Follow Me.” Levi gets up and follows. Then comes the part that made the room tilt. “Now it happened, as He was dining in Levi’s house, that many tax collectors and sinners also sat together with Jesus and His disciples” (Mark 2:15, NKJV). A whole house full of them. The collaborators, the cheats, the women nobody would name in polite company, all of them reclining at one table with the teacher.

And Luke gives us a scene sharper still. Jesus is at dinner in a Pharisee’s house, a respectable place, and a woman “who was a sinner” comes in off the street. She stands behind him weeping, and her tears fall on his feet, and she wipes them with her hair and kisses them and pours perfume over them (Luke 7:37-38). The host is horrified. Jesus lets her finish. Then he turns to her and tells her that her sins, which were many, are forgiven, and he sends her home in peace.

He kept doing this. Luke 15 opens with the tax collectors and sinners drawing near to hear him, and the muttering that always followed. “This Man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). They meant it as an accusation. It was the truest thing they ever said about him.

The offense

You have to understand what a table meant to these men, or the whole thing stays flat. In first-century Judaism, eating with someone was not casual. It was a declaration. To share a meal was to share a life, to say this person is clean enough, this person belongs with me, this person is inside the circle. The Pharisees had built their entire spirituality around the table. The word Pharisee likely traces to a root meaning “separated one,” and the separation was the point. They tithed their spices and washed their cups and guarded who got to eat with whom, all because they believed holiness was something you protected by keeping the unclean thing at arm’s length.

And underneath the offense sits a word. The muttering crowd used it, Jesus used it, Luke wrote it down.

Greek	Script	Strong’s	Meaning
hamartolos	ἁμαρτωλός	G268	one who misses the mark, a sinner, a person devoted to sin

The verb behind it is hamartano, to miss the mark, the picture of an arrow falling short of the target. But by Jesus’ day hamartolos had hardened into a social label as much as a moral one. It marked a class of people. The tax collectors, the notorious, the ones whose trade or reputation put them outside the boundary of respectable religious life. When the Pharisees said “sinners,” they did not mean “everyone falls short.” They meant those people. The ones you do not touch, do not marry into, do not eat with.

And here is where the whole system read Jesus as a heretic instead of a rabbi. In their framework, contamination flowed one direction. The clean thing did not cleanse the unclean. The unclean thing defiled the clean. Touch a corpse, become unclean. Touch a leper, become unclean. Sit at a sinner’s table, and his uncleanness climbs up your arm and settles on you. So when Jesus reclined in Levi’s house, they did not see mercy. They saw a holy man dissolving himself in filth, and worse, they saw him blessing the very sin the whole law existed to name. He was not merely getting dirty. He was, by their lights, telling sinners they were fine.

But they had the direction of the current exactly backward. When Jesus touched the leper, the leper got clean. When the sinful woman washed his feet, she went home forgiven. The holiness in him was not the fragile kind that had to be walled off. It was the strong kind. It moved outward, and it healed what it touched.

The mirror

Now turn it around, because the mirror is the point of this whole series, and I have to aim it at us before I aim it anywhere else.

We do not tithe our spices. We have a subtler version. We keep a clean table, and we tell ourselves it is reverence. Every church that has been around long enough settles into a quiet sense of who belongs, and the settling happens slowly, one small comfort at a time, until nobody remembers deciding it. There is an unspoken list. It is never printed anywhere, never voted on, but the regulars all know it. The list of who fits and who would need to clean up first before they really fit.

And an outsider can feel that list the second they walk through the door. The person who smells like last night’s bar, the couple who are not married and not hiding it, the man just out of prison, the woman whose reputation arrived before she did. They feel the temperature drop. They feel the half-second pause before the handshake. Nobody says a word, and they do not have to. The coldness says it. Clean yourself up, and then we’ll set a place for you.

That is the rut. And notice how religious it feels from the inside. It wears the clothes of holiness. It calls itself standards, calls itself protecting the witness, calls itself not wanting to condone anything. But it has the current running exactly the wrong way. It assumes the sin at the door is stronger than the Spirit in the room. It is the Pharisee’s arithmetic in a nicer building, and it would have muttered the same line at the same table. This Man receives sinners and eats with them.

The invitation

So look hard at that word Luke uses for what the crowd could not stand. “This Man receives sinners.” The Greek is prosdechomai (προσδέχομαι, G4327). It means to receive to oneself, to welcome, to take someone in. It is the same word Paul uses when he asks the Romans to welcome Phoebe, the same word for waiting expectantly, arms open, for something you actually want to arrive. Jesus did not tolerate sinners. He did not put up with them. He welcomed them, the way you welcome a guest you have been hoping would come.

And he did it without ever once pretending the sin was not sin. That is the part the clean-table church misses and the loose church misses too, from opposite ends. Jesus told the woman her sins were many. He did not soften the count. But he forgave them first and let the forgiveness do the cleaning, because that is the only order the gospel knows. He did not wait at the door for her to become presentable. He was the reason she could.

Here is what living like him looks like now, and it is more ordinary than you think. It looks like the person you would rather not sit by getting your seat. It looks like the handshake with no half-second pause. It looks like a church where the man who still smells like the bar hears something other than a temperature drop, where the list gets torn up because you finally remember you were on it once yourself.

Because you were. That is the ground the whole thing stands on. The reason we can keep an open table is that Someone kept one for us. The cross is the meal where the clean One took the whole current of our uncleanness onto himself and did not flinch, and came out the other side with us made new. We are not the host deciding who is worthy. We are the tax collectors who got called up from the booth, still stunned that he sat down in our house at all.

A church that remembers that cannot stay cold for long. And maybe that is the scandal this one needs.