The evangelists mention more than once that Jesus, during His earthly ministry, visited all kinds of houses. Some of them were places where, from the point of view of the devout religious people of that time, it was simply improper to be. But Jesus pays no attention to commonly accepted opinions...
The evangelists mention more than once that Jesus, during His earthly ministry, visited all kinds of houses. Some of them were places where, from the point of view of the devout religious people of that time, it was simply improper to be. But Jesus pays no attention to commonly accepted opinions. He goes where He considers it necessary to go and speaks with those with whom He considers it necessary to speak. And the point, of course, is not that He is seeking scandal or wants to shock respectable society. The point is simply His ministry. And His earthly path.
A path that, in general, was determined not by society with its standards and opinions, but by His heavenly Father. Yet the nature of His ministry, of course, also mattered. Jesus Himself said that it is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick. One cannot be a physician and associate only with people who are healthy and well-off. Of course, in all this there was also another side, which today we usually call ritual. Although it would probably be more accurate to call it the problem of preserving purity.
Defilement, after all, was the central problem for Jewish religious society. And not only for Jewish society: fear of defilement has belonged to religious consciousness in every age. This is understandable: defilement interferes with sanctification; it interferes with God's action upon a person. Defilement separates a person from God, and whatever a person may do, as long as he is unclean, everything is useless.
Moreover, after becoming defiled, a person rolls backward in his relationship with God: one need only become defiled, and everything sometimes called one's "spiritual achievements" goes to waste. And association with conscious sinners, staying with them in the same house or especially at the same table, was considered in those days to defile a person as such, even if the one associating with such people did nothing bad himself.
Jesus associates precisely with such people, from whom one can become defiled. Of course, if He were an ordinary man, everything would have been exactly, or approximately, as the devout people around Him expected. But He bears within Himself the whole fullness of the Kingdom. A fullness that surpasses every sinfulness. Therefore defilement is not frightening to Him. For every defilement is the triumph of sin. And there is no place for sin in the Kingdom; therefore no impurity is frightening to the Messiah.
19
19:11 They thought the kingdom of God - A glorious temporal kingdom, would immediately appear.