NOTES for Luk 5:27-28
The evangelists more than once mention tax collectors following Jesus, or, as they are called in the Russian Synodal translation in the Slavic manner, publicans. One of these collectors was Levi, mentioned in the Gospel of Luke. Why was it precisely they, these people rejected by religious society, who had such interest in the Savior? And not only they, but, for example, city prostitutes, and in general those who had nothing to count on in respectable religious Jewish society? What did they expect from Jesus? Forgiveness of sins? But what prevented them from turning to God themselves, without waiting for the appearance of this unusual Man? It is not easy for us today to understand this.
Meanwhile, pre-Christian ideas about evil and sin, even in the Jewish environment, were such that these people had nothing to count on. In antiquity the conviction was generally widespread that evil in the world is almost all-powerful. Once a person had committed an evil deed, he could never again get rid of its consequences; they remained with him not only until the end of his earthly life, but until the end of the world. There was no way out: a person was unable to correct the evil he had done. He could repent and regret as much as he liked; it changed nothing. What is done is done. What has been done cannot be returned.
Evil committed, a sin once done, will never disappear, will never go away into nonbeing. In Yahwism and, accordingly, in Judaism, the situation was not entirely like this only because the presence of God accompanying the people sometimes made it possible to be cleansed from the consequences of committed sin, from what in the language of the Levitical priesthood was called defilement. But cleansing was possible only when the sin had been committed involuntarily, for example through ignorance or weakness.
In this case one could repent of the sin committed, and then had to perform the corresponding purifying rituals. They included a special purifying sacrifice, when a person approached the altar, the place of God's presence, so that God would cleanse him from the consequences of what he had done. But if the sin was committed consciously, not against a person's will but in full agreement with it, it was impossible to be cleansed from the consequences of a sin committed in this way.
Even repentance and turning to God with a request for forgiveness did not change the situation: God could forgive a person, but it was impossible to free him from the consequences. For such liberation to become possible, God would have to create the world anew. Restart all the cause-and-effect chains existing in it so that everything would begin from a clean slate. But the coming of Christ and the manifestation of the Kingdom in the world provide precisely such a possibility to everyone.
That is why Levi runs after Jesus: if this Teacher called him, then by some miracle his, Levi's, sin, committed completely consciously and voluntarily, can also be forgiven. For people like Levi, this was truly joyful news. But for each of us it is also such news, although we do not always understand this. For in the Kingdom there is no place for any sin, even accidental and involuntary. This means that all of us, if we want the Kingdom, will have to begin from a clean slate. And make use of the possibility that the Savior gives us.