NOTES for Luk 5:27-28

The evangelists more than once mention tax collectors following Jesus, or publicans, as they are called in the Russian Synodal translation in a Slavic manner. One of these collectors was Levi, mentioned in Luke's Gospel. Why did precisely they, these people rejected by religious society, have such an interest in the Savior? And not only they, but also, for example, city prostitutes, and in general those who could count on nothing in respectable religious Jewish society. What did they expect from Jesus? Forgiveness of sins? But what kept them from turning to God themselves, without waiting for this unusual Man to appear? Today this is not easy for us to understand.

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 there was a widespread conviction that evil in the world was almost all-powerful. Once a person committed an evil deed, he could never be free of its consequences; they remained with him not only to the end of his earthly life, but to the end of the world. There was no way out: a person was unable to repair the evil he had done. He could repent and regret as much as he liked; it changed nothing. What is done is done. The deed cannot be taken back.

Committed evil, a sin once done, will never disappear or pass into nonbeing. In Yahwism and therefore in Judaism the situation was not exactly this only because God's presence accompanying the people sometimes made it possible to be cleansed from the consequences of committed sin, from what in the language of Levitical priesthood was called defilement. But cleansing was possible only when the sin had been committed involuntarily, for example through ignorance or weakness.

In that case one could repent of the sin committed, and then had to perform the corresponding rites of purification. They included a special purification 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 apart from a person's will but in full agreement with it, it was impossible to be cleansed from the consequences of a sin committed in that 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 deliverance to become possible, God would have to create the world anew, to restart all the causal chains existing in it so that everything began with a clean slate. And the coming of Christ and the appearance of the Kingdom in the world provide exactly this possibility to everyone.

That is why Levi runs after Jesus: if this Teacher has 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 good news. But for each of us it is also such news, though we do not always understand it. In the Kingdom there is no place for any sin, even accidental and involuntary sin. That means all of us, if we want the Kingdom, will have to begin with a clean slate and make use of the possibility the Savior gives us.