NOTES for Luk 5:27-28

The evangelists repeatedly mention the tax collectors, or publicans as the Russian Synodal translation calls them in a Slavonic manner, who follow Jesus. One of such collectors was Levi, mentioned in the Gospel according to Luke. Why did 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 had nothing to count on in respectable Jewish religious 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? 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 had committed an evil deed, he could never be 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 undo the evil he had done. He could repent and regret as much as he liked; this changed nothing. What was done was done. What has been done cannot be taken back.

Evil once committed, a sin once done, will never disappear, will never pass into nonbeing. In Yahwism, and accordingly in Judaism, the situation was not quite so only because God's presence, which accompanied the people, sometimes made it possible to be cleansed from the consequences of a committed sin, from what in the language of the Levitical priesthood was called impurity. 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 committed sin, and then the appropriate cleansing rituals had to be performed. 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 the 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 an appeal to God for forgiveness did not change the situation: God could forgive the person, but it was impossible to deliver him from the consequences. For such deliverance to become possible, God would have had to create the world anew. To restart all the causal chains existing in it so that everything would begin with a clean slate. And the coming of Christ and the manifestation of the Kingdom in the world are precisely what give everyone such a possibility.

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 good news too, though we do not always understand this. For 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.