NOTES for Luk 5:27-32

The question asked by the Pharisees of Jesus and His disciples is often regarded as a manifestation of a kind of spiritual fastidiousness on the part of those asking, who considered it shameful to sit at the same table with sinners. At the same time it is supposed that they did not consider themselves sinful, being sure of their own impeccability. Yet the situation in this case turns out to be somewhat more complicated than it may appear at first glance.

Indeed, many really did consider tax collectors, for example, who collected taxes for the Roman authorities, to be collaborators and traitors, especially when it came to representatives of such extreme movements as, for instance, the "zealots" mentioned in the Gospel. But the issue here is not only religious and political sympathies. The issue is the understanding of sin that was characteristic, and not without reason, of the pre-Christian era. Of course, none of the Pharisees considered himself sinless; neither the Torah nor Jewish tradition shared such a view of the human person, even when speaking of someone deeply religious who strictly observed all the norms and rules of ritual purity.

Moreover, the Torah describes special purification rituals (washings and sacrifices) to which people resorted when they needed to be cleansed from the consequences of a sin committed. And, of course, such cleansing required repentance, usually public repentance, since the person offering a purification sacrifice had to name his sin publicly.

But one could be cleansed only from a sin committed involuntarily, out of weakness or ignorance. It was impossible to be definitively delivered from a sin committed consciously and voluntarily. Of course, God could forgive a person even such a sin if the sinner repented deeply and sincerely, but from the point of view of traditional ideas it was impossible to be delivered from the consequences of a sin committed voluntarily and consciously.

That is why purification was impossible, for example, for tax collectors, who did what they did consciously and voluntarily, since no one forced them into it. The issue here is not some special harshness of the Torah or of Judaism, but the objective laws of the fallen world, where before the coming of Christ it was almost impossible to be delivered from evil and from the consequences of a sin committed by a person. Only His coming into the world radically changes the situation. He comes to free from the power of sin everyone who wants to be freed from it, regardless of how the person came under that power. He comes to call "not the righteous, but sinners to conversion."