NOTES for Mar 2:14-17

What so outraged the Pharisees? Yes, the Man whom they considered righteous invites a sinner into His home. But are repentance for sin and conversion really so rare that deeply religious people could forget about them? And did Pharisaic missionaries (and mission in the Judaism of Gospel times was quite active) not themselves speak often about the need for repentance, conversion, living faith and following the Torah, addressing sinners among others? Of course, there were limits. It was believed and generally accepted that a person was forgiven only for an involuntary sin, committed through weakness or ignorance, or under compulsion when, for example, circumstances made a sinful act the only way to avoid death. A tax collector was another matter: here was a deliberate and voluntary sin which, people thought, God did not forgive.

But Jesus says otherwise. For Him there are no unforgivable sins, just as there evidently are none for His heavenly Father, who wants to save everyone who can be saved.

Of course, the traditional Jewish view of sin contained its own truth, and this was the truth of an untransformed world lying in evil. It was a world where evil spread by itself, while the path of righteousness had to be forced open through immense efforts that proved simply impossible without God's help. In such a world, deliberate sin really did generate a chain of consequences that could be stopped only by recreating this world anew. Yet in a certain sense, Jesus is doing precisely that—recreating it. He brings into the world the Kingdom where everyone receives the chance to begin their spiritual life with a clean slate, effectively anew, in a new world.

There is only one condition: all former sins and all evil must remain in the former life. Anyone entering the Kingdom must leave that former life itself behind. Then the slate will truly be clean and the new life complete.