Biblion Bible Commentary
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Levi's Great Feast
Luke 5:27-32
27 After these things he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax office, and said to him, “Follow me!” · WEB
A tax collector leaves his booth and immediately throws a party — and the guest list is the objection.
He saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax office, and said to him, "Follow me!" Luke 5:27.
The call is told in the earliest account Mark 2:1–17. What makes it startling is the man's trade. Tax collection under Rome was a franchise: a man bought the right to collect and made his living on the excess, so the job was legalized extortion carried out against his own people on behalf of an occupier. It also could not be resigned and re-entered. A fisherman leaving his nets could go back; a man who walked away from that booth had given up the contract.
He left everything, and rose up and followed him Luke 5:28. Left everything is this writer's phrase — he used it of the fishermen too Luke 5:11 — and here it has more in it, since what Levi left was money.
Levi made a great feast for him in his house Luke 5:29.
This is the detail this account adds, and it is characteristic of the book. The first thing the man does with his new life is spend it on a party. There was a great crowd of tax collectors and others who were reclining with them — his colleagues, which is to say the only friends a man in that trade had.
So the shape is: he leaves the work, keeps the people, and introduces them.
"Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?" Luke 5:30. The question is put to the disciples rather than to him, and it is about eating. In that culture a shared table was a statement of association — you did not dine with people whose standing you would not accept. The objection is not that he talks to them. It is that he is at their table.
"Those who are healthy have no need for a physician, but those who are sick do" Luke 5:31.
The answer works entirely inside their own logic. If a doctor is found among the sick, that is not a scandal; it is what the word means. And the proverb quietly puts the objectors in a position they will not enjoy on reflection — a man who has no need of a physician is not thereby well.
"I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" Luke 5:32. The last two words are this account's own addition, and they close a door that the sentence might otherwise leave open. The table is not an endorsement of the guests' lives. He is at Levi's feast on the same errand that emptied Levi's booth.
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