[ p. 73 ]
AS HE was walking by the side of the lake, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting in his office collecting customs, and he said to him, “Follow me!” Levi arose and followed him.
It had been the tax-gatherers who had listened to John the Baptist; so now Levi the tax-gatherer had listened to Jesus. Jesus had marked him among his eager hearers, and chosen him to make one of his band of closer followers. There were solid reasons why Jesus’ message, like John the Baptist’s, should have brought the tax-gatherers to his side.
The tax-gatherer was a social outcast. On the lips of the rigidly theocratic Pharisee devoted to the Law and the Tradition, the word “publican” was practically a synonym for “sinner” ; even when the tax-gatherer was collecting his dues, not for the Roman power, but, as Levi in his customs office outside the Galilean frontier town of Capernaum, [ p. 74 ] for Herod Antipas, the Jewish tetrarch of Galilee, he was still the servant of an alien tyranny, for civil government had no right to exist in the thought of a strict Pharisee. And the contempt felt for the tax-gatherer by the Pharisee, who believed that all government was summed up in the Law and all taxation in the Temple dues, was shared on more immediate and less lofty grounds by the ordinary man. At all times and in all places the tax-gatherer has been an unpopular figure ; in the Oriental world, where the system of selling the taxes to the highest bidder, and permitting him to make his profit at his will, has always obtained, he was detested ; in theocratic Jewry he was, as it were, under a perpetual sentence of excommunication.
To such men John the Baptist’s message that all men alike were sinners and must repent to flee the wrath to come was a tonic to their self-esteem : they were no worse than those who scorned them. But Jesus’ message was morer it made them sons of God ; it set them indeed far above the Pharisees, for ‘the Pharisees naturally refused to listen to a gospel which held of no account all their rigid and meticulous loyalty to the Law. The tax-gatherer [ p. 75 ] who listened to Jesus’ preaching straightway became a better man than the Pharisee who would not.
Tax-gathering was a profitable business even for the smaller fry. And Levi, when he gave up his post as customs officer at Capernaum, could well afford to give a great dinner in Jesus’ honor. Besides, he was following a man who demanded of his followers that they should make the sacrifice of all their possessions. The dinner was Levi’s last farewell to the comfortable life. There were many gathered together in his house to dine with Jesus, many of Levi’s friends, “publicans and sinners” who had listened gladly to Jesus, but were not prepared to take the plunge, and many of Jesus’ closer followers.
Perhaps the Pharisees were really indignant at the joyful company; but to a genuine indignation was added the chance of sowing doubts and dissensions among Jesus’ followers. For it was not to the Master that they addressed their question, but to his disciples. At Capernaum fishermen were not likely to be bosom friends with taxgatherers.
[ p. 76 ]
“Why,” said the Pharisees to the fishermen, “does he eat with tax-gatherers and sinners?”
And the fishermen did not know. It was a difficulty that would vanish away when they had grasped the secret of Jesus’ message. They had not done that; they never would. But they believed in him: the Master would have the answer. And they took the question to him. The Master had the answer, and gave it :
“Those who are well have no need of a doctor, but those who are ill. I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.”
There are other replies of Jesus to the Pharisees of the same order as this one ; but they are become so familiar to us that we can hardly realize their perfection. The simplest of men could not misunderstand them; nor the wisest add to them. Those two small and lucid sentences are alive. They have the character which Jesus demanded of his disciples when he sent them out to proclaim the message : they are “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” For even the swiftness of their irony is not so remarkable as the simplicity of their justice. They leave everything to the Pharisees. It was for them to judge whether they were well [ p. 77 ] and whether they were righteous. If they were sure of their health and their righteousness, why then it followed that Jesus was not for them. But if they were not. . . .
The more one looks into those simple words, the more one finds in them. Above all else, the evidence of the Master of men. He is, one would think, on his defense ; by a dozen simple words defense is transformed into an insidious and devastating attack. Yet hardly an attack: merely the serpent doubt set wandering forever in the Scribes’ paradise of certainty. They might well be wished all the joy of the worm, for the worm will do his kind.
Jesus, like John the Baptist, attracted to him social outcasts ; unlike John, he did not fast. His days of deliberate fasting were over when he had won his victory in the Wilderness. Now that he had entered the world of men for his purpose, he lived as a man among men. What fasting he did, he did in secret when he went apart alone to commune with his Father. Of fasting in the sight of men, there was none. His asceticism was of another order, and lay in his implicit faith in God. What the day brought forth, that he and his followers [ p. 78 ] received gladly as their Father’s gift. What the morrow should bring forth was the care of the morrow. A bringer of joyful news could not but live joyfully.
But John’s followers were ascetic like their absent master; and they were troubled at Jesus’ freedom.
“Why,” they asked him, “do your disciples not fast, whereas we do?”
Jesus answered:
“Can the sons of the bridechamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? Surely, so long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken from them and then they shall fast, in that day.”
The beauty of that reply has been lost, and its authenticity questioned, only because it has been confused with his reply to the same question from the Pharisees. They are different answers to different men. And to prove it we need not point to the impossibility of the Pharisees, who scorned John the Baptist, joining with John’s disciples in the attempt to embarrass Jesus. The questions came from different men, and were born of different [ p. 79 ] minds. The masterless disciples of John were truly troubled ; they were loyal to their imprisoned master, and fasted as he had done. Were they wrong?
The beautiful answer was for them alone. “No, you are right,” Jesus said. “The bridegroom has been taken from you. You have cause to be sad. When I too am taken, these friends of mine will fast, even as you. But I am here, and we are happy; and they cannot fast. You understand?”
They are words of tender sympathy with men whose devotion he understood and whose loyalty he admired. They must not be offended in him. So he sent John’s disciples away happy; not so the Pharisees.
For them, when they also asked : “Why do your disciples not fast, whereas we do?” he had a different word, profound and searching.
“No one,” he said, “patches a worn-out coat with a piece of new cloth; if he does, the new cloth pulls away the old, and the hole is made worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine bursts the skins, and both skins and wine are lost. He puts new wine into new skins.”
[ p. 80 ]
Again it is perfect. His message was new. How should he fit it to the old forms? It demanded forms new as itself. Those who would wear his new cloth must throw their old clothes away; those who would drink his new wine must find new wine-skins for it. Old or new? It was for them to choose; but for him there was no compromise.
With the Pharisees he touched fundamentals once more. But not with John’s disciples. The fasting of John’s disciples was their personal act of obedience and loyalty to their master : the fasting of the Pharisees was impersonal, a stone in the great edifice of Law and Tradition the church of their righteousness. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
Here was the issue. A personal knowledge of God’s will set over against an impersonal knowledge of that will as declared ages ago to the men of old: the voice of God speaking directly and anew through a living Man against the voice of God graven immutably upon stone : a new revelation against the old. There was no compromise; there could be no compromise. Either Jesus must deny his knowledge, or the Pharisees abjure theirs. They could [ p. 81 ] not. All that the Pharisee believed, all that his fathers had fought for, all that he lived by, was menaced with annihilation by Jesus’ claim. If men were God’s sons, and could know his will as a son knows his father’s, as it were through a deep call of blood to blood, then the Law was null and the Tradition nugatory. Therefore the Pharisees repelled the claim, and fought the man who made it. They were not villains, they were not fools, they were not—save to the vision of the prophet of genius—even hypocrites: they were merely zealous Churchmen, with the virtues and the vices that have ever belonged to devoted sons of a religious tradition.
Now they sensed the enemy and watched him. If fasting was nothing to him, could the Sabbath be more? The Sabbath—the divine rest directly ordained by God—would he break that?
On the Sabbath day they saw him and his disciples making their way through the cornfields, and as they walked his disciples plucked the ears of corn and ate them.
The Pharisees came forward and said: “See, they are doing what it is forbidden to do on the Sabbath.”
[ p. 82 ]
He answered: “Have you never read what David did when he had need and was hungry, both he and his men? how he went into the house of the Lord when Abiathar was high-priest and ate the sacred bread, which it is forbidden to any man to eat except the priests, and how he even gave it to his men?”
What defense was that to the Pharisee? This carpenter of Nazareth claimed the royal privilege of David in his extremity! They had but to let this heretic speak; out of his own mouth he would surely be condemned.
And he spoke again.
“Or have you not read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and are without offense? But if you knew what this means, ‘I desire love and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.”
What was this for a defense? The carpenter of Nazareth claimed for himself the privilege of the priests in the Temple! And was the solitary word of Hosea to overthrow the very ordinance of God? Was love of God to abrogate God’s Law? How could it be love of God, when love of God consisted in keeping his commandments? That a man, [ p. 83 ] simply by claiming that he loved God, might be free to break God’s Law, was anarchy, sacrilege, blasphemy. Let the heretic speak; he could but go deeper into the mire.
He spoke again :
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore Man is lord also of the Sabbath.”
He had spoken it: a word that they could not, and would not forget: nor the generations after them.
They were silent, and he and his disciples passed on.
But Jesus’ mind, was full. He had flung out his challenge and his vindication; he could no other. But would men understand, would even his own disciples understand, that this freedom that he claimed came solely from a knowledge of God? Freedom without that knowledge was license and sin. He had done what he had done because he knew himself God’s son, more closely bound to Him than by any Law: and any son of God, who knew himself God’s son, might do the same. But not otherwise. He must make it plain.
[ p. 84 ]
As they went along he saw a man working on the Sabbath. He called to him :
“Man, if you truly know what you are doing, you are blessed ; but if you do not know, then you are accursed and a breaker of the Law.”
Those words of Jesus are not in the canonical text; they come from the Codex Bezae. They are visibly authentic, and they express with perfect clarity a fundamental part of Jesus’ teaching. The man who knows God is above the Law; the man who is ignorant of God is bound by it, for 
know God is to be so deeply one with Him that a man’s will is God’s will. Spontaneously, in every thought and act, he expresses God: God is realized, only through man.
When Jesus returned to Capernaum he went into the synagogue. He knew that the Pharisees would be there, for the service of the synagogue was precious to the Pharisee. It was the center of his living religion. The synagogue, the place set apart for the loving study of God’s Law, was the creation of the Pharisee and the citadel of his faith. Therefore, when Jesus entered it, he knew he was entering upon another trial of strength, [ p. 85 ] among men zealous in the service of the synagogue. He had come to destroy them.
There was a man there with a withered hand. The Pharisees watched what Jesus would do.
He said to the man, “Come forward into the middle.” The man stood there.
Jesus turned to the Pharisees and said :
“Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath, or to do evil ; to save life or to destroy it?”
And they were silent.
Jesus spoke again:
“Which man among you having a sheep, if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? And how much more than a sheep is a man?”
They were silent. Then Jesus looked round upon them in anger, stung by their sullen silence, and said to the man:
“Stretch out your hand!”
He stretched it out, and it was restored.
According to Mark’s narrative, the man had made no appeal to Jesus. And it is probable that he did not. More than the healing of a withered hand was at stake. What seems to be the truth is that the Pharisees, knowing that the man desired [ p. 86 ] to be healed by Jesus and believed that he could be, had brought him to the synagogue and forbidden him, on pain of Sabbath-breaking, to appeal.
Certainly the stage was set, the challenge prepared by the Pharisees. Jesus accepted it, and by his words to the Pharisees lifted it to the level of ultimate things. It was no longer a question of to heal or not to heal, to keep or not to keep the Sabbath. It was one conception of right against another. Both were phrased in the same words: to do the will of God. What then was the will of God? Which of them, Jesus or the Pharisee, knew it? Was it that men should do good, or that they should keep the Law?
For Jesus the answer was clear. The will of God was that a man should do good, irrespective of the Law. If by breaking the Law he did good, then it was proved that the will of God was that the Law should be broken.
It was proved: the man with the hand made whole stood in the midst of the synagogue.
But it was not proved for the Pharisees. If they had no answer on their lips at the moment, they would find one soon: since the Law was [ p. 87 ] broken, it was not from God that Jesus had his power to heal, but from the Devil. Meanwhile they had an answer in their hearts. They immediately left the synagogue and took counsel with the officials of Herod Antipas how they might destroy Jesus.