Mark - Lesson 3...Continued from page 2

DAY THREE:  Jesus Embraces the Outcast

Please carefully read Mark 2:13-17 and answer the following questions.

1.  Presumably the next day, though we aren’t told for sure, what did Jesus do (v. 13)?

2.  Capernaum was a customs post on the caravan route between the Mediterranean Sea and Damascus, thus it was not surprising that there would be tax and duty stations there.[7]  What amazing thing did Jesus do there, and what was the reaction (v. 14-15)?

3.  The word Pharisee literally means pure or separated one.  This separation from what was viewed as unclean had become their focus, and they felt that even association with sinners could lead to contamination, especially eating with them, so obviously they questioned Jesus’ morality in this.[8]  They especially felt that the tax collectors were among the worst of society.  The Roman government would sell the right to collect taxes to publicans, or tax farmers, who could keep the profit over the amount that they contracted with Rome to collect; Matthew would have been an under-hireling to one of these publicans, who could also keep whatever they received above the amount they were hired to collect from the people.[9]  They were hated by the Jews for being traitors to their own people, as well as for handling currency with blasphemous pagan inscriptions and for contamination by their interaction with the Gentiles.[10]  How does this account for their reaction to what Jesus was doing (v. 16)?

4.  This religious intolerance of the lower classes of people who had little hope of attaining to the self-righteous legalism of the Pharisees (although in fact this was never commanded by the Law, but by their man-made traditions) had made them outcasts, overlooked, rejected, less than nothing in the Pharisees’ sight.  Yet it was these people who found a home with our Lord, not the legalists!  What was Jesus’ classic response (v. 17)?

5.  We too have the choice whether to admit we have been desperately ill in sin and turn to our Great Physician or to try to live by legalism in denial of the very cancer of sin that will kill us.  For those who are feeling rather smug like these religionists did, what are some facts that the following passages remind us of? 

Romans 3:10-12; 5:6-8, 12 

1 Corinthians 6:9-11

Ephesians 2:1-3

If Jesus Christ does not mean anything to you it is because you have not entered into the domain where He tells; you may have to enter that domain through a ruthless doorway. Immediately you go through the bottom board of self-complacency and come to the elemental you enter the domain of struggle and sin, and Jesus Christ begins to tell at once. Men are alive physically and intellectually apart from Jesus Christ, and as long as they are satisfied with that attitude to life Jesus Christ is not a necessity; the wholesome-minded type is totally oblivious to Jesus Christ. ‘?I did not come for the whole,?’ said Jesus, ‘but for they that are sick?’[11]

Scripture Memory:  Try to fill in the missing words in the blanks below, by memory if at all possible, and then review the passage several times today.

When Jesus ______________________ it, He said to them, “Those who are _______________ have no need of a ____________________, but those who are ________________. I did not come to _____________ the righteous, but ___________________________, to repentance.”  Mark 2:17, nkjv