Dinner with Sinners: Mark 2:13-17

The tax booth sat at the crossroads like a wound in the town's flesh. Everyone who passed had to pay—fishermen with their catch, merchants with their goods, travelers with their coins. And everyone who paid had to look into the face of Levi, son of Alphaeus, who had sold his soul to Rome for a percentage of his neighbors' misery.

Tax collectors were more than unpopular. They were traitors. They worked for the occupation, skimming extra for themselves, growing fat on their brothers' poverty. Levi had money. Levi had no friends—at least none that decent people would acknowledge.

Jesus walked past the booth, and the crowd parted around it like water around a stone. Then he stopped.

"Follow me," he said.