Week 33: Day 2

Intro: Hi, my name’s Gemma Milligan and it’s great to welcome you to Orbit - a short daily reflection from the team behind Satellites, which aims to help you put God at the centre of your life. Each weekday we reflect on a bit of the Bible, pray, and give you a practical challenge to help you live out your faith.

Bible: Today’s reading comes from Mark 2:13-17:

Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.

While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Thoughts: Jesus is one of those people who, if he went to high school today, would definitely upset the order of things. He wouldn’t be particularly interested in hanging out with the popular crowd, or the ones who are always top of the class and win all the awards; he would be more interested in the outcasts, the ones who no one wants to hang out with, the ones who are being bullied, the ones on the edge of dropping out of school. They would be the ones he would be spending most of his time with.

That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t care about everyone – we see at the start of the Bible passage that he taught everyone in the crowd who was willing to listen to him – but he has a special place in his heart for those whom the rest of the world has rejected. Levi, or Matthew as we tend to know him, was a tax collector and therefore would have been hated by the Jewish people at the time, not just because he was taking their money, but because he was also a Jew and so taking the money from his own people to give to the Roman government who was oppressing them would have seemed like the ultimate betrayal. No one would have wanted to be his friend and he would’ve been viewed as scum by pretty much everyone who came into contact with him.

But not Jesus. Jesus asks Levi to become one of his disciples, and not only that, later on we see him partying with Levi and many others like him. And of course, the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders who think that being a good Jew is all about following lots of rules and staying away from those who aren’t following them, didn’t understand at all. But Jesus makes it clear that he wants to spend his time with those who need him the most; even if the rest of the world doesn’t think they are worth the time and effort, Jesus does.

Pray: Jesus, I recognise that you see the world and the people in it very differently to how we tend to. Thank you that you care so much about those that others have rejected. Please help me to see the people around me the way that you do, particularly those who others think have little worth and value. Amen.

Action: Here’s today’s practical challenge to help you put what we’ve reflected on into action:

Keep an eye out at school for those who others may have rejected or who are viewed as having little worth or value – those who are being bullied, those who have additional needs, those who are at risk of exclusion, those who are unpopular. How can you reach out to one of these people and show them the love of Jesus in a practical way? E.g. Invite them to sit with you at lunchtime, stick up for them when someone says something unkind to them, go and talk to them in the playground when they are on their own etc.

Outro: Thanks so much for joining us for Orbit today! We hope you found that helpful, and we’ll be back with another reflection tomorrow.