Today Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Mark (2: 13-17) in which some Pharisees ask why Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners and Jesus says, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners’.

Fr Paul says this story starts with a piece of local lore and a puzzle. The piece of local lore is that Capernaum is the first village reached after crossing the Jordan and entering the territory of Galilee from the territory of Iturea, ruled by Herod Antipas and his brother Philip respectively. It was a good road along the lakeside and a busy trade-route, and presumably there was a border-tax to be paid.

The puzzle: was the tax-collector Levi (as here and in Luke) or Matthew (as in Matthew 9.9)? Perhaps the one man had two names like we experience with Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul.

The chief point, however, is the outrage of the Pharisees at Jesus’ action. Not only had he picked out a tax-collector as one of his special companions, but he actually seemed to enjoy their company.

In the Roman Empire the right to collect taxes was let out to large companies, who naturally wanted to make a profit through what they collected. The tax-collectors were additionally unpopular because they worked for the Romans. To the lawyers (‘scribes’) of the Pharisees, whose chief business was deciding what was ritually clean and what was unclean this was completely unacceptable. To them it was incomprehensible that a religious teacher would plunge into a cesspit of tax-collectors for dinner. But to Jesus these were precisely the people he was seeking out.

Fr Paul notes today’s Gospel Lesson – Pope Francis has said that we must smell like the sheep…in other words even if it is unpopular and goes against society’s norms – how can we help others?