Saturday in the First Week in Ordinary Time, Cycle I
1 Sm 9:1-10:1; Mk 2:13-17
I remember once seeing a cartoon in one of the daily newspapers where one snowflake tells the other snowflake, "Do you know that you are unique and that there is no snowflake like you?" "Oh," the other one replies, "unique like anybody else." Like the snowflake in the cartoon, sometimes we tend to underestimate our uniqueness. Perhaps we tend to focus too much on our limitations and weaknesses and forget that these same limitations are what make us special and unique. Even more than that, Jesus takes these limitations and weakness, even our very sins and turns them into blessings which surpass by far our imagination.
It would suffice for us to look at Levi (or Matthew, as the other Gospels call him) to serve as an example for us. He was sitting at the customs post, an innocuous term but which is laden with negative connotations. The customs post of the tax office symbolised evil in the minds of the readers to which the Gospel of Mark was addressed. It was evil because it was the tax imposed by the Romans over the Jews, and therefore symbolised their oppression. Moreover, they had to pay a temple tax. In their minds it meant that the Emperor was taking precedence over God, something that they can never admit. Moreover we also know that these tax collectors were not paid well by their Roman governments and therefore used to charge more in order to earn a living.
Levi therefore, as a tax collector himself was therefore considered to be not only a traitor working in favour of the Romans against his fellow Jews and even against God, but also a thief and a public sinner. One can speculate on why would he have ended up doing this kind of work. Was it something that he had to do because he had no choice? Was he forced due to economic reasons? Was it because it was a way of earning easy money? Was it because he was in the peripheries of Jewish society?
Whatever it was that made him be a tax collector - or perhaps a whole combination of factors - Jesus looks at him and calls him to follow him. In his CV (resumee) he had no high positions, we know nothing of his educational status, no signs that he was a pious Jew or that he attended the Temple regularly himself. Who knows what Levi thought of himself as he sat there? Who knows how many times he heard people speak ill of him. Little would he have imagined that had he not been sitting at that table, had he not passed through the situations that he passed through he would not have met Christ!
Something that strikes us is that at the end of the short gospel stories that we are reading in Mark's Gospel, we notice a ripple effect. Jesus interacts with one person but the effects reach far and wide. Today's Gospel is no exception. The tax table is changed into a table of fellowship. Jesus breaks bread with other tax collectors and public sinners, introduced to Jesus, we can safely assume by Matthew himself, and thus also teaching a lesson to the pharisees and scribes who look on but do not have a share in meal.
Perhaps today we can think of our own limitations and weaknesses, even our own sins, and see how they are a result of our uniqueness. But we also have to make another step, that of leaving our own tax collection table and participate with renewed fervour in the banquet that Jesus invites us to, and which we will celebrate in just a few moments. Finally, how can my own limitations and weaknesses now serve as a means to help others turn to God and accept the invitation that is being made to them as well?
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