In Luke 5:27 it says, “Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax booth. 'Follow Me,' He told him, and Levi got up, left everything, and followed Him.” Levi is an interesting character; he is Jewish, but he is collecting taxes, from his own people, for the benefit of the Roman government. He is batting for the other team! He was consciously participating in a wealth transfer from the Jewish people to the Roman authorities. As well as their shekels, Levi’s brothers and sisters were losing what little control they had over their lives.
If you have watched the “The Chosen” series, you’ll notice how Levi was quite willing to take whatever hostility came his way. In Levi’s calculus he had concluded that the financial and social capital that he was earning from his arrangement with the Romans was paying worthwhile dividends. It is interesting that the producers of “The Chosen” portray his character as an autistic savant. He is a human calculator but there are some frequencies that his internal social radio has a hard time picking up. Perhaps we need to expand our personal bandwidth to encompass more than the current social and mass media wavelengths.
It appears that Levi had an appetite for the secular sustenance supplied by the ‘spirit of the age’, in his case the Pax Romana. Adam and Eve gave us all a taste for this entrée when they sampled the apple sauce based appetizer, in the Garden of Eden.
The stories, found in scripture, can resonate at different frequencies; the micro (i.e. individual), the macro (i.e. elders of the tribe) and the meta (i.e. the King). In the Old Testament there are stories where persons, at each level of this social hierarchy, sought to do side deals, with the powers that be, to supplement their social sustenance. For God, batting for the other side is not in His game plan. “Since there is nothing new under the sun”, Ecclesiastes 1:9, we can assume that this might be a problem today, as well.
How does Levi escape his bondage to the interlocking religious and social systems of his day? The solution for Levi as well as his counterpart, the tax collector Zacchaeus, was to have a “come to Jesus” moment. In the midst of their entanglements with the micro, macro and meta influences pressing in on their lives they had a meeting with the person Jesus, who delivered them from their attraction to the power of the powers that be.
Going forward, given the religious and social complexities of our lives, we can pray that, wherever a person is, in the hierarchies of power, that they have as many Eucharistic “come to Jesus” moments that are required for the Kingdom of God to be made manifest, in our world.
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