Tax collectors, fasting, Sabbath

Five scenes; one argument about table, fasting, and sabbath. Mark shows the politics of food.

Pre-session video

This week we work through the first cycle of controversy stories in Mark's gospel. Five linked episodes between 2v13 and 3v6: the calling of Levi the tax collector; dinner at Levi's house with sinners and tax collectors; the question about fasting; the disciples plucking grain on the sabbath; the man with the withered hand healed on a sabbath. Mark closes the cycle with the first conspiracy to kill Jesus.

What holds the five together is a question about who counts. Who you eat with declares who counts. Who fasts declares who is religiously respectable. Who keeps the sabbath strictly declares whose labour can afford to rest. The Pharisaic system — purity, fasting, sabbath — was, on Ched Myers' reading, a code for the comfortable; a code that excluded the dispossessed by its very design. Jesus, scene by scene, breaks the code at its centre.

Three things to watch for

The first is Levi (2v14). A tax collector — not just any tax collector, but one stationed at the Capernaum customs post, taking Roman money from his own people. Jesus calls him. Jesus eats with him. The scene is a public, deliberate sign.

The second is the fast question (2v18–22). Jesus does not argue that fasting is bad. He says: the bridegroom is here; this is not the time to fast. And then the two parable-fragments — the patch on the old cloak, the new wine in old wineskins. The kingdom is not a patch. It is not a fix. It is new wine; it needs new skins.

The third is the wheatfield and the synagogue (2v23–3v6). Hungry disciples eating standing grain on a sabbath; a man with a withered hand healed on a sabbath. Mark closes the cycle with Jesus looking around at them with anger and the first conspiracy to kill him being formed by the Pharisees and the Herodians. Liberation provokes conflict.

Exegetical key video

Practice for the week

Two to choose from, or write your own. Eat one meal this week with someone you would not usually share a table with — someone outside your usual circle of welcome — and notice what shifts. Or: take a sabbath in the original sense; one day this week where you stop, and your stopping costs you something, and the cost teaches you whose labour your usual week depends on.

Materials for this session

Facilitator brief, participant workbook, and slides are available to facilitators and pilot participants on request; final downloadable versions will appear here once permissions on the scripture text settle.