And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? The Pharisees' objection is addressed to the disciples rather than to Jesus — perhaps they cannot yet bring themselves to confront him directly. The eating with tax collectors and sinners was a violation of the purity boundaries that the Pharisaic tradition maintained: table fellowship communicated acceptance and solidarity, and sharing a meal with the ritually unclean made the clean participant unclean. The Pharisees are applying the logic of clean-and-unclean consistently; Jesus is about to explain that the logic of the kingdom runs in the opposite direction.

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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