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Luke 5:27-39

              We all know what cliques are. Even the nerds have their own cliques. Usually though, cliques are thought of as the chic, fashionable, good looking, well-to-do types. No matter who you are or where you are, they exist. 

           I am not so sure what the Pharisees are more concerned with in this reading.  Are they concerned about Jesus consorting with crooks and people of marginal character? Or perhaps it's simply that as a religious, Jesus would be part of the religious elite and they didn't want that opened up to anyone else. Yes, theirs was an elite group. Surely Jesus would be one of their own. And then what would we do with all the riff raff he hangs out with? What's going on?

          We are not solitary beings. We gather in groups because it is hard wired into us. Even when I am silent and 'alone' I am not, I am with my God. Perhaps as a matter of comfort we choose those people that we most relate to and are comfortable with. Our worship for the most part is communal in nature too. We celebrate Eucharist - together. Everything we do is a together moment. Most people, straight or gay, strive to find 'the one' that completes them. 'It is not right that man live alone'.

         At issue though is not the cliques or the groups we hang with per se. The problem that we incur is when we make that group the main focus at the expense of all others.  Where a group could enrich others, sometimes they focus inward and perhaps have the arrogance to think that their group is 'the all'. If community is a good thing it is also good, if not required for our survival, that groups interplay and learn from each other. Just as one person is not loved any more (or less) than any other by our God, it is also true that one group is not more loved or more right than any other. We all have a role to play. 

          Our communal / community nature being hard wired into us is not merely a case of survival. In creating this part of us, God has created a clue that will bring us to Him. So, not merely survival is at stake but our spiritual survival, growth and maturity. Our eternal salvation as well?

          We are called to community but we are called to reach out to those that are different than we are. We are called to recognize their contribution to our joint survival and growth. We must not become center focused. When we focus on ourselves alone, whether it is personally or as a group we shrivel and die.

          Reach out, reach up, grow and love.

       

Jesus Calls Levi

After this he went out and saw a tax-collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up, left everything, and followed him.
Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax-collectors and others sitting at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax-collectors and sinners?’ Jesus answered, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.’

The Question about Fasting

Then they said to him, ‘John’s disciples, like the disciples of the Pharisees, frequently fast and pray, but your disciples eat and drink.’ Jesus said to them, ‘You cannot make wedding-guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? The days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.’ He also told them a parable: ‘No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, “The old is good.” ’