Mark 2:13-17

Living Bible

¹³ Then Jesus went out to the seashore again and preached to the crowds that gathered around him. ¹⁴ As he was walking up the beach he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at his tax collection booth. “Come with me,” Jesus told him. “Come be my disciple.”

And Levi jumped to his feet and went along.

¹⁵ That night Levi invited his fellow tax collectors and many other notorious sinners to be his dinner guests so that they could meet Jesus and his disciples. (There were many men of this type among the crowds that followed him.) ¹⁶ But when some of the Jewish religious leaders^[a] saw him eating with these men of ill repute, they said to his disciples, “How can he stand it, to eat with such scum?”

¹⁷ When Jesus heard what they were saying, he told them, “Sick people need the doctor, not healthy ones! I haven’t come to tell good people to repent, but the bad ones.”