Ever feel like you didn't meet expectations?

The Least Likely Candidate

If you were building a team to change the world, you probably would not start with a tax collector. Especially not a first-century one. Tax collectors in ancient Israel were not civil servants doing a necessary job. They were collaborators — Jewish citizens who had signed up to extract money from their own people on behalf of the Roman Empire.

The system was straightforward and rotten. Rome set a tax quota. The collector was responsible for meeting it. Anything above the quota, the collector kept. The incentive was baked in: the more you squeezed from your neighbours, the richer you got.

Levi, sitting at his tax booth, was that person. And Jesus walked up to him and said two words: "Follow me."

The Man Nobody Would Have Chosen

Mark 2:13-17 tells the story with characteristic brevity. Jesus is walking beside the lake, teaching a crowd. He sees Levi, son of Alphaeus, at his tax booth. He calls him. Levi gets up and follows.

What the text does not spell out, but the original audience would have understood immediately, is how shocking this was.

"Tax collectors in that day were not popular people. He was working for the Roman government, taxing the Jewish people. People called him a traitor."

Levi was not just disliked. He was despised. The religious leaders grouped tax collectors with "sinners" — a catch-all term for people who had placed themselves outside the community of faith. To associate with a tax collector was to risk your own reputation. To invite one onto your team was unthinkable.

And yet Jesus did not hesitate. He did not ask Levi to clean up his act first. He did not set conditions. He just said, "Follow me." And Levi followed.

What Levi Left Behind

It is easy to skip over what Levi's decision actually cost him. The fishermen Jesus had already called — Peter, Andrew, James, John — could always go back to fishing. Their boats would still be there.

But a tax collector who walked away from his booth was done. The Roman authorities would not hold his position. His income stream would evaporate instantly. There was no going back.

"For Levi, that would have been a life of uncertainty. He gives up everything — his well-paid job, his security, his entire livelihood — on the basis of two words from a man he may have only been watching from a distance."

That is either the most reckless decision in the gospels or the most courageous. Possibly both.

Dinner with the Wrong Crowd

What happens next is almost as surprising as the calling itself. Levi hosts a dinner party. At his house. And the guest list would have made any respectable religious leader choke on his bread.

"While Jesus was having dinner at Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples."

Levi did not leave his old life behind and pretend those people no longer existed. He invited them to meet Jesus. He used his connections — the very connections that made him an outcast — as a bridge between his old world and his new one.

The Pharisees, watching from the margins, were appalled. "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?" they asked the disciples. In their world, sharing a meal with someone implied acceptance and endorsement. By sitting at Levi's table, Jesus was making a statement that went far beyond social convention.

The Doctor and the Sick

Jesus's response to the Pharisees' objection is one of the most quoted lines in the gospels: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

It sounds simple. But there are layers to it that are easy to miss.

First, Jesus was not saying the Pharisees were actually healthy. He was using their own self-assessment against them. They considered themselves righteous. Fine, he said — then you do not need me. But these people know they are broken, and they are exactly who I came for.

Second, the metaphor of a doctor is deliberate. A doctor does not refuse to enter a hospital because it is full of sick people. A doctor goes where the illness is. Jesus was reframing the entire conversation: his presence at Levi's table was not contamination. It was treatment.

"Jesus didn't come for the people who had it all together. He came for the ones who knew they didn't."

The Expectations We Put on Ourselves

The talk broadened from Levi's story to a wider question about expectations — the ones others place on us and the ones we place on ourselves.

Most people carry an internal sense of who they should be by now. A certain career level. A certain quality of relationships. A certain spiritual maturity. And when reality does not match that internal benchmark, shame moves in.

"Ever feel like you didn't meet expectations? Like you're not quite the person everyone thought you'd be? Or not quite the person you thought you'd be?"

Levi would have understood that feeling, though from a different angle. He had chosen a path that his community considered a betrayal of everything they stood for. He was wealthy but isolated. Successful by one measure and a complete failure by another.

And Jesus looked past all of that — the reputation, the profession, the social status — and saw someone worth calling.

What Jesus Sees

There is a pattern in Jesus's calling of his disciples that is worth noticing. He did not recruit the obvious candidates. He chose fishermen, not scholars. He chose a tax collector, not a philanthropist. He chose people whose CVs would have been rejected by any respectable religious institution.

"The disciples wouldn't have exactly been buzzing that this guy was joining their gang. Amongst the band of twelve that Jesus chose, there was a tax collector — this hugely despised character."

Jesus was not building a team based on credentials. He was building a team based on willingness. The only qualification was a readiness to follow.

That is deeply challenging for anyone who has felt disqualified. Who has looked at their past, their failures, their reputation, and concluded that God could not possibly want them. Levi's story says otherwise. It says that the person you have been does not determine the person you are invited to become.

The Pharisee Problem

The Pharisees in this story are not villains. They are religious people who genuinely believed they were protecting the integrity of their faith. They had rules about who was clean and unclean, who was in and who was out, and those rules had been handed down for generations.

Their mistake was not caring about holiness. Their mistake was believing that holiness was preserved by keeping the wrong people at arm's length.

Jesus flipped that assumption entirely. Holiness, in his framework, was not a fortress to be defended. It was a force that went out into the mess and changed things from the inside.

"The Pharisees thought proximity to sinners would make Jesus unclean. Jesus believed his proximity to sinners would make them whole."

That distinction still matters. There are communities of faith that operate like fortresses — keeping the boundaries tight, the membership pure, the standards clear. And there are communities that operate like hospitals — messy, imperfect, full of people in various stages of recovery, but open to anyone who walks through the door.

Follow Me

Jesus did not say "believe in me" or "agree with my theology" or "sort yourself out and then come and find me." He said "follow me." It is an invitation to movement. To a journey. To learning as you go.

Levi did not understand everything about Jesus when he stood up from his tax booth. He did not have his theology sorted. He did not have a five-year spiritual development plan. He just got up and followed.

"Two words. Follow me. Not 'believe in me.' Not 'think well of me.' But 'follow me.' Give up everything and come."

That is still the invitation. Not to have everything figured out, but to start walking. Not to meet some standard of worthiness, but to respond to the voice that calls you as you are.

Something to Consider

Levi's story is an invitation to stop disqualifying yourself. Whatever you have done, whatever reputation you carry, whatever expectations you have failed to meet — none of it changes the fact that Jesus looks at people the religious establishment has written off and says, "I want that one."

The question is not whether you are good enough. The question is whether you are willing to get up from wherever you are sitting and follow.

What would it look like to stop waiting until you feel worthy and simply start walking?