Here’s a word cloud that visualizes the 200 most significant words extracted from over 400 papers from our research group over the past ten years. Significance was estimated by tf-idf where the idf data is from a collection of newswire articles (thanks Paul!). The word cloud was created with Wordle.

Luke 5:27-32

After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”

Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Reflection:

Here we see the celebration that Matthew (also named Levi) hosted in honor of Jesus as a response and an overflow of celebrating who God is and that he now knows and follow Him. The former tax collector has now been ‘found’ in Him. This is significant because Jesus was upending the thinking of the moral police of the time, in that associating with ‘sinners’ is a grave misconduct. Jesus reveals to them that to break bread and celebrate with the repentant ones coming back to Him is not only appropriate, but the very purpose for His coming.

Response:

When we think of being with a person that we greatly admire, we often see ourselves celebrating being together, doing things that affirm our association. When it comes to living for the Lord, we learn that what matters to God is recognizing that as followers of Christ, we wholly receive and participate in everything associated with God. In our hearts and prayers today, let’s celebrate knowing that in this relationship with God, we have access to everything the Father has and also to all that He wants to do.