The Hard Sayings: Mark 2:17

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are hard to understand. This list was put together by the Lord's Library. To see both those hard verses with articles explaining and those awaiting future articles, go to this page.

Shortly after Jesus called Matthew (Levi), the tax collector, to follow him as an apostle, Jesus and his students sat with other tax collectors and their associates, eating with them. The scholars and Pharisees saw them and asked Jesus how they could eat with sinners. He answered with Mark 2:17:

NIV:  It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

The words in boldface are those that are discussed in this article.

As we often see with Biblical translations, especially the more modern ones, Jesus’s statements are simplified, leaving out what the translators feel is confusing. If this verse is hard to understand in translation, the original Greek is likely to create more difficulties. However, like most of Jesus’s sayings, the Greek is more clever than the translation. The translated words “healthy” and “sick” fit easily with our idea of a doctor, but the words Jesus used are more extreme and fit less comfortably.

Notice that this first sentence is about who “needs” a doctor. Jesus is putting the question of the Pharisees about why he eats with sinners into the context of what is needed. Initially, he isn’t speaking about himself, but the need for a “doctor.” The Greek word translated as “doctor” had the more general sense of “one who heals,” and it covered everything from an herbalist to a surgeon to a midwife.

In describing who does not need a healer, Jesus does not use the common Greek word for “healthy” that he uses elsewhere. That word is familiar to English speakers because it is the Greek root of our word “hygiene.” Here, the word translated as “healthy” means "to be strong", "to be powerful", and "to prevail". The strong have no need of one who heals, which narrows its meaning to the physically strong or powerful, as opposed to those who are socially powerful. Even if we are socially strong, we need doctors because we get physically sick. Here the idea is “those being physically strong” or “those being physically powerful” can prevail over a disease or injury. The sense is one of physical domination of the condition as opposed to physical susceptibility. The need for a doctor is a sign of weakness.

To describe those who need a healer, Jesus does not use the common word for “sick.” Instead, he uses a Greek word that means “ugly,” "bad," "ill-born," “unskilled,” "evil," and "worthless." When referring to people, its primary meaning is “ugly,” which is funny. Do people who are ugly need a doctor? Today, some think they do, but the word has several meanings. Jesus’s listeners would have gravitated to another nearby meaning, “those being worthless.” This idea has both a physical and a spiritual dimension. In Jesus’s era, those who were sick or injured couldn’t work. They were “worthless” in terms of doing any jobs that produced money.

Jesus’s initial contrast in this verse is between “the physically strong” and “the worthlessly weak.” Both ideas have meaning in the next section when Jesus shifts from the physical dimension of a healer to the intellectual or spiritual realm of a teacher.

The Resolution

In the last part of this verse, Jesus doesn’t declare his reasons for eating with sinners. He starts by saying why he isn’t eating with another type of person. He did not come to “call” on those without need. The Greek word translated as “call” means to “summon,” “invite,” and “to call by name.” So, Jesus is calling on them, by visiting their table, but Jesus is also calling them, that is, inviting them to his own table.

Who does Jesus invite and why?

Not the “righteous”. The Greek word translated as “righteous” means "observant of rules," "observant of customs," and “observant of duty.” Our word “law-abiding” comes the closest to this idea. Being “law-abiding” is not particularly high praise from Jesus. He wanted people to follow the spirit of the Judaic laws rather than their letter. The Pharisees’ goal was to get more people to follow their law to the letter.

The word “sinners” is not a moral judgment. It is an adjective that means "erroneous" or "erring." It also means being a slave or low-born, which is “bad” but not “evil.” The root word, translated in the Bible as “sin,” means “missing the mark,” a meaning very close to our “mistake.” I have written an article on this topic, with many examples that you can read here. Our word, “erring” fits people who make mistakes better than the condemnation of the word, “sinners.” As I say in that article, the Pharisees may well have used “sinners” to make moral judgments about people, but Jesus used the term more broadly to refer to human folly.

So, the ones that Jesus came to summon or invite to his table are “the erring,” that is, those who make mistakes, which includes us all. His answer is that he came to invite the erring to his table. This is funny because Jesus is being accused of being erring himself by eating with these “sinners.” Righteous people were expected to shun mistake-makers, not socialize with them. Jesus doesn’t want to care about law-abiding to the Pharisees.

This word, “erring” is the last word and the verse’s punchline. We usually look for double meanings in these punchlines, and there is one, connecting Jesus’s first statement about who needs healing with this second one about who he has come to invite. The Greek word translated as “sick” and the Greek word translated as “sinners” both mean “low born.” So, Jesus is saying that the “low-born” need the one who “heals” and that he has come to invite these low born to him. This implies that by bringing people to his table, he can heal the class divisions which afflict us.

Listeners Heard: Those being strong have no need of a healer, instead, those having worthlessness. I don't show up to call the law-abiding, instead, the worthless.