They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Do you believe that?

Someone invites you out to eat and picks up the tab. They want something from you. Maybe they need it. It could just be your time, your expertise, or even just your presence. You might even pay for someone’s lunch just so you can be seen with them.

That’s what happens with celebrities. Think about it. You win a silent auction to have dinner with a well-known athlete. All the money goes to charity. But you get something out of it, right? You get to be seen with them. Hopefully your friends walk in, or better yet your boss!

That athlete gets a free meal, but not really. They are giving you the privilege of their presence.

When Jesus walked up to Levi in mark 2, he offered to have dinner with him. Think about what that meant to Levi. To his family, to his parents. This well-known rabbi was going to be at his house, was going to sit at his table, was going to have a meal with him.

“Make sure your neighbors find out,” Levi’s mom would have told him.

“Ask him what he thinks of the new governor, Pilate,” his dad suggested.

“Can we come too?” asked his friends.

Levi would have been embarrassed by that last one. My friends? But they’re all…sinners?

He finally, sheepishly, asks Jesus.

And Jesus says, “Sure! I’d love to meet them. The more the merrier!”

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

You may be thinking ahead a bit. Levi left everything behind. He left his job as a tax collector. He became a disciple, leaving home and family. He didn’t get a free lunch. He gave all.

Well, sure he gave all. But he actually traded all for something better. Being a part of a famous rabbi’s entourage. There was a lot of esteem that Levi now had. There were a lot of benefits. He would have a front row seat for the greatest miracle worker the world has ever seen.

And those sinners who came to dinner. They didn’t give a thing! There was no entrance fee. There was no requirement. They just showed up. They got free food and an audience with the Son of God.

But there are no free lunches.

Who paid for that meal? I don’t mean who bought the ingredients, who prepare the dishes, who hired the servants. I mean who paid the ultimate cost?

Jesus would face extreme criticism for his actions, for being at the table with sinners. The experts of religious law would start talking about him behind his back and would ridicule him to his face.

Jesus paid the price of religious reputation. He paid the price of persistent opposition.

But there was a higher price paid.

You might be tempted to think that Jesus sat at that table and said, “Okay, sinners. Here’s the deal. I’m the Son of God, the holy one. Emphasis on holy. That means you all need to bring something to this meal.”

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he traded straight across.

Their sins for his righteousness. That was the cost of attendance.

2 Corinthians 5:21 (NIV)

²¹ God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

In other words, Jesus – who knew no sin – made a trade with sinners – who knew no righteousness. “Your sin for my righteousness. I’ll become the sin, you become righteous. Deal?”

The price for that meal was paid through the cross. Jesus gave up all. Not Levi. Not his parents. Not his friends. No sinner ever gave up more than Jesus did.

There are no free lunches. But Jesus offers us free life…and grace and righteousness and peace.

And he picks up the tab.

Here’s some theology for you. It’s pretty simple to say, but incredibly hard to understand. I know I still struggle with this concept. Okay, here it is: Jesus is both fully human and fully divine.

The big theological term is “incarnation.” That means that God himself put on flesh and lived like a regular person with us. We celebrate it every Christmas, with baby Jesus and the manger and the shepherds and the angels. We put together a nativity scene and set it up next to a Santa Claus, maybe.

But in that simple scene is a powerful principle. I can’t figure it out. One way it doesn’t work is to take the Gospels, all four of them, and start cutting them up. “Okay, here is where Jesus was a man. And over here he was definitely God. This story he’s a man, but maybe he’s God in that story.”

In every story you read, he is fully God and fully man. Both at the same time. It’ll make your head hurt if you think about it too long.

But here’s one way that it doesn’t really hurt. I think it sort of clicks for me when I read that story of Jesus touching the leper (Mark 1:40-42). We read that story this week. When he reached out a human hand he sparked a divine opportunity.

If you were around in Jesus’ day, and you touched a leper, you would be considered unclean. Those were the rules laid out in the Old Testament, in the book of Leviticus. But when Jesus did it? He didn’t become unclean, the leper became clean.

A human action, a divine reaction.

A human gesture, a divine opportunity.

We are not divine. In any percentage. But we do bear a divine mark of salvation. Paul explains that it is the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. But make no mistake, we are not in any way divine ourselves.

But what we do can start that same divine spark that Jesus had. Our human gestures have the power of divine opportunity. Our human actions can reflect divine reactions. Our human hands can be the hands of God.

When we reach out and touch the untouchable, we are not just doing what Jesus did. We are acting on his behalf. We are doing it by divine order. He didn’t touch the leper and say, “Stand back, disciples. Don’t touch this leper. Only I can.”

He was inviting us to touch the untouchable. He was showing the way for his followers to go. He was making the path clear – you have the same divine calling to go where God leads.

We don’t have the power to make the unclean clean. We don’t have power to forgive sin on God’s behalf. Not like Jesus did. But we do have the responsibility to touch on his behalf.

We can be the hands of Jesus when we reach out to those who society around us consider unclean. Who are outcasts, who are the lowest of lows, who are put on the bottom rung. Who are forgotten or overlooked. Who are made to feel less than.

And when we reach out, we are pulling them up. Never getting pulled down. We put them on the same ground as us, level ground. We treat them as equals even when the world wants to put us all in separate categories.

So this week, find those who are needing a hand, needing us to reach out. To pull up. To confirm and affirm. To say, “You belong with us, on our level. All of us, on the same ground.”

And when you do that, you are being divine.

Hagar. The Bible has a lot to say about her, actually. She’s an Egyptian slave. She’s an outsider. She’s the mother of Ishmael, and Ishmael is often characterized as the son of the flesh, while his half-brother Isaac is the son of the promise.

But when you really open it up and start to read it – like we did this past weekend – you see some striking things. First of all, Hagar is visited by God. She has an encounter with “the Angel of the Lord,” which is almost always the way the covenant God reveals himself to his people. But she’s not “his people.”

Also, she receives a promise. That her own son would be blessed, would be victorious, would also be a great father.

But most importantly, she gives God a name. Who else does that in scripture? But this woman was so struck by this encounter and this promise that she can’t help but shout out and rejoice and praise the living God by giving him some sort of descriptor – “El Roi,” the God who sees.

Hagar was an Egyptian slave, purchased by Abraham. No one really saw her. When they did, they only saw her as property. Sarah saw her as a way to remain in Abraham’s good graces, by providing a son. And no one saw her as she slipped from the camp late one night, her belly round and pregnant.

But God saw her. He didn’t just see her, he saw through her and beyond her. He saw her potential and her pain and her promise. And he revealed himself to her.

In that one act, God established a spiritual practice of noticing. When God sees us, it’s more than a passing glance. It’s a searching and revealing. It’s a deep, lingering look that gets to the heart.

And he invites us into this spiritual practice. What does it really mean to notice?

When you see that cashier at the store who handed back the wrong change, what do you see? Do you see a mistake…or do you see a single mom, working multiple shifts at multiple jobs, trying to not only make ends meet but provide a better tomorrow for her kids?

When you get cut off in traffic, what do you see? Some inept driver who couldn’t be bothered to use a turn signal…or do you see a man in a state of emergency, trying to get home because he just found out some bad news, news that distracted him but also drives him to find answers?

When you see the police arresting someone, their hands on the back of a cruiser while the cop frisks them, what do you see? A common criminal…or a person at the end of their rope, hoping beyond hope for a lenient sentence, who is in desperate need of redemption?

When you have lunch with a friend, what do you see? Someone with no real needs or cares in the world…or someone hiding, covering up some shame, obsessing over a long ago guilt, dying inside because of some hurt and pain?

What will it take to see through and beyond the exterior that so many of us put up? We have to get in tune with God’s Spirit, to really see like he does. When he saw Hagar, he saw what no one else saw. It changed her life. It set a destiny of her child. And her child’s children. It meant the world to her, but it also meant greater things.

When we see people, let’s really see them. Engage in this spiritual practice of noticing by disengaging from judgment. There’s enough of that going around. Instead, let’s really look deep to find what is hidden, what God wants to reveal, and release a promise of hope to those in need.