Luke 5

Today’s Passage: Luke 5

This chapter is where the Lord begins to gather men, and the way He gathers them tells you everything about the kind of Savior He is. It opens on a lakeshore at the end of a long night, with a crowd pressing in to hear the word of God and two empty boats pulled up on the stones while their owners scrub the nets. Jesus borrows a boat for a pulpit, and when He has finished preaching He turns to the man who owns it and asks him to fish in the wrong place at the wrong hour. What follows is a catch so enormous that the nets tear and two boats start to founder, and the fisherman’s response is not delight but dread: he goes down on his knees in the fish and asks the Lord to leave. From that shore Luke moves to a man covered with leprosy, an outcast under sentence of lifelong exclusion, who asks not whether Jesus can heal him but whether He is willing. Then a paralyzed man comes down through the roof into a crowded house full of watching Pharisees, and Jesus says a stranger thing than anyone expected. Then a tax collector at his booth hears two words and walks away from everything, and immediately throws a party. And the chapter ends with a question about fasting answered by a wedding, a torn garment, and old skins that cannot hold new wine. Four scenes and a saying, and one thread running through them all: Jesus keeps going to precisely the people the religious world had written off, and He keeps claiming an authority that belongs to God alone.

As you read, hold this: The nearer Christ comes, the more clearly a man sees his own sin, and that is the very moment He says ‘Do not be afraid’, for He did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

Luke 5:1–5 (BSB)

¹ On one occasion, while Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret with the crowd pressing in on Him to hear the word of God, ² He saw two boats at the edge of the lake. The fishermen had left them and were washing their nets. ³ Jesus got into the boat belonging to Simon and asked him to put out a little from shore. And sitting down, He taught the people from the boat. ⁴ When Jesus had finished speaking, He said to Simon, “Put out into deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” ⁵ “Master,” Simon replied, “we have worked hard all night without catching anything. But because You say so, I will let down the nets.”

Notice first what the crowd wants. Luke says they are pressing in on Him “to hear the word of God,” and that is a lovely thing to see. There is a hunger on that shore. And notice what Jesus does with an ordinary working boat: He borrows it, pushes off a few yards so the water can carry His voice up the beach, sits down in the manner of a teacher, and preaches. A tired fisherman’s tool becomes a pulpit for the morning. Simon has to sit there and hold the boat steady while the word of God goes out over his head, which means that before Simon is asked to do anything, he is made to listen. That order matters. Then, when the sermon is over, comes the request that must have tested him to the bone. Put out into deep water, in broad daylight, with nets you have just finished cleaning, after a night in which you caught nothing at all. Simon is not a novice; he has fished that lake his whole life, and everything he knows says this will fail and cost him the rest of the morning’s work. Hear the honesty in his answer, because it is the honesty of a real man and not a stained-glass saint. “We have worked hard all night without catching anything.” That is the truth, and he says it. And then, on the back of it, the sentence that turns the whole chapter: “But because You say so, I will let down the nets.” He does not say he expects fish. He says he will obey because of who is speaking. That is faith at its plainest, and he addresses Jesus by a title only Luke ever puts in anyone’s mouth. Simon calls Him Master (ἐπιστάτης) epistatēs, pronounced eh-pee-STAH-tace. Strong's G1988, master, overseer, the one in charge of a work. Every other Gospel writer records disciples calling Jesus didaskalos, teacher, or rabbi. Luke alone uses epistatēs, and he uses it six times, always on the lips of those closest to Him. It is not a classroom word at all. An epistatēs was the man set over a work: the overseer of a crew, the foreman on a job, the officer in charge, the one whose orders you carried out because he was responsible for the outcome. It is exactly the word a working fisherman would reach for. Simon is not saying “Rabbi, I respect your learning.” He is saying “You are the one in charge here, and I will do what you say,” which is a very great deal for a professional to say to a carpenter’s son about fishing. And notice the shape of his sentence, because it is the shape of every act of obedience that has ever pleased God: all the evidence points one way, and the word of Christ points the other, and faith goes with the word. You will meet that fork often enough. The night has been long and empty, the sensible thing is to go home, and then comes a clear command of Scripture that makes no earthly sense in your circumstances. Because You say so is enough. It has always been enough. .

Luke 5:6–11 (BSB)

⁶ When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to tear. ⁷ So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink. ⁸ When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees. “Go away from me, Lord,” he said, “for I am a sinful man.” ⁹ For he and his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, ¹⁰ and so were his partners James and John, the sons of Zebedee. “Do not be afraid,” Jesus said to Simon. “From now on you will catch men.” ¹¹ And when they had brought their boats ashore, they left everything and followed Him.

Now watch it happen. The nets go down and the lake gives up more fish than the gear can hold. The linen begins to split, the men wave frantically to their partners on the shore, and when both boats are loaded they sit so low in the water that they start to go under. This is not a lucky morning. Every fish in that hold is a rebuke to Simon’s expertise and a sermon on who is in the boat with him. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus called these men by the shore and they followed; Luke alone shows us this, and the difference is the point. He wants you to see what Simon saw before he followed. And here is the thing you would never predict. A man who has just been handed the greatest catch of his life does not celebrate. He goes down on his knees among the flapping fish, and he says the last thing you would expect a man to say to someone who has just made him rich: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man (ἁμαρτωλός) hamartōlos, pronounced hah-mar-toh-LOSS. Strong's G268, sinner, one who misses the mark. Hamartōlos is built on the verb for missing the mark, and it was a hard, public word in first-century Galilee. It did not merely mean “imperfect person,” the way we might use it today with a shrug. In the mouths of the religious it named a class: the notoriously immoral, the ritually careless, the tax collectors and their kind, people a careful man kept away from. That is precisely why it matters that Simon uses it of himself. He is not one of the disreputable. He is a working man with a business, a house, a wife’s mother down the road, no scandal attached to his name. And one look at Jesus of Nazareth put him in the same category as the people everybody looked down on. Keep your eye on this word through the chapter, because Luke uses it three more times before the end: the Pharisees fling it at Levi’s dinner guests, and then Jesus picks it up and makes it the whole reason He came. “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” The distance between Simon on his knees and Levi at his party is smaller than either of them thought, and the same Lord is standing over both. Whoever you are and however respectable your life looks from the outside, the moment you can say Simon’s sentence honestly is the moment you are close enough to hear Christ say “Do not be afraid.” .” Understand what has happened to him. He asked for nothing. He got a display of quiet, effortless power over the deep water and everything in it, and in that instant he knew what he was standing next to, and it was unbearable. That is not superstition and it is not low self-esteem. It is what always happens when holiness comes close. Isaiah saw the Lord and cried that he was ruined. Job put his hand over his mouth. Daniel’s strength left him. Not one of them was told he had overreacted. So do not be surprised if drawing nearer to God makes you more aware of your sin rather than less. That is a sign the approach is real.

And now hear the answer, because it is the sweetest thing in the chapter. Jesus does not deny the charge. He does not tell Simon he is being hard on himself, and He does not go away. He says, “Do not be afraid.” Three words, and they are the standing reply of heaven to a sinner on his face. Then, without pausing, He gives this trembling man a job: “From now on you will catch men.” The Greek behind that phrase carries the sense of taking alive, and it is worth holding on to; these nets will be for rescue, not for harvest. So the fisherman who begged Christ to leave is the fisherman Christ commissions on the spot, and the partners in the other boat, James and John, are swept up in it too. Then look at verse eleven. They bring in the boats, and the largest catch any of them had ever seen is left lying on the shore. They walked away from a full net. Whatever following Jesus cost them, it did not cost them because they had nothing; it cost them at the exact moment their business had never looked better. Praise God for a Lord who calls men like that, and for the mercy that answers “I am a sinful man” with “Do not be afraid.”

Luke 5:12–16 (BSB)

¹² While Jesus was in one of the towns, a man came along who was covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell facedown and begged Him, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” ¹³ Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” He said. “Be clean!” And immediately the leprosy left him. ¹⁴ “Do not tell anyone,” Jesus instructed him. “But go, show yourself to the priest and present the offering Moses prescribed for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” ¹⁵ But the news about Jesus spread all the more, and great crowds came to hear Him and to be healed of their sicknesses. ¹⁶ Yet He frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray.

Luke is a physician, and he tells you the man was covered with it, which is his way of saying this was not an early patch on the arm. It was advanced, and everyone in that town knew what it meant. The Law was not cruel in its exclusions; it was protecting a community that had no medicine, but the cost to the sufferer was total. Listen to what his life sounded like.

"A diseased person must wear torn clothes and let his hair hang loose, and he must cover his mouth and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ As long as he has the infection, he remains unclean. He must live alone in a place outside the camp." Leviticus 13:45–46 (BSB)

Live alone. That is the sentence he had been serving, perhaps for years, and it had not only put him outside the town but outside the worship of God, since no unclean man could come to the tabernacle or the temple. Now see how he comes. He falls on his face, and his request is one of the most theologically exact prayers in the Gospels: “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” He has no doubt at all about the power. His only question is about the willingness, and that is where most of us are actually stuck, if we are honest. We rarely doubt that God is able. We wonder whether He wants to bother with us.

And here comes the answer, and it is given twice, once with a hand and once with a voice. Jesus could have healed him from ten feet away. He had done it with a word before, and He would do it again. Instead, “Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man.” No one had touched him in years. Under the Law, touching a leper made a man unclean, and every rabbi in Israel knew it. But when this hand touches this man, the uncleanness does not travel up the arm; the cleanness travels down it. That is the gospel in a single gesture, and it is the whole story of the incarnation in miniature: God did not shout salvation across the gap, He came into the camp and laid hold of us where we were. Then “I am willing. Be clean!” and it was done at once. And notice what Jesus tells him to do next. Go to the priest, and bring the offering Moses commanded. He sends the healed man straight back into the life of Israel by the front door, so that the priest himself has to examine him and pronounce him clean, and a certificate is issued that the town can read. The Law is honored and the man is restored to the congregation. Then Luke, who never wastes a line, gives us two verses that belong together: the crowds swelled, and He frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray. Luke will show you Jesus praying at every hinge of this Gospel, and here is the pattern set early. The busier the ministry grew, the more deliberately He went away to be alone with His Father. If the Son of God, in the days of His flesh, would not run on an empty tank, no one else should try.

Luke 5:17–21 (BSB)

¹⁷ One day Jesus was teaching, and the Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. People had come from Jerusalem and from every village of Galilee and Judea, and the power of the Lord was present for Him to heal the sick. ¹⁸ Just then some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They tried to bring him inside to set him before Jesus, ¹⁹ but they could not find a way through the crowd. So they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. ²⁰ When Jesus saw their faith, He said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” ²¹ But the scribes and Pharisees began thinking to themselves, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

Set the room in your mind before you go any further. This is not a casual gathering. Pharisees and teachers of the law have come from every village of Galilee, and from Judea, and from Jerusalem itself, which means the authorities have taken notice and sent men to sit in and evaluate. They are seated, in the good places. The house is packed to the door and out into the street. And into that carefully arranged room comes an interruption. Four friends with a paralyzed man on a mat cannot get within twenty feet of the door, so they do the unthinkable: up the outside stair, onto the roof, and they begin to dig. Picture it honestly. Dust and broken tiles and crumbs of packed earth coming down on the heads of the most fastidious men in the district, and then daylight, and then a stretcher swinging down on ropes into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. Nobody asked permission. These men had decided that getting their friend to Christ was worth the damage and the embarrassment, and they were right.

Then verse twenty, and read it slowly, because there is a detail in it many readers walk past. “When Jesus saw their faith.” Not his faith. Theirs. The Lord looked up through the hole in that roof at four determined faces and counted what they had done as faith, and He acted on it. Do not hurry away from that. It does not mean anyone is saved by proxy; the paralytic will hear the word for himself and obey it in a moment. It does mean that the persistent, costly, undignified effort of ordinary believers to get somebody in front of Jesus is seen by Him and honored by Him. Carry the people you love to Christ. He notices. And then the word nobody was expecting. The man came for his legs. What Jesus says is, “Friend, your sins are forgiven (ἀφίημι) aphiēmi, pronounced af-EE-ay-mee. Strong's G863, to send away, release, let go completely. Aphiēmi is a wonderfully physical word before it is ever a theological one. It means to send away, to let go, to release, to leave behind. It is used of a fever leaving a body, of a debt being cancelled, of a man dropping what is in his hand and walking off. Luke has already used it in this very chapter without translating it “forgive”: when the fishermen brought their boats ashore, they left everything and followed Him. Hold those two uses side by side, because together they tell you what the day was like. Christ let go of this man’s sins, and this man’s friends let go of everything to get him there, and Levi in a few verses will get up and let go of a customs booth. That is what happens in the wake of forgiveness. Notice, too, the sheer completeness in the word. To forgive is not to overlook a debt while quietly keeping the ledger, nor to reduce the balance to something manageable. It is to send the thing away entirely, out of sight, never to be brought back and set before you again. And it costs the one who does the sending. The hand that released this man’s sins in Capernaum would be nailed down outside Jerusalem to make the release just. Whoever you are, whatever is written in your ledger, that is the word Christ has authority to speak, and when He speaks it the thing is gone. .” First the deeper paralysis, then the visible one. The scribes and Pharisees are outraged, and here we must be fair to them, because their theology was perfectly sound. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” That is exactly right. No prophet in Israel had ever claimed such a thing. A priest could pronounce a man cleansed on the ground of a sacrifice, but no one on earth could stand up and forgive a sin committed against God as though the debt were owed to himself. Their premise is correct. It is their conclusion that fails, because there is one other possibility they will not consider.

Luke 5:22–26 (BSB)

²² Knowing what they were thinking, Jesus replied, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? ²³ Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? ²⁴ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on the earth to forgive sins…” He said to the paralytic, “I tell you, get up, pick up your mat, and go home.” ²⁵ And immediately the man stood up before them, took what he had been lying on, and went home glorifying God. ²⁶ Everyone was taken with amazement and glorified God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”

They never opened their mouths. They were “thinking to themselves,” and He answers the thought, which is itself an answer to their question if they had eyes to see it, for who reads the heart but God alone? Then He asks them the question that pins the whole matter down. “Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?” Easier to say, notice. Anyone can claim to forgive sins, because nothing visible happens and no one in the room can check. To tell a paralyzed man to stand up is a claim that will be tested in five seconds flat in front of the whole district. So Jesus offers them the visible miracle as proof of the invisible one, and He says so plainly: “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on the earth to forgive sins.” That title, Son of Man, is His own favorite for Himself, and it comes out of Daniel’s night vision of one like a son of man who comes with the clouds and is given dominion and glory and a kingdom that will never pass away. He is not claiming less than deity; He is claiming it in the way the Scriptures had taught them to expect. And the God of Israel had long since said that the blotting out of sin was His own prerogative and no one else’s:

"I, yes I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake and remembers your sins no more." Isaiah 43:25 (BSB)

Set that verse beside the words spoken in that crowded house and you see why the room went so quiet. Either this is blasphemy, or the I who blots out transgressions is standing in front of them in a body. There is no third option, and Luke has been driving toward that fork since the angel spoke to Mary. Then the man stands. He picks up the mat that has carried him for years, tucks it under his arm, and walks home through the crowd glorifying God, which is exactly what a healed man ought to do. And the whole house is left with the honest verdict of astonished people: “We have seen remarkable things today.” They had. They had seen the Son of God forgive a sinner, and then prove it.

Luke 5:27–32 (BSB)

²⁷ After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax booth. “Follow Me,” He told him, ²⁸ and Levi got up, left everything, and followed Him. ²⁹ Then Levi hosted a great banquet for Jesus at his house. A large crowd of tax collectors was there, along with others who were eating with them. ³⁰ But the Pharisees and their scribes complained to Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” ³¹ Jesus answered, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. ³² I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

Out of the house and down to the road, and there sits Levi at his booth, doing the most despised job in Galilee. He is a Jew taking money from Jews for a Herod, and everyone walking past him that morning knew what they thought of him. Jesus looks at him and says two words. There is no interview, no probation, no demand that he first clean up his accounts. “Follow Me.” And Levi gets up, leaves everything, and follows. Weigh what leaving everything meant for a man in his line. Peter could conceivably go back to fishing, and later he tried. A tax franchise once abandoned was gone for good, and there would be no queue of employers eager for a former collector. Levi burned the boat, and he seems to have done it without a backward glance.

Then look what he does with his very first day as a disciple, because it is the most natural piece of evangelism in the Gospels and nobody had to teach it to him. He throws a party. A great banquet, in his own house, and he fills it with the only friends he has, which is to say a large crowd of tax collectors and the sort of people who would eat with tax collectors, and he sits Jesus down in the middle of them. He does not lecture anybody. He simply gets his old world into the same room as his new Master and lets them look at Him. If you want a model for reaching the people you know, there it is, and it costs nothing but a table and some courage. The Pharisees, watching from outside the circle, take their complaint to the disciples rather than to Jesus: “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” In their world, sharing a table was sharing a life, and a holy man kept his table clean. Jesus answers with a proverb any of them could have quoted: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Then He states His mission in one line, and it is the sentence this whole chapter has been building toward: “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance (μετάνοια) metanoia, pronounced met-AN-oy-ah. Strong's G3341, repentance, a changed mind that turns the life. Metanoia is one of the great words of Luke’s Gospel, and it means far more than feeling sorry. Its two parts mean a change of mind, but not in the thin modern sense of altering an opinion; it is the turning around of the whole way you think about God, yourself, and your sin, so deep that the direction of your life changes with it. The Old Testament picture behind it is simply turning: you were walking away, and now you are walking back. Notice that Jesus says He came to call sinners to it, which means repentance is not the entrance fee you pay before Christ will have you. It is where His call takes you. Levi is the illustration standing right there. Christ spoke first, and Levi got up. And notice, too, that repentance is not the misery it is often made out to be. Levi’s turning ends in a banquet. When Luke gets to the fifteenth chapter of this Gospel he will show you the same thing three times over, a lost sheep and a lost coin and a lost son, and every one of them ends with people being called together to rejoice. Turning to Christ costs you a booth and a ledger and a whole way of getting on in the world, and it gains you a table with the Son of God at it. That is not a hard bargain. That is the best news a sinner ever heard. .” There is a gentle irony in it that the Pharisees seem to have missed. He is not conceding that they are righteous and need nothing. He is saying that a doctor goes where people admit they are ill, and the tragedy of the men outside the door is that they were every bit as sick and would not say so.

Luke 5:33–39 (BSB)

³³ Then they said to Him, “John’s disciples and those of the Pharisees frequently fast and pray, but Yours keep on eating and drinking.” ³⁴ Jesus replied, “Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while He is with them? ³⁵ But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.” ³⁶ He also told them a parable: “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will tear the new garment as well, and the patch from the new will not match the old. ³⁷ And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will spill, and the wineskins will be ruined. ³⁸ Instead, new wine is poured into new wineskins. ³⁹ And no one after drinking old wine wants new, for he says, ‘The old is better.’”

The complaint moves from the company Jesus keeps to the way His disciples live. John’s men fasted, and so did the Pharisees, twice a week by custom, and here are these disciples eating and drinking at a tax collector’s banquet. It sounds like a small point about religious practice, and Jesus answers it by telling them what time it is. “Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while He is with them?” A Jewish wedding ran for a week, and the friends of the bridegroom were released from ordinary religious obligations for its duration, because there is a time to mourn and this was not it. Do you see what He has just claimed? He is the Bridegroom. In the prophets that is the Lord’s own name for Himself with His people, and Jesus takes it up as calmly as He took up the authority to forgive. Fasting in the presence of the Bridegroom would not be piety. It would be bad manners at a wedding. But He does not leave it there, and the shadow falls across the sentence at once: “the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.” That is the first real hint in Luke of the cross, dropped quietly into a conversation about mealtimes.

Then two small pictures, and they are not about religion in general but about what is happening in front of them. Nobody rips a piece out of a new coat to patch an old one, because you ruin the new coat and the patch does not match anyway. Nobody pours fermenting new wine into a skin that has already been stretched to its limit, because the gases will split it and you lose the wine and the skin together. What Jesus has brought is not a repair to the old system. He is not a patch on Pharisaic practice or an improvement to a religion of fasting schedules and clean tables. He is new wine, and He requires new skins: hearts made new, able to hold what He is pouring out. And then the last line, which is one of the most quietly devastating things in the Gospels: “And no one after drinking old wine wants new, for he says, ‘The old is better.’” There is no scolding in it. It is simply an observation about people, and it explains everything you have watched in this chapter. The men from Jerusalem had the old wine. They were comfortable with it, they had built their lives around it, and they had no appetite whatever for what God was doing in front of them. It is a warning worth taking personally, and gently. Familiar religion can be a fine thing or it can be a settled preference for what we are used to over the living Christ, and only an honest heart can tell the difference. Ask Him for the appetite.