Luke 5:12-26

Facilitating Wholeness (2)

Reintegrating into Community

Luke 5:12-16 - Jesus Cleanses a Leper

¹² He was in one of the towns,

and there was a man covered in leprosy there too.

He saw Jesus, and falling on his face,

he pleaded with him saying,

“Lord, if you want to, you can cleanse me.”

¹³ He reached out his hand,

touched him,

and said, “I do want that. Be cleansed!”

Immediately the leprosy left him.

¹⁴ He directed the man “Tell no one.

But go, show yourself to the priest,

and make the appropriate offering for a cleansing, as Moses decreed,

as a witness to them. ”

In Mark’s Gospel the incident had served to illustrate Jesus’ emerging conflict with the priestly establishment. It was the priests’ role to determine who was ritually “clean” or “unclean”. The Jewish establishment was no longer of interest to Luke since it had been wiped out with the Roman invasion of Israel in 70 AD. For Luke the incident was simply another indication of the compassion of Jesus. Mark had appropriately situated the incident in the countryside, since lepers were ostracised from habitation until declared “clean”. Luke located it in an unidentified city, since city, not countryside, was the home base of the Christian communities of the Empire.

¹⁵ Word about him spread all the more,

and numerous crowds gathered to listen him

and to be cured of their weaknesses.

¹⁶ But he would go off to deserted areas and pray.

In fact, after touching the leper, Mark assumed that Jesus incurred ritual uncleanness and was consequently unable to stay in inhabited places. Luke was not interested in such detail and put the reason for Jesus’ withdrawal to the desert as his desire to pray. It is significant how much Luke emphasised the prayer of Jesus. In his view, prayer would be essential also for disciples if they were later to acquire the mind and the heart of Jesus.

Facilitating Wholeness (3)

Forgiving Sin

Luke 5:17-26 - Jesus Heals a Paralytic

¹⁷ One day he was teaching

and Pharisees and experts in the law were sitting there.

They had come from the whole region of Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem.

The power of the Lord was there in his healing activities.

¹⁸ Some men carrying a paralysed man on a stretcher came along.

They tried to bring him in

and put him down in front of Jesus.

¹⁹ They could find no way to bring him in

because of the crowd.

So they went upon to the roof

and lowered him down on his stretcher

through the tiles

into the middle right in front of Jesus.

²⁰ He saw their faith, and said,

“My man, your sins are forgiven!”

²¹ The scribes and Pharisees started muttering,

“Who is this fellow, uttering blasphemies?

Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

²² Jesus knew what they were muttering,

and said to them in answer,

“Why are you muttering in your hearts?

²³ What is easier?

to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven!’,

or to say, ‘Get up and walk!

²⁴ But so that you might know

that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…",

he said to the paralysed man,

“I tell you, Get up,

pick up your stretcher,

and go to your home.”

²⁵ He stood up immediately in sight of them all,

picked up what he had been lying on,

and went off home, praising God.

²⁶ Sheer amazement gripped them all

and they praised God.

They were filled with fear,

and said, “We have witnessed extraordinary things today!”

For Mark this incident had illustrated Jesus’ confrontation with the legal establishment, represented by the scribes (teachers of the law) who were present. Whatever about scribes having come from every village of Galilee (there were about two hundred villages!), the fact that some came from Jerusalem seemed to indicate an official contingent. Luke’s main interest, however, was not the encounter with the Jewish power structures, but the matter of forgiveness.

The use of the passive voice: Your sins are forgiven was an accepted way of indicating God’s action. God forgave sins. Yet Jesus saw himself as the agent of God, the one with the authority on earth to forgive sins.

Luke’s comment that the power of the Lord was with him (Jesus) to heal would seem to indicate Luke’s conviction that Jesus’ healings were due to the power (the Spirit) of God working in and through his human agency.

Though the scribes were clear that only God could forgive sins, nevertheless forgiveness was to be granted only by means of the right rituals, under the right conditions and through the right intermediaries. The scribes believed this to be their domain. They determined the conditions; the priests performed the rituals. For Jesus, explicitly forgiving simply illustrated further the advent through his ministry of the Lord’s year of favour. Jesus’ God was a God whose mercy could not be constrained.

For the first time in the narrative Jesus used of himself the title Son of Man. He would use it again. The title referred to a vision in the Book of Daniel. In the vision, the figure seemed to indicate both an individual and at the same time the Jewish people as a whole who had remained faithful to God at the time of the persecution of the Hellenic ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes, in the middle of the second century before Christ.

The title conveyed a context of:

unjust persecution and suffering
a response of faithfulness in the face of such suffering
God’s vindication of such faithfulness to the extent that it became the criterion of true righteousness.

Next >> Luke 5:27-29