Thoughts on Luke 5

Today’s reading: Deuteronomy 25-26; Luke 5

Luke 5 strikes me this morning with the different ways we allow our hearts to respond to Jesus; either letting our hearts be softened and swayed by evidence, or hardening our hearts to the evidence having already decided what we will or won’t believe.

Responding to the evidence

At the start of the chapter we see Peter, James, and John reacting to Jesus by recognizing something of His worthiness to be followed and leaving everything to follow Him. Now I have heard this passage taught multiple times before, more or less calling for radical blind faith in Jesus. The teachers say that the disciples see one miracle from Jesus and that is enough for them to leave everything and follow. I have actually heard it taught that we shouldn’t seek evidence or expect to be convinced of who Jesus says He is or of His gospel, we should simply respond to it like Peter, James, and John.

So let’s just start by pointing out that this is not at all what happens. Luke 5 is far from Peter, James, and John’s first encounter with Jesus. While Luke doesn’t record their initial meeting, John tells us that Peter’s brother Andrew was a disciple of John the Baptist, and it was at hearing John declare of Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” that he went and followed Jesus, bringing his brother Peter and their other friends along as well. So their initial introduction to Jesus was a known prophet of God (John the Baptist) declaring Jesus to be the one he was sent to prepare the way for. And while Luke doesn’t include this initial meeting, he does include, near the end of Luke 4, the account of Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law.

What this means is that by the time Peter, James, and John leave everything to follow Jesus in Luke 5, they have had His identity attested to by a prophet, they have been following Him around and listening to His teachings, so they know what He is about, they have seen Him cast out unclean spirits and heal the sick, and finally they experience this miracle on their behalf. This is FAR from blind faith when they choose to leave everything to follow Jesus. These men have heard Jesus’ teachings and seen the evidence of who He is, and their choice to leave everything and follow Him is the result of rightly considering where the evidence they are seeing points.

But, once they recognize where the evidence points, they are willing to radically change their lives in order to follow Jesus, and there is definitely something in that that we need to pay attention to and consider today…

Refusing the evidence

The other heart response to Jesus that we see in Luke 5 is the Pharisees and scribes hardening their hearts to the evidence before them and refusing to accept Jesus’ claims regardless of what He says or does to back them up.

When a paralyzed man is brought to Jesus, in the presence of the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus chooses to tell the man that his sins are forgiven. The Jewish leaders and teachers are reasonably riled up at this, as the forgiveness of sins is God’s domain alone, and it would be blasphemous for a mere man to try to claim such authority. But Jesus doesn’t just leave it as a claim, He backs it up by a demonstration of divine power in healing the man. The inherent argument, which would not have been missed on His audience, is that if Jesus is actively blaspheming, God is not going to empower Him to heal in God’s name. Jesus’ ability to heal the paralyzed man shows Him, at the very least, to be a prophet of God, such that God is backing Him with His power, and that alone means that they cannot discount His words of forgiveness of sins as either blasphemy or idle chatter.

Luke tells us that when Jesus does this, amazement seizes all of them and they were filled with awe. But that awe doesn’t last long for the scribes and Pharisees when they see Jesus eating at the house of Levi the tax collector. Luke says that they started grumbling about what they were seeing from Jesus. And this really starts the process of their rejection of Jesus, no matter how much evidence He offers them. They know what they want from Jesus, and when He doesn’t match up with their expectations, rather than adjusting their expectations to match the evidence, they begin to harden their hearts to the evidence so that their expectations don’t have to change.

And this is the place many people today find themselves as well. We have our own thoughts on spirituality We have our own sense of our goodness or worthiness. We have our own understandings of how life should go and what in life “works best.” And as long as the Jesus we hear about fits into our own views and pictures, we will happily accept the evidence of who He is. But when things start to clash, when Jesus asks us to accept a truth we don’t like, when the author of life claims He knows how life works better than we do, suddenly all that evidence seems less compelling. We start to make excuses for rejecting the evidence we have seen because accepting it would mean we were wrong or that things in our life would need to change, and we aren’t interested in change.

Responding or refusing?

As much as we see Peter, James, and John swayed by the evidence to make radical changes in their lives in order to follow Jesus, we also see the scribes and the Pharisees hardening their hearts to the evidence before them so that they can cling to their own views and righteousness and not be forced to change for Jesus.

And whether you are a follower of Jesus or not, this has implications for you. Can you be wrong? Do you have a category for potentially being wrong about Jesus, who He is, or what He teaches, that allows you to accept the evidence as God reveals it to you, or have you already decided that you are objectively right in all your thoughts and opinions such that anything to the contrary much necessarily be wrong or deceptive? Are you willing to allow your heart to be swayed by the evidence Jesus offers you? And if so, do you have a category for the fact that you and Jesus don't see eye to eye? Peter, James, and John left everything to follow Jesus and then continued to have their views and assumptions challenged by their time with Him. They are not the same people on the day of Pentecost as they are when we find them in Luke 5, but they have been shaped and changed in response to the Lord. Does He have that space and that right in your life as well?