Luke 5:17-26 Commentary

Jesus Forgives and Heals a Paralyzed Man
17 One day Jesus was teaching, and Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick. 18 Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. 19 When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, 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 The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, "Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?"

22 Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, "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 I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins." So he said to the paralyzed man, "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." 25 Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. 26 Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, "We have seen remarkable things today."


Dig Deeper
Many years ago when I was playing basketball I had a teammate my first year in college who was very unusual. He seemed to be a pretty good player in practices before the season started but you also got the sense that he was not playing very hard. It wasn’t that unusual to see guys who wouldn’t give full effort during practices but would save up their best efforts for games, though. What was unique was that he had never dunked the basketball. He hadn’t done it in practice, in scrimmages, and not even before and after practice when most guys would mess around and try to outdo one another in dunks. Dunking well was kind of a status symbol at that time so it was something of a small scandal that he had never done it. To add to the problem for him was that he was 6 feet 5 inches tall (1.96 m). If he had been a small guy, he might haven’t gotten away with not dunking, but because of his height he took a great deal of abuse about his lack of throwing one down. His only response was always that he only dunked in real games. He didn’t “waste his energy,” was always his claim. Of course that’s easy to say, so no one believed him and even gave him a harder time about it. Then our first game came. A few minutes into the game he caught the ball outside of the three-point line, took a few quick dribbles towards the basket, and then took off, flying past his defender and thunderously slamming the ball into the basket. He didn’t say a word and didn’t look in the direction of the rest of the team, but we all knew. Not another word was said on the subject of his dunking. He had proven that what he said was true all along.

To say that you can do something is one thing. In fact, it’s pretty easy to make claims. Our world is full of people who make claims about various things, but to back up those claims is an entirely different thing. Think of how many times in your life you have heard claims being made that just could not be backed up by the subsequent actions. My friend claimed that he could dunk, although he never made a big deal out of it, and he could. Yet, I’ve known a few guys who would say that they could but then they really couldn’t. Luke made some big claims about the authority that Jesus had and purported to have but he knew that those claims were not really very impressive if not backed up with demonstrable action to verify that authority. Jesus had already shown that he had the authority over demons and illnesses, but now he was about to make a claim of authority that goes way beyond that. Could it be that he really had the power to forgive sin? How could one possibly ever know the truth of that claim? Luke is about to show us.

Jesus’ notoriety has spread enough that, even though Jesus was still in Capernaum, people had come from all over Galilee to see him. In fact, it went beyond just people from Galilee. The big boys had come out to see him. Luke tells us that Pharisees and teachers of the law had come not just the area of Galilee but as far away as Judea and Jerusalem. This is the first time Luke mentions the Pharisees who will serve as Jesus’ main source of opposition throughout his ministry. The Pharisees, we should note, were not an official group at the time. They were an informal pressure group. They were the ones that went around speaking of the coming of the kingdom of God so when someone else was out making claims about God’s kingdom, that was certainly going to catch their attention. What they would quickly discover, however, was that Jesus’ version of the kingdom was diametrically opposed to the one that they had embraced. They were thoroughly convinced that the reason that the kingdom hadn’t yet come was because of the many sinners in Israel. They were keeping God from returning to his people and if they would just stop sinning and hold to the law tighter then he would finally return and crush Israel’s enemies. This led them, in many ways, to look down on others as the problem and to see themselves as the example and the solution. So they offered up more and more rules and regulations for people to follow so that they could escape their status as sinners, if they would only take up this heavy yoke then they might be accepted by God.

But Jesus was offering something very different and quite opposed to that mindset. Rather than clinging more tightly to rules, regulations, and their heritage as Jews, Jesus didn’t appear to have a heavy yoke of laws that would help the lowly sinners improve their plight. He seemed to be more interested in faith and obedience to himself than in anything that people did or were born as to improve their plight. Of course if people did believe in his authority and live in submission to it, they would find that they would be better off, but that change would be real change that slowly came from within, not the more visible change that would come from conforming to the standards of others. Those were big claims and one would need a whole lot of authority to be able to make the radical claims that Jesus was making. But how could he possibly demonstrate the truth of such claims. Anyone, after all could say such things, but how could people know that what he was saying was true?

That is where the miracles came in. Jesus was healing people and demonstrating the power of the kingdom of God to make people whole through the physical reality of miracles. So many people were coming to Jesus that it was apparently becoming next to impossible to get in to see him. Surely this had to irritate the Pharisees who, although were respected in the community in many respects, certainly didn’t have throngs of people pressing in to see them and hear them talk about the kingdom of God. But Jesus did. Luke tells us of one man and his friends who so badly wanted to experience the healing touch of Jesus that they climbed up on the roof and dug their way through the thatch to lower their friend down to Jesus. Jesus was struck by the loyalty that these men were showing to their paralytic friend (paralytics were of little to no value in the society and often left to fend for themselves in many ways). He saw their faith, Luke tells us, which is a clue and a key to this whole story. Their faith was demonstrated by their actions. We tend to view faith as a mental exercise, but the people of Jesus’ time just did not see it that way. You acted on what you believed in such a way that your actions always demonstrated your beliefs. For someone to say, “well I did this but that’s not what I believe or what is in my heart,” is something that would make no sense to the Jews of Jesus’ day. You did what you believed, end of story. Thus, Jesus’ sees the demonstration of their faith and he will respond with a demonstration of his own.

Their great hope was that Jesus would heal this man and allow him to walk home but Jesus did way more than that. The kingdom of God, after all, was not primarily about physical healing. The physical healing merely pointed to the true power of the kingdom of God to heal the lives of sinners. Because this man had demonstrated the determined kind of faith that was necessary for one to accept the kingdom of God, Jesus would demonstrate his position as the savior of the world who had the authority, even though he had humbled himself to become a man limited by the flesh, to forgive sins. It is important to note, that although those around him were still not fully cognizant of the fact that Jesus was claiming to be God (Luke will get to that soon enough), that Jesus was doing things that only Israel’s God could do as savior. AS the prophet Isaiah wrote, “I, even I, am YHWH, and apart from me there is no savior” (Isa. 43:11).

The Pharisees certainly got the underlying point of the claim to forgive sin. If Jesus was claiming the authority of sin forgiver and savior, then he was claiming the authority and identity of God. They simply would not stand for this, especially when his message was so fundamentally opposed to the one that they embraced. This demonstrates an important truth in Jesus’ ministry. The miracles were great demonstrations of Jesus’ true authority but they weren’t enough by themselves. They had to mingle with submission and obedience in order to produce the necessary faith of a true kingdom person. As Jesus’ ministry will show, it was just as easy to see those miracles and still reject Jesus’ authority.

Jesus knew that the Pharisees’ were thinking that he was making claims that he could not back up. His ability to tell them what they were thinking was another clue of his true identity, one that they rejected. In order to demonstrate his true authority, though, and give every opportunity to the Pharisees and the whole crowd to believe, Jesus will show that he does indeed have the power and authority that he has claimed in being able to forgive sins. First, he asks an important question. Is it harder to forgive sin or to heal a lame man and give him the power to walk? There is no good way for the Pharisees to answer that question and so they don’t. But Jesus commands him to get up and walk. Surely the crowd was amazed and at least some realized that this was a clear demonstration that he did have the power to forgive sin just as he claimed.

In claiming his authority to forgive sins, though, Jesus dropped another clue that at least some in the crowd, not the least of those being the Pharisees, picked up on. Jesus used the somewhat mysterious phrase “the son of man.” This is the first time that Luke has described that phrase from the lips of Jesus and it is no small thing. The phrase could simply mean “just another man,” but by the time of Jesus, the phrase had almost exclusively taken on the meaning of its use in Daniel 7 and been applied to the messianic figure from that passage. In Daniel 7, the son of man is the one who is brought before God, suffers persecution, and is given all authority over the whole world. He was the Messiah through whom God would bring his kingdom into the world. Jesus was subtly indicating that he was Daniel’s Messiah. He was the one who had authority over the whole world to forgive sin and to make the lame walk. His works showed that his authority was genuine just as our actions demonstrate the genuineness of our faith.

The people standing there that day were amazed and they certainly saw much more than they expected. Imagine that this was the first time that you had ever read the Gospel of Luke or even heard of Jesus. From that perspective, we should recognize that feeling of amazement because as we read through Luke we find that Jesus is much more than we could ever expect. Jesus made a life of doing things that people never expected and he will continue to do the unexpected in our lives if we recognize his authority.


Devotional Thought
Jesus differed from the religious leaders of his day because he offered the people hope and true transformation rather than just blaming them for being sinners. Does you tend to reflect Jesus’ approach or that of the religious leaders? Take an honest look and assess whether you really present the gospel as a message of hope or one of condemnation.