The Gospel of Luke 5:27-39 The call of Levi
Luke 5:27-39 · Vern Peterman · Feb 8, 2015
Gospel of Luke, No. 19
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926455361738

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. Before we step into the passage that Courtney just read for us here, we're going to address a question that came up last week. Several of you expressed a real surprise. What? Jesus had a house? Which is what I presented there. So let's take a look at that.

Mark 2.1 is one of those passages that talks about Jesus being at home.

In other places in the New Testament, where it refers to being at home, it means to be at home in a dwelling. The only exception to that is three times in 2 Corinthians 5, where the Apostle Paul is talking about being at home with the Lord. So it's a different context. But the usual pattern for at home in the Bible, when it's referring to a particular person, is it's referring to their actual physical dwelling. His hometown is translated from different Greek words so that's it's not when it says at home it's not conveying that.

Matthew 4.13 it says that Jesus came and occupied a house is what the particular words and definition is. It's translated settled there in the New American Standard. He dwelt. He settled down in the house if you will. And that house it says was in Capernaum. So we have the location Somewhere there in Capernaum, he had a house. However, this is what people are usually thinking of.

Luke 9.58, and Jesus said to him, the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. So that's usually what people are thinking of and stunned to find out Jesus had a house.

Matthew 8.20 quotes almost verbatim the same thing. But the thing is, these statements are made about two years later. after Jesus had been established. So by about two years later, it appears he did not have a house at that time and was simply itinerant and staying with different ones. And it also doesn't record or give any implication that he was settled down in a particular place.

So anyway, I just wanted to address that question. Now back to Luke 5, 27 through 39, and we'll step through it a verse or two at a time here. Luke 5 27 through 28 it reads this way after that he went out and noticed a tax collector named Levi sitting in the tax booth and he said to him follow me and he left everything behind and got up and began to follow him so here's the interesting irony you have Levi who also as you find often in the Bible has another name also known as Matthew so probably you know he was called both in the formal sense He was the son of Alphaeus, and some weeks out from now we'll take a look at all 12 of the apostles and look at these sometimes double names that are involved. Here is Levi, also known as Matthew, and we'll call him Matthew throughout most of our study here.

He was a tax collector for the despised Romans, and he probably worked for a chief tax collector like Zacchaeus. not Zacchaeus specifically, but like that. So here he was, a Jew, collecting taxes from the Jews for the Romans. That was not well thought of. So Matthew, his name means gift of Yahweh, or gift of God. God is the covenant name of God. It's a shortened form of Mattathias.

So that was, if you will, a nickname. Patriotic Jews considered tax collectors for the Romans to be the worst of the worst. Really, really awful. If you wanted to call somebody a bad name, that's what you chose. Tax collectors and sinners was a phrase roughly equivalent to our scum of the earth. Really bad. It was the worst insult you could possibly call someone.

So what you'll see throughout the Gospels is a pattern, tax collectors and something else, tax collectors and sinners, like we see in Luke 5.30 and other places. We're going to run into it again. That was one combination of words. So tax collectors and sinners. And by the way, the tax collectors and sinners is just synonyms, right? If you're a tax collector, of course you're a sinner. That was the assumption. Tax collectors and prostitutes.

That was another one that found in the Gospel of Matthew in a couple places. And finally, just tax collectors. And we'll see that farther on Luke. We've actually already seen it once already. References to an individual tax collector show up in Matthew and Luke, and we've got the references listed there. So lots of references in the Gospels, including Luke, to tax collectors, the scum of the earth.

Now, we have some more irony here. Here's Matthew, who is a gift of God, right? That's his name. While the Jews viewed telling a lie as a violation of the Law of Moses, and according to the Law of Moses, you're supposed to stone someone to death if they told a lie, right? They considered it permissible to lie to a Roman tax collector. That was okay. If needed to protect property, you could do that, and that was alright, because those tax collectors are so scummy!

So Dr. Luke gives a unique account here about the chief tax collector Zacchaeus, and some months from now, if the Lord has us around that long, we'll get to that. That's in Luke chapter 19. Matthew, also known as Levi, will invite lots of tax collectors to a reception for Jesus. Now one of the things to ponder here is Jesus comes up to Matthew, Levi, and says, follow me. And he did. But what that meant was that he was leaving a very lucrative job.

You see, here's the way tax collecting worked in the Roman Empire. They'd map out districts, and they'd have various people bid for how much tax money they could get out of a particular district. And that amount had to be turned over to the Romans. whatever a tax collector got above that bid was all take-home money. So the tax collector would then have this take-home money and then he'd feed some of that to the chief tax collector, somebody like Zacchaeus. And so they could get paid very, very well essentially by the table of taxes they'd make up their own. And it was just so that they made lots of extra over the amount that they had to pay to Rome.

So, Matthew was giving up a very lucrative job, a job where he was being paid very well. This really big decision on Matthew's part ultimately valued spiritual things more highly than his high income. That was a huge spiritual decision for Matthew to make, to leave this very lucrative job, to follow Jesus with no guaranteed income. Matthew responded quickly and decisively. Isn't that interesting? To Jesus' invitation to follow him. And here we have Matthew, also known as Levi, the author of the first gospel. The gospel according to Matthew.

So Luke 5.29 reads this way, And Levi gave a big reception for him in his house, and there was a great crowd of tax collectors and other people who were reclined at the table with him.

One of the disappointments I had in the various pictures that are made from movies and whatnot is there's nowhere near enough people. That does not look like a great crowd, does it? No. So anyway, imagine a much larger group than this. And matter of fact, even difficult to distinguish who's just hanging around outside and who's inside here as a part of the party.

So, on Matthew's retirement, one of the things you could look at this big party as, this gathering, is one, it's to honor Jesus, but it's also a retirement party. It's for Matthew to explain, you know, why am I giving up a lucrative job to follow and be a disciple under this rather poor carpenter, right? Ex-carpenter. And so he's saying, here's Jesus, and I want to honor him, but I also want to explain. Here's why I'm leaving, to follow him.

So Matthew's retirement from tax collecting, and having begun as Jesus' disciple, he held a large banquet. And that speaks, of course, to his financial success. He could afford it. It might be the last banquet that he throws, but nonetheless, he could afford it. Up to this time, he's done very well financially. The point of this banquet was to introduce and to honor Jesus. That was the primary point. To introduce and to honor Jesus. Matthew would do so by inviting a great many of his tax collector friends.

Which, of course, the rest of the people wouldn't think that's very honoring. But nonetheless, that's what he did. So one gets the impression that this is no small gathering of people, unlike the picture that you see. Dr. Luke said it was a big reception with a great crowd. So big reception, great crowd. This is a large group of people.

I imagine since Matthew was successful that he also had a fairly large house and could hold that, assuming it was at his home. There's a good chance the invitation was also sent, since it's a big reception and a large crowd, that the invitation was sent to people living in neighboring towns as well. We don't know exactly what town this was. It may have been Capernaum. Capernaum had about 1,500 people in this village there, and they may have invited people from other towns around the Sea of Galilee and then some farther away. It implies here that there's a large number of these tax collectors. So since they didn't have a high population of tax collectors, they probably brought them in from other places.

So Luke 5.30 says this, "...the Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at His disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?" Now the Pharisees and their scribes, the scribes are the ones who are aligned with the Pharisees. They would hang around with the Pharisees. They were invited to the reception as well.

I'm going to make a comment about this here briefly. It doesn't look like they were warned about or expected the number of tax collectors who would be attending that day. Now there is another possibility, and we make note of it here. In our culture, if you gather around someone's house while they're eating, and look in the windows, and look in the door, and make comments, and ask, you know, hey, how's the baklava? You can't do that in our culture. You'd probably get a phone call to the police and be extracted, right? It's just not acceptable or even legally allowed in our culture.

However, in the culture of the day, and as we go through the Gospel of Luke, you're going to see this, It was socially acceptable and completely legal to go up to people's houses and windows and to peer in while they're eating and to make remarks about what they're eating and who they're eating with. That was entirely acceptable. So these Pharisees in the culture of the day are not being rude. They're following the pattern that was completely accepted in the culture.

So that's a possibility that these Pharisees were not invited actually, but they invited themselves to come and peer and look and ask questions about things and that sort of thing. So in effect the Pharisees and scribes were asking Jesus' disciples, why do you eat and drink with the scum of the earth? That was the message that they were pulling across here. So the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled.

What's interesting is the word here that's translated grumbled is gongouzmos. And it's meant, like some of our words in English, to imitate the sound of grumbling. You can imagine, if I were to have it, and we did this in a Thursday night Bible study, and we'll try it here. I said, okay, everybody start saying gungusmos, gungusmos, and we start doing that. That's the attempt to imitate that sound of grumbling. So that's what they were doing. And the Greek word for grumbling was that imitation of the sound. Jesus ate, if you recall, and we'll see it here, we'll see it again and again, with tax collectors and sinners, and he was going to be crucified between two thieves. So he hung out with some pretty distasteful people, as we would see it.

He spoke with a Samaritan woman. Of course, Samaritans, you didn't even talk to them. You didn't even go in their land. When the Jews wanted to go from the Sea of Galilee area down to Jerusalem, they bypassed Samaria by going down the Jordan River to stay away from the Samaritans. Jesus, though, intentionally goes into Samaria He's there at Jacob's well at the time of day when the women of ill repute come out and talks to the Samaritan woman, a woman of ill repute, deliberately.

Okay? Deliberately. So Jesus would talk to people that others would not. He did other things as we'll go along here and see in the Gospel of Luke. He did other things that was completely unlike what any other rabbi would ever do or say. And this is one of them. You recall Luke 20, and we'll be getting there in some months ahead.

We'll see that paying taxes to Caesar was a point of debate. The leaders of the Jews were hoping to put Jesus into a lose-lose, that's not loose-loose, lose-lose dilemma, where no matter what he answered he was in trouble. But these Pharisees and the scribes, there was no point for debate. These tax collectors are awful, terrible, scum of the earth. How could you possibly eat with them? Much less invite them to your dinner. It's just about as bad a thing as a Jew could do. How could one possibly eat and drink with them?

That was their thought. It just blew their circuits. Now, I'm going to recite for you some ancient Pharisee poetry. that I've just written. Okay, here we go. Roses are red and violets are bluish and collecting Rome's taxes is very un-Jewish. Okay? Alright. Now, get ready for the next one. There once was a Jew under Rome. The tax collectors came to his home. He'd sooner lie to a brother and swear by his mother then pay taxes to a Jew serving Rome. That gets you the idea anyway. Okay. Now, enough of that nonsense. Here we go.

Luke 5, 31-32, And Jesus answered and said to them, It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Now, one of the things to keep in mind, Jesus even though it's the disciples who are getting the questions, right? Jesus steps forward to answer their questions. The disciples, first of all, are new at this, right? And one of the things we notice, since Matthew was the last disciple to get asked here, Matthew, Levi, is especially new at this whole thing, how do I deal with these Pharisees?

And it's going to get more aggressive. So Jesus stepped in to answer the grumbler's question rather than to have the disciples field the question themselves. They're just rather green at this. So this would not be the only time he'd speak up for his disciples. We're going to encounter that more as we go through the Gospel of Luke.

The opposition to Jesus from the Pharisees and the Sadducees gets more and more intense as time goes on. Ultimately, of course, they think that they've gotten something accomplished by getting Jesus out of the way. So this is just the beginning. This is just the beginning. So Jesus says, those who are sick need a physician. Now, let's ask this question.

Were the Pharisees and their scribes well or sick? The scribes and Pharisees would say, we are well, you guys are sick, right? However, the truth is, they were sick but didn't realize it. And certainly, The scribes and Pharisees would say that those tax collectors are really, really sick. So they didn't realize it. They would universally view the tax collectors as sick. And by anyone associating with them, especially eating and drinking with them, well, you must be sick too. So Jesus said he came to call the sinners to repentance. The scribes and Pharisees, of course, would see themselves as righteous. vary. They all viewed the tax collectors as sinners universally.

This word repentance, even among us Christians, has sometimes gotten, well, different kinds of impressions. Sometimes Christians will think repentance is where you feel really, really bad about what you did or didn't do. You know, it's kind of, I got the blues, you know, and that kind of feeling. That's not repentance. Another one here, intense emotional expressions, sobbing, and repentance body language. People are looking for that. Reality is, repentance just means to change one's mind. And in a Christian context, it means to end up agreeing with God and believing. It's metanoia, change of mind, that's all it means. Not how you feel, not what emotions you express.

So Luke 5.33, and they said to him, the disciples of John often fast and offer prayers, the disciples of the Pharisees also do the same, but yours eat and drink. One of the things you do is, if you lose the argument, you change the subject. The first complaint was about the tax collectors. Tax collectors and sinners. That one didn't work out so well.

Jesus came up with an answer that they couldn't come back to. So, they changed the subject. It's now no longer the problem of the tax collectors you're eating, but it's the problem you're not fasting and praying and you're eating and drinking instead. So, they'd either lost the argument or they were satisfied with Jesus' answers, or both. So they changed the subject to fasting and praying instead of tax collectors. Now it's a different issue.

Now, John the Baptist, whom they made reference to, did not admire the Pharisees. Most certainly not. As a matter of fact, I think the words he used were, you brood of vipers! Which didn't exactly go well with them. But anyway, but the Pharisees and John the Baptist both had their disciples fast and pray as part of their spiritual disciplines within each of those orders. So, instead of fasting and praying, Jesus' disciples were feasting and playing. And so it seemed to these Pharisees and their scribes. So Jesus responded to them, to this new objection, to the way Jesus was being a rabbi. Is there such a verb as rabbying?

I'm not sure. Anyway, Jesus will be giving these objectors four word pictures. And by the second one, it's called a parable, to illustrate his point. So we use four word pictures. Two of them will be the bridegroom fasting and the attendants, with the word picture there. A new cloth on an old garment will be the next one, verse 36. New wine in old wineskins, verse 37 and 38. And old wine, new wine, verse 39, that finishes up the passage.

So four word pictures, and he comes just rapid fire apparently with each of these. That must have really confused the Pharisees. We'll see that the Pharisees and scribes don't seem to have any comeback to Jesus' word pictures, nor another question. My guess is they didn't understand any of it.

So here's Luke 5, 34 and 35, and Jesus said to them, You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and they will fast in those days.

So, Jesus' word picture of the bridegroom and the attendants is in reference to Christ as the bridegroom until the church begins. Jesus refers to the disciples then as attendants, or we might call them groomsmen. With Jesus present with the disciples, as a bridegroom would have descendants, it's not the right time for fasting, at least not yet. Jesus, when he was taken away, then they would fast.

The bridegroom is taken away, which implies something. Jesus will be taken away at some point. This being taken away begins with Christ's crucifixion and ends with his ascension. You notice he doesn't spend a lot of time elaborating on this taken away.

As the church begins in Acts chapter 2, these attendants would change into being a founding part of the Bride of Christ. Just as they would change from disciples into apostles. That's why he doesn't yet call them apostles, he doesn't call them a part of the Bridegroom, but he does make reference, he is the Bridegroom.

So Luke 5.36, and he was also telling them a parable, no one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. Otherwise he would tear the new and the piece from the old, excuse me, from the new will not match the old.

I had an experiment with this sort of thing one time. We had a nice large bag of leather scraps and as I had Levi's and it developed holes. I'd put a have you know, my sister or a friend put a leather patch over the hole Well, eventually I had a pair of leather pants, you know, that's just the way it works because the the new right the new Just tears away at the old and so that doesn't work So here we see the first use of the word parable.

We're not going to see this As the last use however, we're gonna see it again. So many more times as we continue investigating Jesus. Also, this parable is relatively short, one verse. We're going to continue in our study to encounter this word parable, but we're going to find some of them are far more complex than one right after another. Anyway, we'll get there. A parable will reveal truth to those with insight, but conceal it from others.

And my guess is the Pharisees, once they started into this, had not a clue what he was talking about and didn't want to look dumb so they didn't ask any more questions. So the Pharisees didn't get this. A piece of new cloth not being placed on the old cloth was saying that Jesus did not come up to patch Judaism which had holes in it. Jesus was not trying to patch up Judaism.

Matter of fact, that doesn't work. You think about it. You know in Western Europe. They had the Reformation you know why they had the Reformation it's because Guys like Martin Luther tried to reform The Roman Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church said nothing doing right and so Reformation doesn't work centuries later along come Jonathan and Charles Wesley and and try to reform the Anglican Church. Did that work? Nah. Okay. Typically it doesn't work. Jesus did not come to try to reform Judaism. I think we have a reformed Judaism already, right? He didn't come to reform Judaism. He came to replace it. Something new. Jesus was coming in with an entirely new order to replace Judaism.

If Jesus had said that plainly, they would have been totally blown away. As it was, he gave them this word picture with the patch over the old cloth. The parable concealed Jesus' message from the Pharisees and the scribes. So while Jesus explained using the parable, they didn't get it. And the disciples themselves wouldn't get it until years later.

Now here's Luke 5.37 and 38.

And no one puts new wine into old wine skins, otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled out and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wine skins. It's interesting, in looking this up, a lot of people will be given a picture of what we call a Boto bag. It's not a Boto bag. What they would do is they would take an animal skin, like what you see here, and by the way, it's not a pig skin, not Jews. They'd take an animal skin, usually a sheep skin. goat, something like that, and they would tie up the legs and tie up where the head was and all that and use that as the wineskin.

So when he's making reference to that, that's what it looks like. Since new wine is actually just fresh grape juice, it must be put into new wineskins because it ferments quickly and all the fermenting process puts off gases and all sorts of things like that.

Nancy and I knew some folks who decided they were going to make root beer. And so they had a bunch of bottles of this root beer that they were making, and they put it in that space that's over the top of the cabinets, you know, in a lot of houses. They put it over that space in the kitchen.

Well, one day, BOOM! Root beer went all over the place. And the whole family worked on getting this thing wiped down because you know it gets sticky all over the doors and handles and just a mess. Just as soon as they got it done, guess what? Boom! They had to do it all over again. That was the last time they put those in the kitchen.

And that's the problem here, that the process of developing this is not going to work with an old wine skin, which is starting to get stiff and inflexible. What will happen is, just like the friends found with the root beer, it just explodes all over the place and now you've lost the wine, you've lost the skin, and it's all a mess. That was the reason you didn't put new wine and old wineskin. You don't try to reuse the wineskin in the fermenting process.

What God is doing with the church could not be put into the structure of Judaism. We're not under any of Israel's laws or tradition. Christianity is not a patch of Judaism. Not a patchwork of Judaism. Unfortunately, those in Christendom who really like putting new wine in old wineskins, they really like patching up the old worn-out cloth with new Christian patches.

It's a disaster. It's a disaster. They do it by concocting crusty old traditions that God never intended, adding just enough law to confuse a Pharisee. And unfortunately, a great deal of Christendom is caught up in this. And it's a problem. It's a problem.

Jesus intended to start something entirely new in an entirely new wineskip. Right? Entirely new. Here's the last verse, Luke 5, 39. And no one after drinking old wine wishes for new, for he says the old is good enough. The old is good enough. What's he saying? The old wine was fermented and new wine is just grape juice. Right? So Jesus compared Judaism the old wine with biblical Christianity, the new.

Those who had been steeped in Judaism were often inclined to stay with Judaism, even though that was the old order. And up until a certain point in time, that was the Apostle Paul's preference, before he became Paul and before he became an apostle. That was his preference. He wanted to stick with the old order and do away with the new. The new thing that God was bringing in was not to the liking of those in old Judaism. Not at all.

Think about how this transitioned. Remember we saw earlier in this passage Jesus talked about being taken away. The Jews thought, oh we've gotten rid of Jesus by having him crucified. Guess what that did? That made all those in the body of Christ to die to the law. The Jews thought they succeeded And what they thought they succeeded in in getting this Jesus crucified was the very thing that God would use to establish the new order altogether. And they would die to the law that ruled Judaism. So we, having been identified with Christ in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seating, the first of those, the first of those, which is the Jews' victory, is the very beginning of the five ways in which we've been identified with Christ, and that very beginning cuts us off from the law.

We've entirely died to the law of Moses and any principle of law altogether. Thank the Lord for that, for His amazing grace. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that as we look at this passage here, we see that indeed you have established something new. What I'm sure puzzled the Pharisees then, and the disciples even at that point in time, you've made very clear. And we thank you for that. We thank you for what you've revealed here, because you love us and care for us. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.