Luke 5:32

Luke places this call straight after Jesus heals a paralytic and forgives his sins (Luke 5:17–26). “And after these things he went forth”, and the verb exérchomai is the ordinary word for going out. Out in the town Jesus “saw a publican, named Levi”. The word for saw, theáomai, means to look at or behold, and Luke tells us that Jesus looked at this man where he was, in the middle of his working day.

Levi was “sitting at the receipt of custom”. The telṓnion was the tax booth or customs house, where taxes, tolls and duties on goods were paid. So Jesus finds Levi at the very place that marked him out to everyone as a tax collector, and he calls him from there.

Luke introduces Jesus’ words with épō, the ordinary verb for speaking or saying, and the words themselves are short: “Follow me.” The verb is akolouthéō, which properly means to be on the same road with someone and so to go along with him, and it is the usual word for going with a teacher as his disciple. The word for “me”, moí, is the plain unstressed form. Jesus has just shown his authority over sickness and over sin, and the same authority is in this command. He calls, and the man he calls gets up and comes.

Earlier in the chapter Jesus called fishermen, Simon Peter, James and John (Luke 5:1–11). Now he calls a man from a very different trade and a far lower place in the eyes of his neighbours, which shows how widely the Lord draws his followers.

“And he left all, rose up, and followed him.” Luke tells Levi’s answer in three short verbs, one after another, and their speed is the point. Levi answers at once.

The first verb, kataleípō, means to leave behind or to abandon, and Luke says he left “all” (hápas, the whole of it). For a tax collector that meant his trade, the money it brought in and the settled life built on it. The second, anístēmi, is the ordinary word for standing up, so Luke shows us Levi getting up from his seat at the booth. The third is “followed”, akolouthéō, the same verb as Jesus’ command in the verse before. Levi does what he was told, in the very word he was told it.

To follow Jesus in this way is to go with him as a disciple, to learn from him and to share in his work. Jesus later says that whoever will come after him must deny himself and take up his cross daily (Luke 9:23–26), and he puts the cost plainly: “So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). Peter would one day remind Jesus that the disciples had left all and followed him, and ask what they would have (Matthew 19:27). Paul counted everything he once valued as loss for Christ (Philippians 3:7–8).

Levi’s leaving all has its pattern in Christ himself, who “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7) for the sake of those he came to save.

Levi’s first act as a disciple is to give a feast for Jesus. “Levi made him a great feast in his own house.” The word for feast, dochḗ, means a reception, a banquet given for guests, and mégas, “great”, speaks of its size. Levi held it in his oikía, his own house, with Jesus as his guest. The feast showed his gratitude and his new allegiance to Jesus openly, and it brought Jesus among the people Levi knew best.

The English word “great” comes twice in this verse, and it translates two different Greek words. The “great company” is polýs óchlos, a large crowd or throng, made up “of publicans and of others”. These were Levi’s fellow tax collectors and other guests (állos simply means “other”), the people the Pharisees call sinners in the next verse.

“Sat down” translates katákeimai, which means to lie down and is used especially of reclining at a meal. At a formal meal the guests reclined on couches around a low table. These guests “sat down with them”, metá, with Jesus and his disciples, and to share a table like that meant fellowship and acceptance. Matthew and Mark both tell of this meal and of the words that followed it (Matthew 9:10–13, Mark 2:15–17).

The scene looks beyond Levi’s house. Here the King himself eats with the people he came to save. The Son of man came to minister and to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45), and through him God reconciles sinners to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). Levi’s table points ahead to the feast at the end: “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).

“But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples”. The scribes, grammateús, a word drawn from writing, were experts in the law of Moses, who copied, explained and taught the Scriptures and held great authority among the people. The Pharisees, Pharisaîos, a name of Hebrew origin meaning separatist, were a strict party who kept the law and their oral traditions with great care, applied the rules of ritual purity to daily life, and kept themselves apart from people they considered unclean.

To murmur, gongýzō, is to grumble in discontent. They bring their complaint to the disciples, it touches Jesus as well, and he is the one who answers it. “Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?” In their eyes, eating with someone meant accepting him and sharing his standing before God, so to eat with such people was to share their uncleanness. For them holiness meant keeping separate from the unclean, and Jesus was doing the opposite. Luke records the same complaint again later, when the Pharisees and scribes grumble that Jesus receives sinners and eats with them (Luke 15:1–2).

“And Jesus answering said unto them”. Jesus takes up the question himself, and he answers it with a saying everyone already knew from life: “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.”

Each word is plain. “Whole” is hygiaínō, a verb meaning to have sound health, to be well, which elsewhere is used figuratively of being sound or true in teaching. A physician, iatrós, is a doctor, a healer. “They that are sick” translates kakōs échō, literally to have it badly (kakōs is “badly” and échō “to have” or “to hold”), the ordinary way of saying that someone is ill.

Jesus is the physician in his own saying. The sick are those who know their sin and their need, like the tax collectors at Levi’s table. The whole are those who count themselves healthy, like the Pharisees, and so look for no cure. There is irony in the word, because the ones who think themselves well are the ones furthest from the healing they need. Early in his ministry Jesus quoted the proverb “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23), and in this chapter he has already cleansed a leper (Luke 5:12–16) and healed the paralytic, so the picture of a physician fits him well.

The cure he brings for sin cost him his life. Isaiah foretold the servant who would bear our griefs, and “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4–6), and Peter says that Christ bore our sins in his own body on the tree, by whose stripes we were healed (1 Peter 2:24). Isaiah also says that he “was numbered with the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12), and Levi’s table shows him already among them. He came to “save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Since he is without sin, he can sit among sinners and make them clean, and their uncleanness leaves him untouched.

“I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” The verb for “came”, érchomai, is the ordinary word for coming, and here Jesus uses it of his own coming among us, and names its purpose. He came to call.

The call is “to repentance”, metánoia, a change of mind, a turning around. It is the turning of a whole life from sin to God, which changes a person’s outlook, purpose and conduct. John the Baptist preached repentance before Jesus began his ministry (Luke 3:3), and Jesus warns that all must repent or perish (Luke 13:3). Repentance is the answer his call looks for, and Levi has just given it: he left all and followed.

Paul sums up the same mission in a sentence: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). Jesus says it again in the house of another tax collector, later in Luke: “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). He makes the same point in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican who went up to the temple to pray (Luke 18:9–14).

Every scene in Luke 5 shows the same Lord at work, among fishermen, a leper, a paralysed man and now a tax collector, and here he shows us plainly why he came. He looks at Levi at his booth and calls him, and that grace is his own choice. God has chosen the foolish and weak things of the world to put the wise and the strong to shame (1 Corinthians 1:27), and Levi’s past made him exactly the kind of man Jesus came for.

The love behind the call goes all the way to the cross: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The physician who sat at Levi’s table is the Lamb of God, “which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). His call still goes out in the same words of welcome: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28–30). Whoever answers it as Levi did becomes “a new creature” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). Luke gathers three parables of the lost and found in Luke 15, and they tell the same story as Levi’s feast: heaven rejoices over one sinner who repents, and the Lord is glad to sit at the table with him.