Son of God: The Physician to Sinners
An audio reading based on Luke 5:27-32
SNU – Sketching from the Neck Up / Art works made by quadriplegic artist, Johann Q.
Jesus was in Capernaum. And a day or so before he led his disciples on a circuit tour of the nearby villages (so he could preach there also), he went to the town square. Approaching a tax collector’s booth, he called out to the publican inside, “Levi, follow me.”
Levi got up, left everything and followed him. From then on, he was called Matthew.
That evening, Matthew held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of other tax collectors and his associates were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
They said to him, “the disciples of John the Baptist often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking.”
Jesus answered, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast.”
Then Jesus gave them this illustration: “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and uses it to patch an old garment. For then the new garment would be ruined, and the new patch would not even match the old garment.
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the new wine would burst the wineskins, spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine must be stored in new wineskins. But no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the new wine. ‘The old is just fine,’ they say.”
One day later, Jesus was preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven and healing the sick and the crippled at a nearby village. After which, he would leave and go to another village and do the same thing over and over.
