Luke 5 in Art: The Catch, the Roof, the Tax Booth, and the Verses Worth Remembering

Luke 5 is about Jesus calling his first followers and the objections that follow: a night of failed fishing that ends in an enormous catch, a man with leprosy who asks only if Jesus is willing, a paralysed man lowered through a roof by his friends, a tax collector called from his booth who then throws a banquet, and a question about fasting answered with new wine and old wineskins.

Tap any part to jump to it, with the paintings and the verses.

Jesus needs somewhere to stand. The crowd is pressing in, so he gets into a fishing boat that happens to belong to Simon, asks him to push out a little, and teaches sitting down from the water.

Then he tells a professional fisherman how to fish. Simon's reply is one of the most quietly human lines in the Gospel:

“Master,” Simon replied, “we have worked hard all night without catching anything. But because You say so, I will let down the nets.”

Luke 5:5 · BSB

The nets come up so full they start to tear, and both boats begin to sink.

Witz paints the later lakeside encounter in John 21, after the Resurrection. It offers a companion image to Luke’s earlier miraculous catch.

And Simon's reaction is not gratitude. It is closer to panic:

“Go away from me, Lord,” he said, “for I am a sinful man.”

Luke 5:8 · BSB, excerpt

He has just had the best day of his working life and his instinct is to get this man out of his boat. Something has gone right in a way that has shown him something about himself, and his first move is to ask for distance.

The answer he gets does not argue with him. It just reassigns him.

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus said to Simon. “From now on you will catch men.”

Luke 5:10 · BSB, excerpt

And when they had brought their boats ashore, they left everything and followed Him.

Luke 5:11 · BSB

Note the order. The boats are hauled in and secured first. Then they walk away from them.

Next, a man with leprosy — which in this period meant not only illness but exclusion, since the law required him to keep away from other people. He does not ask whether Jesus is able. He asks something harder:

“Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.”

Luke 5:12 · BSB, excerpt

The Danish painter Niels Larsen Stevns brings the scene into flat, bright modern colour — he was part of the generation that moved Danish religious painting away from nineteenth-century gloom.

Jesus begins his answer with three words — I am willing — and reaches out: the text says he touched him. Luke does not tell us how long it had been since anyone had done that.

Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” He said. “Be clean!”

Luke 5:13 · BSB, excerpt

Is Luke's version different from Mark's?

Slightly, and in a way people have noticed for a long time. Mark 1:40 says simply "a leper came to Jesus." Luke says the man was "covered with leprosy" (5:12) — a more detailed description of his condition. Luke is traditionally identified as a doctor; Paul calls him "Luke, the beloved physician" (Colossians 4:14). The wording fits that traditional portrait, although it does not prove the Gospel writer’s profession.

Then the chapter drops in a sentence that is easy to skip and worth keeping:

Yet He frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray.

Luke 5:16 · BSB

The house is full. Pharisees and teachers of the law have come from everywhere to listen. And outside are some men carrying a paralysed friend on a mat who cannot get in. Mark’s parallel account supplies the number: four (Mark 2:3).

So they go up on the roof and take it apart.

So 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.

Luke 5:19 · BSB, excerpt

Here is the detail everyone misses. Jesus looks up at a hole in someone's ceiling and a man on a mat, and what Luke says he sees is their faith — including the friends who brought him. And what he offers is not what anyone in the room came for:

When Jesus saw their faith, He said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”

Luke 5:20 · BSB

The objection is immediate, and it is a fair one: only God can do that. Jesus' reply is a question that has never lost its edge:

“Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?”

Luke 5:23 · BSB, excerpt

The man picks up the mat he came in on and walks home.

Van Dyck paints a related healing at the pool of Bethesda (John 5), where Jesus also tells a man to take up his mat.

And Luke gives the crowd a line that sounds like something a person would actually say:

“We have seen remarkable things today.”

Luke 5:26 · BSB, excerpt

One of the earliest surviving pictures of a miracle

This one is worth the detour. It comes from Dura-Europos, a city on the Euphrates that contained one of the earliest surviving Christian worship buildings. It began as a home, but research now questions the familiar label “house church”: its conversion substantially changed the domestic space. On its baptistery wall someone painted this related healing, probably the Bethesda episode in John 5 rather than the roof scene in Luke 5.

It survived by accident. Around AD 254–256, defenders piled an earth embankment against the inside of the city’s western fortification wall, burying nearby buildings and their paintings. The city fell; the paintings were preserved. This one is now at the Yale University Art Gallery, among the earliest surviving depictions of Jesus’ miracles.

Roughly two hundred years after the Gospel events, these early Christian painters chose this: the man with the mat.

Jesus then walks past a tax booth. Tax collectors collected tolls and other dues, and the job was widely despised. Luke’s earlier account already warns them not to collect more than required (3:13). Luke gives the exchange two words and no negotiation.

“Follow Me,” He told him, and Levi got up, left everything, and followed Him.

Luke 5:27–28 · BSB, excerpt

Which man is Matthew?

Art historians have argued about this painting for a long time, and the argument is unresolved. Most take the bearded man at the table to be Matthew, pointing at himself — me? — and compare him with the bearded Matthew in the companion paintings in the chapel. Others read his finger as pointing past himself to the young man at the end of the table, head down, not yet looking up. Some think Caravaggio made it ambiguous deliberately.

It is a rare case where the thing everyone wants to know about a painting is the thing nobody can settle.

(Luke and Mark call the tax collector Levi; Matthew’s parallel account calls him Matthew. Christian tradition identifies them as the same man.)

Then Levi does something that tells you what the call felt like from the inside: he throws a large party and fills it with his colleagues.

The painting that was renamed to escape the Inquisition

Veronese painted this enormous canvas in 1573 as a Last Supper, for the refectory of a Dominican friary in Venice. The Inquisition objected: the picture was full of buffoons, dwarfs, drunken Germans and other, in their words, scurrilities, and on 18 July 1573 Veronese was summoned to explain himself.

He changed the subject by adding an inscription identifying it as The Feast in the House of Levi — a different Gospel dinner, and one in which the text itself speaks of tax collectors and sinners. The crowded banquet remained.

Which is a very good joke, because it is exactly the complaint the Pharisees make in this chapter:

“Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”

Luke 5:30 · BSB, excerpt

The answer is a doctor's line, recorded by a man tradition remembers as a doctor:

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

Luke 5:31–32 · BSB, excerpt

The last complaint of the chapter is about fasting: John's disciples fast, the Pharisees' disciples fast, and yours keep eating. Jesus answers first with a wedding — you cannot make guests fast while the bridegroom is still in the room (5:34).

Burnand’s invitation scene is a thematic companion to the wedding image here, rather than a depiction of the conversation in Luke 5.

Then he reaches for two images that have outlived their original argument entirely.

“And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will spill, and the wineskins will be ruined.”

Luke 5:37 · BSB, excerpt

And then Luke ends the chapter on a dry note that only he includes:

“And no one after drinking old wine wants new, for he says, ‘The old is better.’”

Luke 5:39 · BSB, excerpt

It is not a rebuke exactly. It is an observation about people, and it is unsettlingly accurate: having got used to something, we generally prefer it. Luke has just spent a chapter describing four people who did the opposite.

1. The reluctant yes: "But because You say so, I will let down the nets." (5:5)
2. The wrong reaction: "Go away from me, Lord" (5:8)
3. The reassignment: "From now on you will catch men." (5:10)
4. The cost: "they left everything and followed Him." (5:11)
5. The harder question: "Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean." (5:12)
6. The answer: "I am willing." (5:13)
7. The habit: "Yet He frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray." (5:16)
8. Their faith: "Friend, your sins are forgiven." (5:20)
9. The question: "Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?" (5:23)
10. The mission statement: "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance." (5:32)

Read the chapter as a list of the people Jesus picks, and it is a strange list: a fisherman who asks him to leave, a man the law required to stay away, a man who could not walk in under his own power, and a tax collector.

Not one of them arrives qualified. Simon volunteers his own unfitness. The man with leprosy is ritually excluded. The paralysed man does not even get himself into the room; his friends drop him through the roof, and Luke says it was their faith Jesus saw. Levi is doing a job his neighbours despise when he is called mid-shift.

Then the complaints begin, and they all have the same shape: you are with the wrong people. The answer given is the one line in the chapter that explains the rest of it — the healthy do not need a doctor.

• Where we are: just after Luke 4; Jesus begins gathering followers.
• Who is new: Simon (later Peter), James and John, Levi (traditionally identified with Matthew), and the Pharisees, who appear here for the first time in Luke as critics.
• The five scenes: the catch (5:1–11) · the man with leprosy (5:12–16) · the roof (5:17–26) · Levi's booth and banquet (5:27–32) · fasting, and new wine (5:33–39).
• Famous lines that start here: "From now on you will catch men," "your sins are forgiven," "it is not the healthy who need a doctor," and "new wine into old wineskins."
• Easy to miss: Jesus responds to “their faith,” including the friends who bring the paralysed man; and Luke alone adds the closing line about preferring old wine.

Visio Divina is Latin for "divine seeing" — praying with a picture instead of only a passage.

1. Look (Visio): Pick one painting above and stay with whatever your eye goes to first.
2. Meditate (Meditatio): Read the large verse beside it twice. Which word catches?
3. Pray (Oratio): Say one honest sentence. The man with leprosy managed ten words.
4. Contemplate (Contemplatio): Sit quietly for a minute. Nothing has to happen.

What is the miraculous catch of fish in Luke 5?

After a night of catching nothing, Simon lets his nets down again at Jesus' word and hauls in so many fish that the nets tear and two boats begin to sink (5:4–7). Simon's response is to fall at Jesus' knees and ask him to go away (5:8). Jesus tells him not to be afraid and says that from now on he will catch people; Simon, James and John leave everything and follow (5:10–11).

Why did the men lower the paralytic through the roof?

Because the house was too full to get in any other way. Luke says they went up on the roof and lowered the man "through the tiles" into the middle of the crowd (5:19) — Mark's account says they dug an opening. When Jesus saw their faith, he told the man his sins were forgiven, which started the argument that follows.

Who was Levi in Luke 5?

A tax collector, called by Jesus from his booth (5:27). Luke and Mark call him Levi; Matthew’s parallel account calls him Matthew. Christian tradition identifies the two. After following, he hosted a large banquet at his house for Jesus and a crowd of other tax collectors — the meal that prompts the Pharisees' complaint in 5:30.

What does "new wine into old wineskins" mean?

It is Jesus' answer to a question about why his disciples do not fast (5:33). Old wineskins have already stretched and hardened; new wine still fermenting would burst them. The image says that what he is doing will not fit inside the existing arrangements — it needs new containers, not a patch on the old ones (5:36–38).

Why does Luke 5:39 say "the old is better"?

It is the closing line of the wineskins parable and appears only in Luke. It is an observation about taste and habit: someone used to old wine will not want new. Coming at the end of a chapter about people who left everything, it reads as a wry comment on how rare that is.

Is the Calling of Saint Matthew in the Bible the same as Luke 5?

Traditionally, yes: the three parallel accounts are read as the call of the same man. Matthew 9:9 names him Matthew; Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27 call him Levi. Caravaggio’s famous painting takes its title from Matthew’s version.