NOTES for Luk 5:17-39
One of the Gospel's constant qualities is newness. In every age, regardless of the degree to which it has been "Christianized," the Gospel has always turned out to be "new wine in old wineskins," tearing apart people's settled ideas about the world and about God. People always have ideas about justice, about the rules of religious life, about what is permissible and what is not. Therefore, when Christ comes to them, for whom the only rules are God's love, He inevitably comes into conflict with those whose religious ideas have obscured God, those who do not want to believe in the forgiveness of sinners and cannot understand that the sick are closer to the physician than the healthy, or those who consider themselves healthy.
And it is important to remember that this newness of the Gospel must without fail be revealed and recognized by us as well, and not only by Jesus' contemporaries, so that the paradox of His Message can also blow open our little world, opening it toward God.