2. The Christian and the law (19, 20)
A Christian’s righteousness: Christ, the Christian and the law
(Matthew 5:17–20)
So far Jesus has spoken of a Christian’s character, and of the influence he will have in the world if he exhibits this character and if his character bears fruit in ‘good works’. He now proceeds to define further this character and these good works in terms of righteousness. He explains that the righteousness he has already mentioned twice as that for which his disciples hunger (6) and on account of which they suffer (10) is a conformity to God’s moral law and yet surpasses the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees (20). The ‘good works’ are works of obedience. He began his Sermon with beatitudes in the third person (‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’); he continued in the second person (‘You are the salt of the earth’); and now he changes to the authoritative first person and uses for the first time his distinctive and dogmatic formula I say to you (18) or I tell you (20).
This paragraph is of great importance not only for its definition of Christian righteousness but also for the light it throws on the relation between the New Testament and the Old Testament, between the gospel and the law. It divides itself into two parts, first Christ and the law (17, 18) and secondly the Christian and the law (19, 20).
1. Christ and the law (17, 18)
He begins by telling them not for one moment to imagine that he had come to abolish the law and the prophets, i.e. the whole Old Testament or any part of it. The way in which Jesus phrases this negative statement suggests that some had indeed been thinking the very thought which he now contradicts. Although his public ministry had so recently begun, already his contemporaries were deeply disturbed by his supposed attitude to the Old Testament. Perhaps the sabbath controversy had flared up thus early, for Mark puts both the sabbath plucking of corn and the sabbath healing of a man’s withered hand before even the appointment of the twelve. Certainly from the very beginning of his ministry, people had been struck by his authority. ‘What is this?’ they asked. ‘A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him’ (Mk. 1:27). It was natural therefore that many were asking what the relation was between his authority and the authority of the law of Moses. It was clear to them that the scribes were submissive to it, for they were ‘teachers of the law’. They devoted themselves to its interpretation and claimed for themselves no authority apart from the authorities they quoted. But it was not so clear with Jesus. Jesus spoke with his own authority. He loved to use a formula no ancient prophet or modern scribe had ever used. He would introduce some of his most impressive utterances with ‘Truly I say to you’, speaking in his own name and with his own authority. What was this authority of his? Was he setting himself up as an authority over against the sacred law, the word of God? So it seemed to some. Hence their question, spoken or unspoken, which Jesus now answered unequivocally: Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets.
People are still asking today, though in different ways, about the relation between Jesus and Moses, the New Testament and the Old. Since Jesus grasped the nettle and declared himself plainly on the issue, we should not be shy of following suit. He had come (notice in passing his awareness that he had come into the world on a mission) neither to abolish the law and the prophets, setting them aside or abrogating them, nor even just to endorse them in a dead and literalistic way, but to fulfil them.
The verb translated ‘to fulfil’ (plērōsai) means literally ‘to fill’ and indicates, as Chrysostom expressed it, that ‘his (sc. Christ’s) sayings were no repeal of the former, but a drawing out and filling up of them’. In order to grasp the far-reaching implications of this, we need to recall that ‘the law and the prophets’, namely the Old Testament, contain various kinds of teaching. The relation of Jesus Christ to these differs, but the word ‘fulfilment’ covers them all.
First, the Old Testament contains doctrinal teaching. ‘Torah’, usually translated ‘law’, really means ‘revealed instruction’; and the Old Testament does indeed instruct us about God and man and salvation, etc. All the great biblical doctrines are there. Yet it was only a partial revelation. Jesus ‘fulfilled’ it all in the sense of bringing it to completion by his person, his teaching and his work. Bishop Ryle summed it up like this: ‘The Old Testament is the Gospel in the bud, the New Testament is the Gospel in full flower. The Old Testament is the Gospel in the blade; the New Testament is the Gospel in full ear.’
Second, the Old Testament contains predictive prophecy. Much of it looks forward to the days of the Messiah, and either foretells him in word or foreshadows him in type. Yet this was only anticipation. Jesus ‘fulfilled’ it all in the sense that what was predicted came to pass in him. The first statement of his public ministry was, ‘Fulfilled is the time …’ (Mk. 1:14). His very words here, I have come, imply the same truth. Again and again he claimed that the Scriptures bore witness to him, and Matthew emphasizes this more than any other evangelist by his repeated formula, ‘All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet …’ The climax was his death on the cross in which the whole ceremonial system of the Old Testament, both priesthood and sacrifice, found its perfect fulfilment. Then the ceremonies ceased. Yet, as Calvin rightly comments, ‘It was only the use of them that was abolished, for their meaning was more fully confirmed.’ They were but a ‘shadow’ of what was to come; the ‘substance’ belonged to Christ.
Third, the Old Testament contains ethical precepts, or the moral law of God. Yet they were often misunderstood and even more often disobeyed. Jesus ‘fulfilled’ them in the first instance by obeying them, for he was ‘born under law’ and was determined (as he had already told John the Baptist) ‘to fulfil all righteousness’. ‘He has in fact nothing to add to the commandments of God,’ wrote Bonhoeffer, ‘except this, that he keeps them.’ He does more than obey them himself; he explains what obedience will involve for his disciples. He rejects the superficial interpretation of the law given by the scribes; he himself supplies the true interpretation. His purpose is not to change the law, still less to annul it, but ‘to reveal the full depth of meaning that it was intended to hold’. So then he ‘fulfils it by declaring the radical demands of the righteousness of God’. This is what he stresses in the rest of Matthew 5 by giving examples, as we shall see.
In every generation of the Christian era there have been those who could not accommodate themselves to Christ’s attitude to the law. The famous second-century heretic Marcion, who rewrote the New Testament by eliminating its references to the Old, naturally erased this passage. Some of his followers went further. They dared even to reverse its meaning by exchanging the verbs so that the sentence then read: ‘I have come not to fulfil the law and the prophets, but to abolish them’! Their counterparts today seem to be those who have embraced the so-called ‘new morality’, for they declare that the very category of law is abolished for the Christian (though Christ said he had not come to abolish it), that no law any longer binds Christian people except the law of love, and in fact that the command to love is the only absolute there is. I shall have more to say about them later. For the moment it is enough to emphasize that according to this verse (17) the attitude of Jesus to the Old Testament was not one of destruction and of discontinuity, but rather of a constructive, organic continuity. He summed up his position in a single word, not ‘abolition’ but ‘fulfilment’.
The apostle Paul taught very clearly the same truth. His statement that ‘Christ is the end of the law’ does not mean that we are now free to disobey it, for the opposite is the case. It means rather that acceptance with God is not through obedience to the law but through faith in Christ, and indeed that the law itself bears witness to this good news.
Having stated that his purpose in coming was to fulfil the law, Jesus went on to give the cause and the consequence of this. The cause is the permanence of the law until it is fulfilled (18), and the consequence is the obedience to the law which the citizens of God’s kingdom must give (19, 20).
This is what Jesus has to say about the law he has come to fulfil: Truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota (which is Greek for yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, almost as small as a comma), not a dot (keraia, a horn, referring probably to one of the tiny hooks or projections which distinguish some Hebrew letters from others), will pass from the law until all is accomplished. His reference now was only to ‘the law’ rather than to ‘the law and the prophets’ as in the previous verse, but we have no reason to suppose that he was deliberately omitting the prophets; ‘the law’ was a comprehensive term for the total divine revelation of the Old Testament. None of it will pass away or be discarded, he says, not a single letter or part of a letter, until it has all been fulfilled. And this fulfilment will not be complete until the heaven and the earth themselves pass away. For one day they will pass away in a mighty rebirth of the universe. Then time as we know it will cease, and the written words of God’s law will be needed no longer, for all things in them will have been fulfilled. Thus the law is as enduring as the universe. The final fulfilment of the one and the new birth of the other will coincide. Both will ‘pass away’ together (parelthē is repeated). Jesus could not have stated more clearly than this his own view of Old Testament Scripture.
2. The Christian and the law (19, 20)
The word ‘therefore’ introduces the deduction which Jesus now draws for his disciples from the enduring validity of the law and his own attitude with respect to it. It reveals a vital connection between the law of God and the kingdom of God. Because he has come not to abolish but to fulfil, and because not an iota or dot will pass from the law until all has been fulfilled, therefore greatness in the kingdom of God will be measured by conformity to it. Nor is personal obedience enough; Christian disciples must also teach to others the permanently binding nature of the law’s commandments. True, not all the commandments are equally ‘weighty’. Yet even one of the least of these commandments, precisely because it is a commandment of God the King, is important. To relax it— i.e. to loosen its hold on our conscience and its authority in our life—is an offence to God whose law it is. To disregard a ‘least’ commandment in the law (in either obedience or instruction) is to demote oneself into a ‘least’ subject in the kingdom; greatness in the kingdom belongs to those who are faithful in doing and teaching the whole moral law. ‘The peerage of Christ’s kingdom’, wrote Spurgeon, ‘is ordered according to obedience.’
Jesus now goes further still. Not only is greatness in the kingdom assessed by a righteousness which conforms to the law, but entry into the kingdom is impossible without a conformity better (much better: the Greek expression is very emphatic) than that of the scribes and Pharisees, for God’s kingdom is a kingdom of righteousness. But surely, someone will protest, the scribes and Pharisees were famous for their righteousness? Was not obedience to God’s law the master-passion of their lives? Did they not calculate that the law contains 248 commandments and 365 prohibitions, and did they not aspire to keeping them all? How then can Christian righteousness actually exceed pharisaic righteousness, and how can this superior Christian righteousness be made a condition of entering God’s kingdom? Does this not teach a doctrine of salvation by good works and so contradict the first beatitude which says the kingdom belongs to ‘the poor in spirit’ who have nothing, not even righteousness, to plead?
Our Lord’s statement must certainly have astonished his first hearers as it astonishes us today. But the answer to these questions is not far to seek. Christian righteousness far surpasses pharisaic righteousness in kind rather than in degree. It is not so much, shall we say, that Christians succeed in keeping some 240 commandments when the best Pharisees may only have scored 230. No. Christian righteousness is greater than pharisaic righteousness because it is deeper, being a righteousness of the heart. There has been much talk since Freud of ‘depth-psychology’; the concern of Jesus was for a ‘depth-morality’. Pharisees were content with an external and formal obedience, a rigid conformity to the letter of the law; Jesus teaches us that God’s demands are far more radical than this. The righteousness which is pleasing to him is an inward righteousness of mind and motive. For ‘The Lord looks on the heart’.
It was a new heart-righteousness which the prophets foresaw as one of the blessings of the Messianic age. ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts,’ God promised through Jeremiah (31:33). How would he do it? He told Ezekiel: ‘I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes’ (36:27). Thus God’s two promises to put his law within us and to put his Spirit within us coincide. We must not imagine (as some do today) that when we have the Spirit we can dispense with the law, for what the Spirit does in our hearts is, precisely, to write God’s law there. So ‘Spirit’, ‘law’, ‘righteousness’ and ‘heart’ all belong together. The Pharisees thought an external conformity to the law would be righteousness enough. The ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ who figures in the Dead Sea scrolls was stricter, for he ‘defined the demands of the Law more exhaustively and more stringently than did even the Pharisees, and urged upon the Sect (sc. the Essenes of Qumran) radical obedience to them all’. Yet Jesus was more radical still, for if the Essenes asked for ‘more and more obedience’, he asked for ‘deeper and deeper obedience’. Now it is this deep obedience which is a righteousness of the heart and is possible only in those whom the Holy Spirit has regenerated and now indwells. This is why entry into God’s kingdom is impossible without a righteousness greater (i.e., deeper) than that of the Pharisees. It is because such a righteousness is evidence of the new birth, and no-one enters the kingdom without being born again.
The rest of Matthew 5 contains examples of this greater, or rather deeper, righteousness. It consists of six parallel paragraphs which illustrate the principle Jesus has just propounded in verses 17 to 20 of the perpetuity of the moral law, of his coming to fulfil it and of his disciples’ responsibility to obey it more completely than the scribes and Pharisees were doing. Each paragraph contains a contrast or ‘antithesis’ introduced by the same formula (with minor variations): You have heard that it was said to the men of old … But I say to you … (21, 22).
What is this antithesis? It is clear who the authoritative egō is. But with whom is Jesus contrasting himself? It is essential to consider this question now before, in the next three chapters, we look in greater detail at the six antitheses themselves. Many commentators have maintained that in these paragraphs Jesus is setting himself against Moses; that he is here deliberately inaugurating a new morality, and is contradicting and repudiating the old; and that his introductory formula could be paraphrased ‘you know what the Old Testament taught … But I teach something quite different.’ Popular as this interpretation is, I do not hesitate to say that it is mistaken. It is more than mistaken; it is untenable. What Jesus is contradicting is not the law itself, but certain perversions of the law of which the scribes and Pharisees were guilty. Far from contradicting the law, Jesus endorses it, insists on its authority and supplies its true interpretation. Four arguments will be sufficient to prove that this is so.
First, there is the substance of the antitheses themselves. At first sight in each instance what Jesus quotes appears to come from the Mosaic law. All six examples either consist of or include some echo of it, e.g., You shall not kill (21), You shall not commit adultery (27), Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce (31). Not until we come to the sixth and last antithesis do we see clearly that something is amiss. For this reads: You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy (43). Now the first half of this sentence is a clear command of the law (Lv. 19:18), although even this is a truncated commandment, omitting the vital words which set the standard of our neighbour-love, namely ‘as yourself’. The second half of the sentence, however, is not in the law at all. It comes neither in Leviticus 19:18, nor anywhere else. So here was a contemporary addition to the law, which was intended to interpret it, but in fact distorted it. When we look more closely at the other five antitheses (as we shall in the following chapters), it becomes plain that a similar distortion is implied. It is these distortions of the law which Jesus rejected, not the law itself. After all, the first two antitheses do not read ‘It was said “you shall not commit murder and adultery”, but I say you may’. Rather, ‘but I say you shall not even have angry or lustful thoughts’.
Secondly, there is the introductory formula, beginning you have heard that it was said to the men of old (21, 33), or you have heard that it was said (27, 38, 43), or more briefly still, it was also said (31). The words common to these formulae are it was said, which represent the single Greek verb errethē. Now this was not the word which Jesus used when quoting Scripture. When he introduced a biblical quotation, both verb and tense were different, namely gegraptai (perfect, ‘it stands written’), not errethē (aorist, ‘it was said’). So in the six antitheses what Jesus was contradicting was not Scripture but tradition, not God’s word which they had ‘read’ but the oral instruction which was given ‘to the men of old’ and which they too had ‘heard’ since the scribes continued to give it in the synagogues.
Professor David Daube confirms this from his comprehensive knowledge of rabbinics. The verb ‘hear’ is associated, he says, with ‘the superficial, literal meaning of Scripture’. So in the two parts of the introductory formula, ‘the first gives a scriptural rule narrowly interpreted, the second a wider demand made by Jesus’. Again, ‘These declarations “Ye have heard—But I say unto you” are intended to prove Jesus the Law’s upholder, not destroyer … it is the revelation of a fuller meaning for a new age. The second member unfolds rather than sweeps away the first.’ One might sum it up by saying that in relation to scribal distortions of the law, the term ‘antithesis’ rightly describes the teaching of Jesus, whereas in relation to the law itself ‘exegesis’ would be a more accurate word. His quarrel was not over the law, for both the Jewish leaders and he accepted its divine authority, but over its true interpretation.
Thirdly, there is the immediate context. We have already seen that in the verses preceding and introducing the antitheses (17–20) Jesus affirmed in a quite unequivocal way what his own attitude to the law was and what his disciples’ ought to be. This was ‘fulfilment’ in his case and ‘obedience’ in theirs. Not a dot or iota would pass away; all must be fulfilled. Not one of the least commandments might be disregarded; all must be obeyed. Are we now seriously to suppose that Jesus contradicted himself, that he proceeded at once in his teaching to do what he had just categorically said he had not come to do and they must not do? For this is the dilemma: if in the antitheses Jesus was contradicting Moses, he was thereby contradicting himself. ‘Commentators have exhausted their ingenuity’, writes W. C. Allen, ‘in attempts to explain away this passage.’ He goes on to exercise his own ingenuity by supposing that verses 18 and 19 ‘did not originally belong to the Sermon, but have been placed here by the editor’. His reason is that in his view ‘the attitude to the law here described is inconsistent with the general tenor of the Sermon’. But this is an entirely subjective judgment, and moreover it does not solve the dilemma. All it succeeds in doing is to remove the supposed discrepancy from the teaching of Jesus and attribute it instead either to the first evangelist or through him to some early Christian community. The better way is to accept the statements of verses 17 to 20 as genuine and to demonstrate that they are consistent not only with the Sermon as a whole but with the rest of Jesus’ recorded teaching. This brings us to the last argument.
Fourthly, there is Christ’s known attitude to the Old Testament. In the previous chapter Matthew has given an account of his temptations during forty gruelling days in the Judean desert. Each subtle enticement of the devil was countered by an appropriate quotation from Old Testament Scripture. Jesus had no need to debate or argue with the devil. Each issue was settled from the start by a simple appeal to what stood written (gegraptai). And this reverent submission of the incarnate Word to the written word continued throughout his life, not only in his personal behaviour but also in his mission. He was resolved to fulfil what was written of him, and could not be deflected from the path which Scripture had laid down for him. So his declaration in Matthew 5:17 that he had come not to abolish but to fulfil the law and the prophets is wholly consistent with his attitude to Scripture elsewhere.
From these four factors it is evident that the antitheses do not set in opposition to each other Christ and Moses, the New Testament and the Old Testament, the gospel and the law, but rather Christ’s true interpretation of the law and the scribal misinterpretations, and therefore Christian righteousness and pharisaic righteousness, as verse 19 anticipates.
What, then, were the scribes and Pharisees doing? What were the ‘tortuous methods’, as Calvin called them, by which they debased the law? In general, they were trying to reduce the challenge of the law, to ‘relax’ (19) the commandments of God, and so make his moral demands more manageable and less exacting. They found Torah both a yoke and a burden (indeed they called it such), and wanted to make the yoke easier and the burden lighter. How they did it varied according to the form each law took, and in particular whether it was a commandment (either precept or prohibition) or a permission. Four of the six antitheses fall into the category of ‘commandment’, the first three of which are negative (forbidding murder, adultery and false swearing) and the last of which is positive (enjoining love for neighbour). These four are clear commands of God either to do or not to do something. The remaining two (the fourth and fifth antitheses) are best described as ‘permissions’. They do not belong to the same category of moral command as the other four. Both lack the prescriptive words ‘You shall’ or ‘You shall not’. The fourth antithesis concerns divorce, which was never commanded but was permitted in certain circumstances and on certain conditions. The fifth concerns retribution (‘an eye for an eye …’) which was permitted in the law courts and which restricted to an exact equivalent the penalties which Israelite judges might impose. Thus both these permissions were circumscribed by definite limits.
What the scribes and Pharisees were doing, in order to make obedience more readily attainable, was to restrict the commandments and extend the permissions of the law. They made the law’s demands less demanding and the law’s permissions more permissive. What Jesus did was to reverse both tendencies. He insisted instead that the full implications of God’s commandments must be accepted without imposing any artificial limits, whereas the limits which God had set to his permissions must also be accepted and not arbitrarily increased. It may be helpful to see the application of these principles to the antitheses in summary before considering them in detail.
The scribes and Pharisees were evidently restricting the biblical prohibitions of murder and adultery to the act alone; Jesus extended them to include angry thoughts, insulting words and lustful looks. They restricted the command about swearing to certain oaths only (those involving the divine name) and the command about neighbour-love to certain people only (those of the same race and religion); Jesus said all promises must be kept and all people must be loved, without limitations.
But the scribes and Pharisees were not content merely to restrict the commands of the law to suit their convenience; they sought to serve their convenience still further by extending its permissions. Thus, they attempted to widen the permission of divorce beyond the single ground of ‘some indecency’ to include a husband’s every whim, and to widen the permission of retribution beyond the law courts to include personal revenge. Jesus, however, reaffirmed the original restrictions. He called divorce on other grounds ‘adultery’ and insisted in personal relationships on the renunciation of all revenge.
This preliminary look at the antitheses has shown us that Jesus did not contradict the law of Moses. On the contrary, this is in effect what the Pharisees were doing. What Jesus did was rather to explain the true meaning of the moral law with all its uncomfortable implications. He extended the commands which they were restricting and restricted the permissions which they were extending. To him Moses’ law was God’s law, whose validity was permanent and whose authority must be accepted. In the Sermon on the Mount, as Calvin correctly expressed it, we see Jesus not ‘as a new legislator, but as the faithful expounder of a law which had been already given’. The Pharisees had ‘obscured’ the law; Jesus ‘restored it to its integrity’.
And in this matter Christian disciples must follow Christ, not the Pharisees. We have no liberty to try to lower the law’s standards and make it easier to obey. That is the casuistry of Pharisees, not Christians. Christian righteousness must exceed pharisaic righteousness.
Yet the advocates of the ‘new morality’ or ‘situational ethic’ are in principle trying to do exactly what the Pharisees were doing. True, they claim to take Christ’s part against the Pharisees, but they resemble the Pharisees in their dislike of the law. They regard the law as rigid and authoritarian, and (just like the Pharisees) they attempt to ‘relax’ its authority, to loosen its hold. So they declare the category of law abolished (which Jesus said he had not come to abolish) and they set law and love at variance with each other (in a way in which Jesus never did). No. Jesus disagreed with the Pharisees’ interpretation of the law; he never disagreed with their acceptance of its authority. Rather the reverse. In the strongest possible terms he asserted its authority as God’s Word written, and called his disciples to accept its true and deeply exacting interpretation.