Tuesday
Tuesday
Christ and the Law
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Matthew 5:17
People were very struck by Jesus’s authority. “What is this?” they asked. “A new teaching!” In particular, they asked what the relation was between his authority and the authority of Moses’s law.
To this question, spoken or unspoken, Jesus now gave a definitive answer. He had come not to abolish the Old Testament but to fulfill it, that is, to bring it to completion, to obey it, and to supply its true meaning. For it has a permanent validity. In consequence, greatness in the kingdom of God would be measured by obedience to the law. Jesus continued, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven” (v. 20). On hearing this, the disciples must have been dumbfounded. For the scribes and Pharisees were the most righteous people on earth. As we have seen, they had calculated that the Old Testament contained 248 commandments and 365 permissions, and they claimed that they had kept them all. How could the disciples of Jesus be more righteous than the most righteous people on earth? The riddle is not hard to solve. Christian righteousness is greater than Pharisaic righteousness because it is deeper: it is a righteousness of the heart.
The rest of Matthew 5 consists of six parallel paragraphs, each of which contains a so-called antithesis introduced by the formula, “You have heard that it was said…. But I tell you.” With whom is Jesus contrasting himself? Many commentators have maintained that Jesus is setting himself against Moses. But this is definitely not so, for at least two reasons. Firstly, the formula Jesus used when quoting Scripture was, “It is written”; the formula, “It was said” introduced an oral tradition, not the written Scripture. Secondly, Jesus has just affirmed in unequivocal terms the lasting authority of Scripture (vv. 17–18); it is inconceivable that immediately afterward he should have contradicted Scripture and so have contradicted himself. No. He endorsed Scripture, insisted on its authority, and gave it its true meaning, as we will see tomorrow.
For further reading: Matthew 5:17–20