MATTHEW 5:17-48
TAKE A PENCIL AND A BLANK NOTEBOOK. Find a place to sit. Then for the next half hour just look around and write down everything you see. That was the command given years ago to a group that included me. Our teacher wanted us to learn how to read the Bible better by first simply learning how to sit and see.
That short exercise in observation changed my life. As I observed the beautiful detail and design of the old limestone hall, the play and pursuits of wild squirrels (as well as the play and pursuits of college couples), and leaves softly falling to the ground while quietly bending the blades of grass on which they landed, I came to see how little I usually see and how much there is to be seen. Since that day, when it comes to talk preparation I embrace what the Germans call sitzfleisch (“sitting flesh”)—the ability to sit on my flesh for long periods of time in order to see what is so obvious, yet so often missed.
So as I sit with my pencil in hand and paper on lap and with my Bible opened to this text, one of the first things I see is the phrase Jesus used repeatedly, “I say to you.” (“I [emphatic by initial position] say to you [plural].”)
It first occurs in verse 18, “For truly, I say to you.” Then it’s in verse 20. The Esv translates it, “For I tell you,” but in Greek it is the same as verse 18, “I say to you.” We also find it in verses 22, 26, 28, 32, 34, 39 and 44. Nine times!
This is not only the most repeated phrase of our text, but it is also the key phrase because it embodies perfectly and succinctly its two main themes. The “I say” speaks of Jesus’ authority and the “to you” of our ethics. Jesus’ authority and our ethics will be what we look at now as we explore what all these “I say to you” statements say to us.
I Say
First, we have Jesus’ authority. Look at verses 17-19:
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. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
What is Jesus saying here? First notice the first three words—“do not think.” This tells us that there must have been people, perhaps “the scribes and Pharisees” mentioned in verse 20, who thought and perhaps taught that Jesus— this new, self-appointed rabbi—doesn’t uphold the Law and the Prophets.
Here Jesus sets the record straight. He pledges his “full and unswerving loyalty to the law” (cp. Romans 3:31 ). He is pro-Old Testament. In fact, to Jesus the smallest letter (i.e., the Hebrew letter yod) and the least stroke of a pen (i.e., a horn—the ornamental marks customarily added to certain Hebrew letters) matter to Jesus. None of what Jesus is saying and doing is abolishing any word, letter, or mark that has been written. He is not relaxing or teaching anyone to relax any of God’s commands. Rather, he is living out and teaching others to live out those very rules. And while he has been or will be dining with sinners, talking with women, healing on the Sabbath, and even overturning the greedy and racist money changers’ tables in the temple, none of those things are aberrations of God’s Word, as the scribes and Pharisees think. Instead those actions accord with the Law’s highest principles.
So here in verses 17-19 Jesus teaches: “I am not against the Bible. I am absolutely for it!” But that’s not all he says. He also adds, “And the Bible is for me.” Look again at verse 17. Here we should all fall to the ground like the soldiers who arrested Jesus did. Our Lord said, “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.”
It would have been bold if Jesus said, “I have come to adhere perfectly, as no man has ever done, to the Law,” or if he said, “I have come to give the best and final authoritative teaching on the Law." Both of those would have been enough for the religious crowd first to scratch their heads and then to rend their garments. But to say what Jesus actually said will get one crucified.
Now we should acknowledge and appreciate that Matthew has done his best to prepare us for 5:17. The language in chapters 1—4 is full of fulfillment. Various things were done “to fulfil” what was written in the Law or the Prophets yet as he did, there is really nothing that can dull the pointed edge of this pronouncement.
Who does Jesus think he is? It is one thing to claim, as he does in verse 18, that the Law will pass away once “all is accomplished,” but it's quite another thing to say, as he does here in verse 17, “I have... come... to fulfill them” Jesus is saying, “All the promises of God—like my passion and death, the engrafting of the Gentiles, etc.—find their yes,” to borrow from Paul’s language, “in me” (cp. 2 Corinthians 1:20). What a stupendous claim! For Jesus to claim to be the inerrant expositor of the Word who has come to tell everyone what the Law really teaches is one highly controversial claim. But to also claim to be the absolute embodiment of God’s greatest promises is more than a bit blasphemous if it’s not true.
One of the most fascinating and ironically faith-building books I have ever read was Jacob Neusner’s A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. Neusner is a Jewish Rabbi, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on Judaism in the first century of the Christian era, and a prolific writer. Prolific is an understatement, as he hits authored or edited more than 950 books. Now that’s sitzfleisch!
In A Rabbi Talks with Jesus Neusner pretends to have an intermillennial, inlet faith exchange with Jesus. He writes of his honest and open debate with Jesus over some of our Lord’s claims and teachings. The book begins,
Imagine walking on a dusty road in Galilee some summer, meeting up with a small band of youngsters, led by a young man. The man’s presence catches your attention: he talks, the others listen, respond, argue, obey— care what he says, follow him. You don’t know who the man is, but you do know he makes a difference to the people with him and to nearly everybody he meets. People respond, some with anger, some with admiration, a few with genuine faith. But no one walks away uninterested in the man and the things he says and does.
The dialogue between Neusner and Jesus starts after Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount. After hearing what Jesus taught, Neusner notes how he would have responded just as the original crowd did, with astonishment. “Here is a Torah-teacher,” the rabbi says, “who says in his own name what the Torah says in God’s name.” He notes how the prophets and sages, how Moses, for example, never said, “I say to you,” but rather “the Lord says to you.” “At Sinai, God spoke through Moses. On this Galilean hill, Jesus speaks for himself.” The rabbi is taken aback by this teacher who stands seemingly above the Torah. And it is here, at their first encounter, that Neusner admits that it is not Jesus’ teachings so much as the figure of Jesus “that is at issue.” He says, “I am troubled not so much by the message, though I might take exception to this or that, as I am by the messenger.”
When you clear away all the cliches and platitudes that have developed like ten-inch plaque on the teeth of Jesus’ teachings, and when you listen as this rabbi did, with fresh and unclogged ears, there is really only one of two conclusions to make. If Jesus claims to be the Lord of the Law—to transcend the Torah without violating even the tiniest word and the smallest ethic, to be the final, authoritative, and infallible interpreter of God’s Word, and to personify its promises—he is either right or wrong. We cannot remain neutral before him.
If we think he is wrong, then we openly reject him, as Neusner does with refreshing honesty. “I would follow the Pharisees,” he writes in one of his final chapters, “and I do that even now.” But if we think Jesus is right about himself, then we come not to some ingenious Torah teacher but to God’s Son himself, and there is no difference between the voice of God on Mount Sinai and the words of this Man on this Mount. There is no difference between “Thus says the Lord” and “I say to you.”
To You
I say. This first point is foundational. If Jesus is not the Son of God, why listen to what he has to say to us in verse 20ff.? Why listen to his kingdom ethics about anger, adultery, or anything else? Who is he to tell me how to live or not live my life? Why in the world would I listen to what he has to say about the world and my relation to others in it? Wouldn’t it be better if I just did what most people do today—look within my black heart and let it color my convictions, or perhaps just reach out into that “free-floating morality” that hangs with airy intangibility above us, grabbing what I think is good and bad, taking advice from this guru and that bartender?
You can look within, you can look without, or you can look to Jesus. If he is indeed God’s beloved Son, then we should do as the Father instructed the disciples to do on the Mount of Transfiguration—we should “listen to him” (17:5). We should listen to what he says to be right and wrong, holy and unholy, righteous and unrighteous.
Therefore, turn with me toward him as we turn now to his words recorded in verses 20-48. We’ll look at this passage again in the next chapter, where I’ll do another whole sermon on those “to you" verses. For now, however, I want us simply to see the forest before we climb the trees. To do this, we’ll focus just on the first and final verses—verses 20 and 48.
In verse 20 Jesus gives His “thesis statement” for all that follows in the Sermon on the Mount “For I say to you [literal translation], unless your righteous exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Then in verse 48 he ends this section by saying, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
I know these verses are a bit tricky, but not as tricky as you might think. The basic message of verses 20-48 is: don’t act like the scribes and Pharisees, but instead act like God.
Perfect Love
I’ll explain the last part first. When Jesus says, “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (v. 48), what is the perfection about which Jesus is talking? Is it some kind of absolute moral perfection, as the medieval monks were fond of teaching? They thought the Sermon on the Mount was only for the super-spiritual and that only a few (namely themselves) ever climbed these stairs to perfection. However, this is the absolute opposite of what Jesus is talking about. If that notion is in your head (monastic spirituality has become quite popular today), put it under your foot like a cigarette butt and crush it into the ground. For in context the meaning of the word “perfect” is perfectly clear. In verses 43-17 Jesus teaches how God the Father shows indiscriminate love by making the sun rise and the rain fall on both the good and the bad. He doesn’t hide the sun from immoral people. He doesn’t fail to water the fields of the wicked. In the same way, Jesus says, we are to love all people—our brothers (those who love us) and even our enemies (those who don’t love us). That is perfect love.
Think of it like a triangle. We are to love God. This is the greatest commandment and the tip of the triangle. But we are also to love our neighbors, the nice ones. They are, let’s say, the right point of the triangle. But if we stop there, it is imperfect love. We must also love those at the left point of the triangle, who we’d naturally like to leave for the lions.
Everybody, the worst of people, love their own. You won’t find an Italian mobster who doesn’t love the family or a brutal inner-city gangbanger who won’t take a bullet for his grandmother. But what kind of love is that? It is lopsided love. It’s a one-pointed triangle! We are to love with perfect, complete, or whole love, as the Father daily demonstrates, and as the Father most fully demonstrated in the cross of Christ. “...while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10). That’s perfect love. That’s the love we are to emulate. It’s the love of God the Father for us in Christ.
If you are born of God, you are to act like God in his perfect love—loving even the unlovely. Of course, love is not what gets you into the kingdom, but love is what you will show if you are already part of it. John’s epistles make this clear. For example, in 2 John 5 the apostle says that we are to “love one another,” and then he continues in verse 6, saying, “And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments.” That is precisely what Jesus teaches here in verses 20-48. We are to love others. How? We love by obeying Christ’s commandments, which relate to ethics and affect others—for example, the commands that prohibit murder, adultery, divorce, perjury, and retaliation.
Have you ever wondered why Jesus selected these Old Testament commands out of the hundreds he could have selected on which to comment? It is because of what binds them all together—love toward others! These are all relational commands. If you murder someone, it is obviously unloving, but so too is having a sexual relationship outside of marriage, getting a quick and easy divorce, making false oaths, or wronging someone every time he or she wrongs you. Kingdom righteousness puts on love, which “covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).
The love of others—that is the Law and the Prophets (7:12), and that is kingdom righteousness.
Unrighteous “Righteousness”
In verse 48 Jesus teaches that we are to have God-emulating, perfect love. We are to act like God. In verse 20. the other crucial verse, Jesus gives the counter-example. We are not to act like the scribes and Pharisees with their unrighteous “righteousness,”
As I said earlier, Jesus’ audience would have been astonished by his claim in verse 17. While the astonishment may have subsided slightly during verses 18, 19, verse 20 would have brought it right back again: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The closest equivalent today would be for the average Roman Catholic to hear the divine pronouncement, “Unless you are holier than His Holiness [a common title for the Pope], you’re not getting into Heaven!” For you see, the scribes and the Pharisees were the super-spiritual in Jesus’ day. They were the ethically elite. The scribes were the Bible experts. They devoted their whole lives to reading, studying, and teaching the Bible, And the Pharisees, a word meaning “separatists,” were known for being separate from the common Jew. They not only knew God’s Law and sought to obey it, but they went overboard in obedience to it. For
example the Law decreed to fast once a year, they lasted twice a week, or if the Law commanded resting on the Sabbath, they excluded every kind of work on Saturday.
Thus the average Jew in Jesus’ day couldn’t imagine being more “righteous" than these two characters. However, what Jesus is teaching here is not that one needs to be more spiritually stringent or that one needs to improve their Bible IQ. Instead what Jesus says is that one’s righteousness needs to be, in fact, quite the opposite of these pretentious pretenders.
What Jesus will do in verses 21-48, the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and throughout much of the Gospel of Matthew, especially with the woes in chapter 23, is call their bluff. He will expose their unethical ethics. He will display their disloyalty to the Law. He will lovingly hate their hypocrisy. He will denounce their “righteousness” as unrighteous.
First, what is unrighteous about their righteousness is their adherence to the letter rather than the spirit of the Law. The letter of the Law is “don’t lake a knife and stab somebody to death.” The spirit of the Law is “don’t even lose your cool and then curse someone out.” The letter of the Law is “don’t sleep with someone who is not your spouse.” The spirit of the Law is “keep from lusting.” They loved the letter of the Law (which is so much easier to keep) but not the spirit. But obedience to the letter and the spirit of the Law is true fulfillment of it, and that Law, as Paul and James will put it, and as Jesus puts it here, is the law of loving others (see Romans 13:8-10; Galatians 5: 14; James 2:8).
Second, what was unrighteous about their righteousness was that they neglected the weightier matters of the law” and focused on the nitpicky (23:23b). For example, they would teach (and I’ll modernize their thought), “If you’re going to make a proper oath, make sure you have a black leather King James Bible to put your hand on; otherwise the oath doesn’t count.” To this Jesus says, “If you’re going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, there is no need to place your hand on any Bible; just say whatever you’re going to say.”
I don’t think it mattered if former (now convicted to fourteen years in jail) Governor Rod Blagojevich “swears to God” or not in his official testimony. It shouldn’t matter if you are talking to a late-night talk show host or a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Your yes should be yes and your no no.
The Pharisees loved the nitpicky, but they neglected what was the obvious loving thing to do. The Law allows you to divorce your wife for certain reasons, but why not forgive her and have compassion on her instead? The Law says there is proper retribution, but why not let mercy forgive that debt, why not turn the other cheek or go the extra mile?
In their neglect of the spirit of the Law and the weightier matters of the Law, the scribes and Pharisees’ “righteousness” was unrighteous.
My brothers and sisters, we are to act like God, showing perfect love (even to those who have wronged us) and not be like the scribes and Pharisees with their unrighteous “righteousness” (taking this law of love and squeezing “the love of others” out of it).
Jesus before the High Priest
In the famous seventeenth-century painting Christ before the High Priest, our Lord is depicted standing on trial with his hands bound before the high priest, Caiaphas. A Bible is opened before Caiaphas. He looks up at Jesus angrily and accusingly, leaning on the Bible and pointing his finger at him. There is a candle on the table, yet interestingly (if I’ve understood the shading correctly) the light on Jesus is somehow brighter than the glow that falls on the pages of the Bible, and in fact it is somehow brighter than the candle flame itself.
The artist, Gerrit van Honthorst, has perfectly captured the irony of the situation. Jesus, who has come to fulfill what is in that Bible, is on trial for disregarding its teachings. And Jesus, who alone is the Light of the Word, and who alone has lived out the ethics of the Law (perfect love!), is being judged a criminal. But such is the story, isn’t it—the true and marvelous story of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is Lord over the Law, and his law is love.
(R. Kent Hughes. and Douglas Sean O'Donnell., 2013; edited Carl Hinton., 2020)