Matthew 5:17-20 — Fulfilling the Law

FRANK: Four verses today, Linda, and I want to say plainly what they're about before we read them... Jesus explains how he relates to the Old Testament, and then he sets a bar for righteousness higher than the most careful, most devout religious men anyone in that crowd had ever met. It's one of the most important things he ever said, and it's also one of the easiest to misread, so I'm really glad we get a full day on it.

LINDA: Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, and I'm glad you're here for this one, because it's a passage I've always found a little intimidating. We're in Matthew chapter five, verses seventeen through twenty, still on that hillside in Galilee, right after the Beatitudes and the salt and light. Frank, read it for us?

FRANK: Here it is. "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 I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever practices and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

LINDA: Scribes and Pharisees. Those names come up over and over in the Gospels, and I think most of us just file them under "the bad guys." Who were they, really, and why would a crowd hear that last line as such a shock?

FRANK: That's exactly the right place to start, because if you picture them as villains the verse loses all its force. The scribes were the professional copyists and interpreters of Scripture... men who preserved every letter of the text by hand and ruled on how it should be applied to ordinary life. The Pharisees were something different, a lay movement, not priests, just people utterly devoted to keeping God's law with total seriousness. And they did something clever and, honestly, admirable. They built what they called a fence around the law, extra rules surrounding each command so that you couldn't even get close to breaking the real one. They tithed their garden herbs, a tenth of the mint and the dill. They counted the steps they walked on the Sabbath. In the eyes of the average fisherman or farmer on that hill, nobody was more righteous than these men. Nobody. If anyone was getting into God's kingdom, it was them. So put yourself on the grass for a second... what do you hear when Jesus says your righteousness has to exceed theirs?

LINDA: I hear "you're out." Or maybe, if I'm the ambitious type, I hear "try harder." Be more careful than a Pharisee. Tithe the herbs and the salt too. Count my steps twice.

FRANK: Most people hear exactly that, and it's the most common misreading of this verse... call it Pharisee-plus. Same ladder, more rungs. But Jesus tells us later, in Matthew twenty-three, where the Pharisees actually fell short, and it wasn't a lack of care. He says, "You pay tithes of mint, dill, and cumin. But you have disregarded the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness." Their problem was never too little effort. They were aimed at the wrong depth. Moses himself had said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart... These words... are to be upon your hearts." The law always had its home in the heart, not just the hands. Jesus isn't inventing a new demand in verse twenty. He's pressing the old one down to where it always lived.

LINDA: Before we go further, though, I want to go back up to verse seventeen, because something there bugs me. "Fulfill" sounds nice, but isn't it just a polite way of saying "finished"? Paul says Christ is "the end of the law." End means done. So is Jesus keeping the law or retiring it?

FRANK: Fair question, and the words themselves answer it. The Greek verb in verse seventeen is plēroō, and it has the sense of filling a vessel to the brim, or bringing something to the point it was always leaning toward. A promise is plēroō'd when the thing promised actually shows up. Paul's word in Romans ten is telos... which means the goal, the target an arrow is flying at. So when Paul says Christ is the telos of the law, he's saying Christ is what the law was aiming at from the start. The risen Jesus says the same thing in Luke twenty-four: everything in Moses, the prophets, and the psalms "concerning me" had to be fulfilled. And remember, Jesus opens with "Do not think," which tells you a rumor was already circulating. This teacher is loose with Moses. He's a wrecker. Verse seventeen is his answer to that charge, head-on.

FRANK: Then he doubles down in the strangest, most specific way. "Not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen." The jot is the iōta, standing for the Hebrew yod, the smallest letter in the alphabet, barely bigger than a comma. And the stroke is the keraia, literally a little horn... the tiny hook that tells one Hebrew letter apart from another. Scribes counted every letter of a book, marked the middle one, and if a sheet was miscopied they might bury it rather than let it stand. That's the world Jesus is pointing at. He isn't affirming the law in some general, warm-hearted way. He's staking his authority on every serif of it.

LINDA: Serif. He goes all the way down to the smallest hook on the page, and the reason nothing drops out is that every mark ends up pointing to him and being completed in him.

FRANK: Completed, yes, and I'd add one piece. Look at the order Jesus speaks in. First, "I came to fulfill." Only after that, the height of the wall: a righteousness exceeding the Pharisees. Before he tells you how high it is, he tells you who climbed it. And this is where the old teachers drew a distinction that I think is one of the most freeing ideas in Scripture. We usually think of the cross as Jesus bearing the penalty our sin deserved. Theologians call that his passive obedience, his suffering under the curse. But the law doesn't only punish the guilty. It commands the living. A record wiped clean is not yet a record of righteousness. So Christ also lived under the law, actively, keeping every command from Bethlehem to Golgotha, heart and hands both. That's his active obedience. Not one jot fell through his hands.

LINDA: Zero, then. That's how I picture forgiveness, honestly... like an overdrawn account the bank finally clears. Debt gone, balance at zero, and I breathe out. You're telling me zero doesn't get me through the door?

FRANK: Zero is a real mercy, and it isn't the whole of what's offered. Verse twenty asks for a positive balance, more righteousness than the Pharisees had, and you and I have never made that deposit. Paul's answer is what the church calls imputation. Romans five: "through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous." Second Corinthians five: "him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Christ's lifetime of keeping is credited to your account the moment you trust him. Romans three calls it "a righteousness of God apart from the law... through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe." [short pause] The righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees' isn't a stricter version of theirs. It's his. And he gives it away.

LINDA: Then verse nineteen feels like dead weight. If he's already made the deposit, why does Jesus bother warning me about breaking "one of the least of these commandments"? Why would it matter whether I'm called least or great, if I'm in on his record anyway?

FRANK: Because the fulfilling does two things, not one. The sources I trust put it this way: the righteousness the law demands is both fulfilled for us and worked within us. Verse nineteen is spoken to people already in the kingdom... notice it says "least in the kingdom," not outside it. And the exceeding righteousness includes a changed heart, which is precisely what God promised. Jeremiah thirty-one: "I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts." The Pharisees polished the outside of the cup. Jesus gives you his record and then starts on the inside.

LINDA: That sounds like the ladder sneaking back in through the side door. Now instead of earning the deposit, I have to prove I got it, by producing a changed heart, and I'll end up checking that the way I check my bank account at two in the morning. Twice. Then again to make sure I read it right.

FRANK: If that were how it worked, you'd be right to push back. Listen to Ezekiel thirty-six, though. "I will put a new spirit within you, and I will cause you to walk in my statutes." Who is the subject of that sentence? God. The obedience in verse nineteen isn't a summit you reach to confirm your standing. It's something God has pledged to produce in the people he's already declared righteous. Root first, then fruit. At the same time the gift isn't a license to stay where you are. Matthew Henry said it plainly, back in the early seventeen hundreds: "No sinner partakes of Christ's justifying righteousness, till he repents of his evil deeds." Receiving Christ and clutching your sin are two hands trying to do opposite things. The person who takes the robe is the person who has let go of the old one.

LINDA: "I will cause you to walk." That, I can take. I'll concede the order... standing first, then change, and God on the hook for the change. What I'm still not sure of is how to keep from turning my own progress into the new thing I audit. Maybe that one doesn't resolve neatly.

FRANK: Maybe not in a sentence. Psalm one-nineteen gives the best picture I know: "How I love your law! It is my meditation all day." That's not a man auditing himself. That's delight. The Pharisees counted. The psalmist enjoys. And the only way you move from counting to enjoying is knowing your balance isn't in question. Where do you think the "least commandment" shows up for most people listening?

LINDA: Money. The electric bill is on the counter, it's the second notice, and the account has maybe half of what it needs until the fifteenth. You call the company, and the easiest sentence in the world is "I mailed it last week." Your kids are right there eating cereal. Nobody's being robbed, exactly. It's so small.

FRANK: Small is the word Jesus won't let you use. And the part that stings in verse nineteen isn't just "whoever breaks." It's "and teaches others to do likewise." Most of us can accept that we sin. Fewer of us want to face that our sin instructs. The kids at the counter aren't learning about electricity. They're learning that truth bends when money's tight. And money is exactly where the Pharisees and the rest of us both keep our ledgers... tithing the dill, rounding the numbers, watching every cent go out while the weightier matters slide. What would it actually cost to tell the truth on that call?

LINDA: It costs saying out loud, "I don't have it until the fifteenth. Can we set up something?" In front of the kids. Feeling small, and exposed, and a little afraid of what they'll say on the other end. It costs putting the groceries back that won't fit, at the register, with people behind you.

FRANK: And that's the real alternative to the Pharisee's way. Fear is what drives a ledger righteousness, the constant need to look fine, to look covered. When your standing before God is already paid in full, you can afford the awkward true sentence. You won't manage it on grit. But the Christ who kept every command now lives in you by his Spirit, and he's more committed to your honesty on that phone call than you are.

LINDA: Credited. The Pharisees' righteousness was a balance they kept checking and could never quite trust, and ours is a balance someone else filled, so we're free to be honest about the one in the checking account.

FRANK: That's it, and it answers where we started. Jesus did demand a righteousness greater than the most religious men alive. He meant it, every jot. And then he walked up to that impossible door and opened it from the inside.

LINDA: Go into today, then, as someone whose record is already full, kept down to the last stroke of the pen by Christ himself. May the bill on the counter lose its grip on your voice, and may the true sentence come easier than you expect, because you have nothing left to prove and nothing hidden to protect.

FRANK: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA: Thanks for sitting with this one. We will see you next time.