Chapter 4

Matthew 5:17–20

LISTEN to the Story

17“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. 18For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Listening to the text in the Story: Exodus 19–24; Deuteronomy 5–8; Jeremiah 31:31–34; Hebrews

There are two ways of reading the Bible so that we can live before God properly. One way reads the Bible from front to end as the gospel Story, and the other way reads the Bible from Genesis to Malachi with no preconceived Christian beliefs, no gospel orientation, and in a historical manner.1 The moral life that follows from each reading will vary. The question for the second one is simple: What did this passage mean in its day? The question for the first one is different and looks like this: What does this passage say in light of the Story of the Bible and how do I live faithfully? If Jesus is the goal of that Story from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, then reading the “Old Testament” without reference to Jesus will be a misreading. But this means learning to read the Bible the way Jews, Jesus, and the apostles did.2

Our passage is the most significant passage in the entire Bible on how to read the Bible, with a nod to Luke 24:13–49; Galatians 3:19–25; Romans 9–11; and the book of Hebrews, because Jesus tells us here how to read the Bible. The entire Old Testament or, in Jesus’ Jewish shorthand summary, the Law and the Prophets, aim at and are completed in/fulfilled in Jesus as Messiah. Yet these words, “completed” and “fulfilled,” do not mean “abolished.” Rabbi Pinchas Lapide makes this potent observation: “In all rabbinic literature I know of no more unequivocal, fiery acknowledgement of Israel’s holy scripture than this opening to the Instruction on the Mount.”3 This Jewish scholar thinks these words “acknowledge”—he means “affirm”—the Bible of Israel. This passage is also the thematic statement for what follows in Matthew 5:21–48; that is, we will be treated to five cases of how to read the Bible: about murder, adultery, oaths, retaliation, and love for enemies. Bible reading is at the heart of Jesus’ mission, and this passage reveals what makes that heart beat.

So we need to be listening more carefully in our churches to this question: How do church folks read the Bible?4 Some people read the Bible formationally; they read with the heart open to receive from God at a spiritual, intuitive, devotional, and relational level. Others read the Bible informationally; they read it to know what it said—and many such people have acquired the original languages so they can examine tenses, cases, and sentence structure. Others read the Bible canonically; they read it with their ears open to the rest of the Bible. Others read the Bible historically; they only want to know what Jesus’ intent was in his world or what Matthew’s intent was in his context. Others read the Bible socio-pragmatically; they read it to foster and further their own political, theological, ideological, or social agenda. Others read the Bible according to what their guru says; they read it—usually in a group, or a church, a sect, or a school of thought—according to how their favorite teacher or prophet or charismatic leader teaches the Bible. Thus, a “Catholic,” a “Calvinist,” an “Arminian,” a “Barthian,” a “Hauerwasian,” an “N.T. Wrightian,” or a “John Piperian” reading of the Bible, so they say, would look like this—you can fill in the blank.

Is there a right way? Or are there only ways of reading the Bible? Are some ways better than others, or do we simply read the Bible for ourselves? We can learn to transcend our own readings of the Bible by focusing on how Jesus read the Bible. What does he say?

EXPLAIN the Story

There are four elements to our passage, and they need to be put in outline form perhaps to see how this passage is put together:

Here’s a more concrete, straightforward outline:

Whenever I read or teach this passage, I paraphrase a statement attributed to Mark Twain but which never shows up in his many writings: “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand.” Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

The Claim of Fulfillment (5:17)

From the opening of 5:17, with its sudden and out-of-nowhere “Do not think,” we can infer that some had accused Jesus of breaking the Torah or teaching something that deconstructed the Torah.5 We might pause to speculate what his opponents found so objectionable about him that they could accuse him of abolishing the Torah and the Prophets. In light of what we learn in 5:21–48, where Jesus is seen to be anything but a softy, at the heart of their worry was probably Jesus’ willingness to see the entire Torah (and the Prophets) as expressions of the Jesus Creed of loving God and loving others,6 or the Golden Rule as a variant of the Jesus Creed. The Jesus Creed threatens the legalist and the minimalist, but it expands the Torah to its divine expectations for the one who genuinely loves God and loves others. There’s more. It was not that Jesus had an Ethic from Above, Below, or Beyond, but that he had the audacity to think he was the Messiah and taught a Messianic Ethic, reorienting the whole Torah and Prophets. This is what disturbed some of his contemporaries.

In the face of some accusations, Jesus asserts in the strongest of terms that his mission (“I have not come”) is not to “abolish” the Torah or the Prophets. Notice that his focus is on both—both Moses and Elijah, as the Transfiguration will also show (17:1–13). Instead of abolishing the law, Jesus says his mission is to “fulfill.” On this word hangs the meaning of this passage, and the word is used emphatically in Matthew to refer to the salvation-historical, theological, and moral Story of Israel coming to completion in Jesus.

The term fulfill relates to Old Testament patterns and predictions coming to realization. Nothing makes this clearer than reading Matthew 1–2, though one can also observe the same at 3:3; 4:1–16; 5:17–48; 8:16–17; 9:13; 10:34–36; 11:10; and 12:16–21. While some have suggested that Jesus “fulfills” by teaching the true meaning of Torah or by “doing what it says,” the use of this term “fulfill” in Matthew makes the sense of an eschatological completion the most accurate meaning.7 In summary: to “fulfill” or “complete” means history has come to its fulfillment in Jesus himself—that is, in his life, death, resurrection, and exaltation and in his teachings.

We must consider the mind-numbing claim here by Jesus: he is claiming that he fulfills—in a salvation-historical, theological, and moral manner—what the Torah and the Prophets anticipated and predicted and preliminarily taught. What kind of person makes claims like this? It is one thing to say, as Jesus could have, I can do miracles as mighty as Elijah, or I can predict the future as clearly as did Isaiah, or I can do miracles as astounding as Moses. It’s altogether different to claim that he himself fulfills the Torah and the Prophets. But that’s precisely the claim Jesus makes here. Nothing in history would ever be the same. The Torah had come to its goal. The Torah hereby takes on the face of Jesus. His claim is thoroughly Jewish (Isa 2:1–5; Jer 31:31–34), but of a particular sort: messianic.8 The first lesson we get in reading the Bible is this one: Look to Jesus as its central Story.

An Elucidation of the Claim (5:18)

The claim by Jesus that he fulfills the Torah and the Prophets might suggest we can be done with the Torah, but Jesus says precisely the opposite. Surprisingly, neither does this passage teach a simple return to the Torah. Our next verse props up the previous one by clarifying just how serious Jesus is when he says “fulfill” and “not … abolish.” He’s saying that everything in the Torah (or Prophets) is true, and every bit of it will come to pass just as it is written.9

But what needs to be observed here is that Jesus is not a Pharisee or a Qumran sectarian, nor is he a later rabbi, each of whom was scrupulous in Torah observance. For Jesus the real Torah is permanent as Jesus teaches it, which is the point of 5:21–48 and which illustrates our category of a Messianic Ethic. Still, that Torah and those Prophets are not done away with; they remain in effect (in an even greater way).

The book of Hebrews, not to mention the tensions we find in Paul over the Torah (Rom 7:1–6; 10:4; Gal 3:19–26; 5:1–6), illustrates the tension over what to do with the Torah. In Acts 10–11, in the encounter of the Torah-observant Peter with the God-fearing Gentile Cornelius, we see what “fulfill” looks like for the apostles: it means some radical revisioning without abolishing. Paul’s words about accommodating himself to Gentile ways in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 also illustrate how the apostles “applied” this claim by Jesus. Second lesson in Bible reading: looking to Jesus means following him and through him the Torah.

The Consequences of the Elucidated Claim (5:19)

Jesus’ logic is relentlessly practical. If he is the fulfillment, and if in that fulfillment everything is established as true and realized, then morality changes. The clearest way to put this is to say that Jesus thinks that following him means following the Torah. Those who follow him (and his teaching of the Torah) will be called “great” in the kingdom. Anyone who denies his teachings and teaches others not to follow him (and through him the Torah) will be called “least” in the kingdom.

What about the “least” and “great”? Will both enter the kingdom eventually? Are we to see “great” and “least” as two levels of kingdom participation? Some see this distinction (see 18:4; 20:16, 21, 23, 26),10 but it is more likely that Jesus is using typical Jewish/Hebraic contrasting results for the ones who will enter the kingdom (the doer) vs. the ones who will not enter the kingdom (the nondoer). In other words, “least” in the kingdom is a kind way of saying “suffering eternal judgment.”11 What leads us to this view is the end of the Sermon (7:21–23), where we see that only those who do the will of God (as Jesus teaches it) will enter the kingdom. In addition, 8:11–12 says the “subjects [sons] of the kingdom will be thrown outside,” so that being in the kingdom and eventually being tossed outside the kingdom are not incompatible ideas for Jesus. Third lesson in Bible reading: following Jesus really means following Jesus, and it matters eternally.

An Elucidation of the Consequences (5:20)

If that statement by Jesus is not clear enough, Jesus makes it more concrete by comparing his followers to existing religious groups. If their righteousness—and here he means “behavior that conforms to the will of God as taught by Jesus” or, as Tom Wright captures it, “your covenant behavior” (KNT)—does not greatly surpass12 that of “the Pharisees and the teachers of the law,” they will never ever enter the kingdom. The language is as emphatic as the claim is shocking. If you want to pick an example of the pious, you pick the Pharisees, who famously mastered the Torah and all its interpretations and rulings or, like them, the “teachers of the law.” Jesus takes such examples—somewhat like taking a Mother Theresa or a John Stott or a Dallas Willard or a Francis Chan—and says, “You’ve got to be much, much better!”

It is far too easy for Protestants to take the sting from Jesus’ words by thinking what Jesus was really saying was not that his followers had to do more, but that they were to trust in the righteousness of Christ while the scribes and Pharisees were trusting in themselves. Or to say the Pharisees were externally righteous only. For this view, “surpasses” is really about kind of righteousness and not degree.13 Yes, there’s a place for such a concern with externals, and one can find it in some Pharisees and find support in Luke 18:9–14 or Romans 10:3, but it is unlikely that we need to think this way here. Others contend that Jesus has in mind not justification but sanctification.

Yes, righteousness emerges out of communion with Jesus and redemption; it is a kingdom righteousness, a kingdom that comes with new covenant power to heal and transform. Yes, this is righteousness under the cross. But it is a righteousness that is done. The ethic of this verse is more an Ethic from Above, designed rhetorically to strike the followers with a demand. When we recontextualize it into sanctification, which is where it might fit in our theology, we run the risk of destroying its original rhetorical power. Fourth lesson in Bible reading: we are challenged to be better than nonfollowers. Followers are marked by a greater righteousness or by more righteousness. (Just what that more will look like can be found in the antitheses of 5:21–48.)

LIVE the Story

Bible Reading

We do not read the Bible aright until we learn to read it as the Story of Israel that comes to completion—fulfillment—in the Story of Jesus Christ. This is the essence of what Paul means by “gospel” in 1 Corinthians 15:1–28, and it is the way the early apostles evangelized when they were telling the gospel: one simply needs to read the sermons in Acts 2; 3;10–11; 13; 14; and 17 to see this.14 This leads me to say that Matthew 5:17–20 is one of the most pristine expressions of the gospel in the New Testament. Why? Because this passage says overtly and boldly that the Story of Israel is fulfilled in Jesus himself. His life, his teachings, his actions—everything about him completes what was anticipated in the Old Testament. That’s the gospel!

From the moment these words were uttered nothing was the same. From that moment Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy … all the way to Malachi (though in Jesus’ day the Old Testament ended with 2 Chronicles) were read as texts that in a large canvas and in small brushstrokes pointed toward Jesus. From this point on purely historical readings (what it meant then) will be unsatisfactory; the Story must be read toward Christ the way someone has learned to read a good novel, say Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, or a good short story, say Parker’s Back by Flannery O’Connor. We read them and then reread them, and the more we know them, the more we read from the ending and not from the beginning. We read the Bible the way we “interpret” a great season for our favorite sports team; we learn to see the first competition as setting the stage for the victory at the end of the season.

Thus, Genesis 1 is not simply about God in heaven, who is called YHWH or Elohim, but about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; it is about Jesus Christ as God; it is about the Holy Spirit. In other words, we are to read Genesis 1 in a Trinitarian manner now that we know where the “God” of Genesis 1 was headed. And the “image” of God that we find in Adam and Eve is not just about their ability know and to relate to God, nor is it just about the ancient Near Eastern sense of representing the king. Rather, the “image” of Adam and Eve in Genesis 1 is a reflection of Jesus Christ, who is the true and perfect “image” of God (cf. 1 Cor 15:49; 2 Cor 3:18; 4:4; Col 1:15; 3:10). In technical terms this is not eisegesis, or the reading into the texts, but it is a reading of the text in light of the whole Story.

I urge you to be a Bible reader—from Genesis to Revelation. The number of Christians who read the Bible today is not high; in a day when the Bible is more available than ever in history, the Bible is being less read by those who have the Bible in hard and electronic copy. I urge you also to be one who sees the whole Bible through the Story of Jesus, and I urge you to commit to doing what Jesus teaches. A student of mine told me he took an introduction to the Bible class with a “bundle of pastors.” The first day the professor asked the class for a show of hands: “How many of you have read the Old Testament?” My student told me no more than five raised their hands—in a class of more than twenty (pastors). Time to commit yourself to reading the whole Bible—front to back.

Ethics

This passage also instructs us how to live the Story. Jesus is not offering a lecture in hermeneutics here, though there’s plenty of hermeneutics here. Rather, he’s explaining how the Bible really works—it comes to completion in him (5:17–20)—in order to tell his followers how to live (5:21–48). Perhaps the words of an early anonymous Jesus-following commentator on the Sermon say it best:

Christ’s commandment contains the law, but the law does not contain Christ’s commandment. Therefore whoever fulfills the commandments of Christ implicitly fulfills the commandments of the law.15

Take kosher laws. We learn that water-dwelling animals that crawl, like the lobster, are unclean because they don’t have fins or scales. Israel followed this commandment (Lev 11:9–12; Deut 14:9–10). A simple “follow the Torah” approach will mean one can’t eat such things, but I do and you probably do as well. Are we right? How do we follow what Jesus says here about the fulfilled Torah? I begin with this: kosher, or purity, is now established on a new basis. Jesus is the one who makes clean, and these laws anticipate the purity that is to be found in Jesus.

Furthermore, as these texts are clearly about order and taxonomy and putting things in their proper place, we observe that Jesus has established an entirely new order: he is Lord, his people are his body. Jesus makes clean—and that means those laws are now secondary to him. This is precisely the point made in 15:1–20. It is not what enters the mouth—food—but what comes out of the mouth that makes clean. And what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and it is the heart that matters most of all. Jesus wants followers who are purified from the heart out. So, kosher food laws can be observed from a clean heart, but if the heart is clean—by contact with Jesus—then whatever one eats cannot make unclean.

Now I can hear a friend of mine pushing back that kosher food laws do require observance by messianic Jews but not by Gentile Christians, and I can agree to that view. But even if one takes that view, one still defines kosher in a new way: Jesus the Messiah makes people clean, and food is but a sign of their messianic purity. This view neither relaxes nor abolishes the Torah but sets it firmly within the hermeneutic of Jesus: kosher is defined by completion in Jesus Christ, and kosher means living a life of loving God and loving others with everything we’ve got, including food.

I have Jewish friends and I have messianic Jewish friends. I’ve shared a table with both. Once I was eating breakfast with a well-known Jewish scholar at a buffet. After observing what I was eating, the Jewish scholar asked, “Is there pork in those eggs?” I said, “Yes.” I asked him, not knowing his kosher food habits (but I was about to learn), “Do you want me to get you some?” His response: “No. My God cares about what I eat.” Matter of fact, no hint of humor. He observed the kosher food laws. Another time I was sharing breakfast with a messianic Jew when the waitress came by and took our order. I asked for a breakfast with some bacon and my messianic friend said, “You’re kidding me!” Having recently eaten with my previously mentioned Jewish friend, I said, “My God doesn’t care what I eat.” He laughed and said back, “My God does. But that’s fine.”

With my messianic friend I had a wonderful conversation about the gospel—not that I didn’t have a wonderful conversation with my rabbi friend. We talked about Christ and about preaching, studying, writing, and attending academic meetings, and about our families and our God. While we differed on the implications of kosher food laws for today, our fellowship was rooted in Christ, not on our kosher food habits. Never did he question if I should be at the table, nor did I question him. He reads the Bible messianically, and so do I. He may have wondered if I should respect his kosher condition by not eating pork, and I may have wondered if the Torah was to be lived differently for messianists than for Gentile Christians. But those were not obstacles to Christ or in our fellowship in Christ.

Extensions

The uncompromising rigor of Jesus in these verses points an accusing finger at a powerful tendency at work in American culture where an increasing number of Christians are posing two kinds of moral standards: one drawn from the Bible/Jesus and one drawn from the Constitution or culture. That is, some say, “I’m personally against abortion but the law now permits it.” Or, “I’m personally against homosexuality, but civil unions are now law so I support them.” This posture of two moral stances is a fundamental moral failure. Yes, as citizens there is the legal or constitutional question, so we are to ask if the law supports or does not support civil unions or the marriages of gays and lesbians, and yes, we are to examine if the law supports or does not support abortion. But what is legal is not the same as what is moral or what is right: the Christian’s morals are not determined by whether something is legal or constitutional, but by what the Story of God in the Bible reveals. A Christian citizen may think civil unions are legally permissible on the basis of legal precedent or legal gaps, but constitutional legality does not determine what is right or wrong, regardless of how much citizens are to respect or live within that law.

The teachings of Jesus are to shape my life, and that means my whole life. I return once again to the Jesus Creed: we are to love God and to love others with “heart, soul, mind, and strength” (cf. Deut 6:5; Mark 12:30)—and surely that last term is an embracive term describing all of our resources and externalities. That is, “and strength” would include our political behaviors and actions. If we think the teachings of the gospel are against abortion, we are bound by conscience to support bans on abortion because of what the gospel requires, even if the law permits such. The same applies to so many things, not excluding civil unions, Christian participation in business, the relations of Christians to wartime activities, and divorce, which is one of the topics toward which Jesus turned his gaze in the next passage.

What this passage teaches is that followers of Jesus are called both to teach and to do what Jesus teaches, and through following Jesus they are to do what the Torah and the Prophets reveal. These are the north star for the follower of Jesus, not the US Constitution or the law of the land.

1. A good introduction to this issue is Edward Klink III and Darian R. Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012).

2. For Jewish texts, see Garland, Reading Matthew, 61. The least-exploited source for evaluating how the early Christians understood Scripture is Jewish evidence. For a place to begin, EDEJ, 1041–42 (Pentateuch) and 1316–17 (Torah); another sketch in “Scripture in Classical Judaism,” in EJ, 3:1302–9. One book of colossal importance here is C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology (Welwyn, Hertfordshire: James Nisbet, 1961).

3. Lapide, Sermon on the Mount, 14.

4. S. McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 22–79.

5. For similar language, cf. 9:13; 10:34.

6. Lapide, Sermon on the Mount, 15.

7. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 59; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 106; France, Matthew, 182–83; Turner, Matthew, 157–58.

8. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon, 109–90.

9. A parallel can be found in Luke 16:17. There are two clauses here that are virtually synonymous and not far from our “until hell freezes over”: “until heaven and earth disappear” and “until everything is accomplished.” See Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 106–8.

10. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 108–9.

11. Luz, Matthew 1–7, 220, who cites Chromatius and Chrysostom from the early church as well as both Luther and E. Schweizer from modern times. Chrysostom’s words: “But when you hear ‘least in the kingdom of heaven,’ you are to think of nothing but hell and punishment” (italics added; from ACCS: Matthew, 98). Also Kinghorn, Wesley on the Sermon, 134–35.

12. The Greek reads perisseusē … pleion, not just perisseusē. In other words, “surpass … greatly.” Almost all translations ignore the adverb pleion here. But see Luz, Matthew 1–7, 211, and the discussion in Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 63–65. Righteousness was discussed briefly at 5:6, above.

13. Stott, Message, 75. Here are his words: “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” (emphasis added). Thus it is a “new heart-righteousness.” See also the four points of Quarles, Sermon on the Mount, 103.

14. McKnight, King Jesus Gospel.

15. ACCS: Matthew, 101.