St Theodore's Sermon

	St Theodore's Wattle Park

Sermon of the Week

25/4/99

The Law and the Prophets? Matt 5:17-37

What does it mean to be faithful to God? How do you go about it? Do you ever think about that question, or is it just something that comes naturally? Well, it seems to me that if you do think about how you're going to be faithful to God there are two complementary issues that face you. They arise out of the fact that as we think about the law God has given us to follow there are two ways of thinking about it.

Jesus obviously understood that this would be a problem for his followers because he addresses these very issues, here in the sermon on the mount.

You see for those who are well taught and understand the gospel well, the problem is that they understand that Jesus has fulfilled the law on our behalf, and that there's nothing that we can do to make ourselves right with God. For the Christian the Law no longer has any power over us. And so the danger is that we begin to think that we don't have to worry about it. It doesn't matter how we live, as long as we continue to believe and trust in Jesus. And of course at that point we begin to take Jesus, or God, for granted. On the other hand, there are some Christians who still think that the way they live will make them acceptable to God. If you ask them what makes them think they're going to heaven, they'll say that they've lived a pretty good life and they're sure God wouldn't reject them just because of a few slip-ups.

Well Jesus here, in this passage addresses both those groups. He says to the first: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. ¹⁸For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." So, although Jesus has indeed fulfilled the law on our behalf, although it's true that nothing we can do can make us acceptable to God, the law is still in force. In the next verse he says: "Therefore, whoever breaks 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." There's no question of our obedience qualifying us for the Kingdom of heaven - that's achieved by Jesus death on the cross - but it will affect our position in that Kingdom. It will affect how God looks upon us, the degree of praise he gives to his good and faithful servants.

   Now before I go on to look at the other group of people, I'd just like you to note something about what Jesus says. When he talks about the law and the prophets, he's talking not just about God's commandments, but he's actually talking about the Old Testament. The Law and the Prophets was a shorthand way of referring to the Old Testament. So not only is Jesus addressing those who would do away with the old laws, he's also addressing those who'd like us to think that the Old Testament is old hat. So he tells us that far from abolishing the Old Testament, he's come to fulfil it. So if you want to truly understand the significance of Jesus' life and works you need to know your Old Testament. This was Jesus' Scripture, the bible that he knew, and it's a book that talks about him.

   But let's go on. To the other group, those who'd like to think that they've lived a pretty good life, he says this: "I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Now let me remind you about the Scribes and Pharisees. Although they have a bad name because of their double standards and hypocrisy, these were the really serious religious people of the time. They were the theologians and the practitioners of spirituality. Their great aim was to so understand the law that they'd be able to keep it completely and make themselves so worthy of God that he'd feel free to send the Messiah to restore the Kingship to Israel. So when Jesus says your righteousness has to exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, it's like saying to a gymnast, your performance has to be better than Nadia Comenici, or to a golfer, you've got to be able to play better than Greg Norman or Tiger Woods. The standard God requires to enter his Kingdom is perfection. Nothing else will suffice. So if you're one of those who are relying on being a pretty good person, perhaps you'd better think again. But we'll come back to that.

   Having laid the groundwork for what he wants to say, Jesus goes on to elaborate. He wants to make it very clear what the standards are for those who belong to God's Kingdom. Now remember, what he's talking about here is not behaviour that makes us worthy of God's love, or worthy to enter God's kingdom, but behaviour that arises out of the fact that we've been brought into God's Kingdom through faith in what Jesus has done. I remember a few years back when I used to go to computer conferences. You could always tell the men who worked for IBM (and they were all men!) because they all wore the same navy blue suits. Now they didn't get their jobs because they wore a blue suit, but having joined the organisation, they adopted the expected clothing standard. Well that's what Jesus is saying here. If you've joined the Kingdom of Heaven, then there's an appropriate standard of behaviour that you're expected to follow. And it's a tough one.

   Let's quickly look at the sort of behaviour that's involved.

   First he talks about our personal relationships, about anger and reconciliation, about sexual purity and marital fidelity. And what does he say? He says first that the command not to kill derives from a deeper imperative of being at peace with one another. The desire to kill, he says is no different from nursing anger towards another. Now he doesn't mean that momentary flash of anger that you may feel when someone wrongs you in some way, but rather the cherished resentment that so many people seem to hold on to. The wrong that's remembered and brought up again and again and again. I remember a friend telling me about a funeral he took for a man in his eighties, and there in the front row of the church was the man's twin brother, who hadn't spoken to him for over 40 years because of something he'd done to him. It was as though he'd killed his brother off all those years ago, and he hadn't spoken to him since. Well, Jesus says, don't be like that. Be reconciled with one another. And don't worry about who's in the wrong. If it's you who's been wronged, don't nurse your anger. If it's you who's caused offence, stop everything, even something as important as your worship of God (v24), until you've been reconciled to your brother or sister. Remember that the great mark of Christians is how they love one another. The great task of Christians is to be ministers of reconciliation.

   The next issue that Jesus speaks about is sexual purity. Again he refers to the commandments, this time the one about adultery, and points out that God is interested not just in the overt act but also in the inner thoughts that precede it. He says: "everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Now he's not saying that the natural desire or attraction that's part of our human makeup is wrong. I mean without it none of us would be here would we? But what he's talking about is the second look, the stare or the leer, the looking at someone in order to desire, looking at them as an object, something to be possessed and controlled. And what remedy does he suggest? An urgent, decisive, even drastic action. "If your eye causes you to sin tear it out and throw it away." Why so drastic a solution? Because the danger is so great. He knows how slippery the slide is from looking in order to desire to seeking to possess. He knows how illicit relationships develop, gradually, until it's too late. And when a people find themselves in that sort of situation it's so easy to justify. She's just a friend. I couldn't just break it off, he'd be too hurt, he wouldn't understand. How could God object when we love each other. And so it continues. 'No!' Jesus says. Cut it off, like a surgeon cutting out a tumour, before it goes too far. This is no cheap remedy. The price of sexual purity is high, but not as high as the cost of failure, both in terms of the disintegration of one's whole life and in terms of our future in God's Kingdom.

   Similarly Jesus calls us to a radical approach to marital fidelity. He turns upside down the prevailing attitude of the time, which was that a woman could be divorced at the whim of the husband. He points out that to divorce your wife wasn't just an administrative detail. It carried moral implications for both the man and the woman and for the woman's future husband. In God's plan for the world, a husband and wife became one and remained that way until one of them died, and this is still the way he'd have it be.//

   Now this is as much a word for today, as it was for Jesus' day. Divorce is almost as simple a matter these days as it was in Jesus' day. It looks like a simple procedural matter that can be executed with the minimum of fuss. Well don't you believe it! Anyone who's gone through a divorce will know that it's a painful and sad experience, that affects a whole range of people and relationships. Now we haven't got time to talk about this in enough detail today, but we need to take seriously this word from Jesus, so we reject the prevailing attitude of our society that marriage vows don't really matter and if it doesn't work out then marriage partners can just walk away from it. We need to prepare people for marriage better, we need to support their marriages better, we need to give married couples in-service training courses. We need to provide opportunities for them to work out their relationships together, not just when they're having difficulty, but as they grow together.

   And finally, we need to realise that people are fallen and sometimes marriages won't work! And then we need to offer people the forgiveness of the gospel as they move on, remembering that failure to fulfil one's marriage vows is no worse in this context than anger or lust, it just happens to be more visible.

   Finally Jesus talks about truthfulness. He says discipleship applies as much to speech as it does to sexual morality. He asks that our speech be simpler, less exaggerated, more down to earth, even less spiritual, less filled with spiritual clichés. Listen to what he says (Mat 5:34-35 NRSV): "Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King."

   Now we don't take oaths now the way they did in Jesus day, but there are circles where people use pious language to make their actions appear better than they really are. "I felt that God was telling me to stay home rather than go to that church activity." "I'll have to pray about that first, before I say I'll do it." "I would have been there but I ran into an old friend and I felt God wanted me to spend time with him." Do you know the sort of thing I'm talking about?

   No, Christ wants our speech to demonstrate our Christian integrity. He's not criticising oaths as such. What he's criticising is those people who deal in double talk. They only feel the need to be truthful when they give an oath. Otherwise it's a case of buyer beware! Like when you played 'Simon Says' as a kid. It only mattered if the sentence started with "Simon Says". But that's not for us. Let your "Yes" be yes and your "No" be no. Let your speech be characterised by simplicity and honesty. For a Christian your word is your pledge.

   Well, I wonder how many of us here feel we've lived up to this sort of a standard of life? Not many? Well the good news, as I said at the beginning, is that our place in God's Kingdom doesn't depend on our standard of obedience. That depends entirely on Jesus work on our behalf, and on our decision to make him the Lord of our lives. That's the import of his statement that he came to fulfill the law and the prophets. In his life and death and resurrection, he's brought them to their fulfillment. There's nothing more that needs to be done to fulfill the requirements of the law. But the bad news, or at least the corollary of that, is that Jesus does expect us once we're his people, to live up to his standards. He expects us to seek to live like this in response to what he's done for us. Not to place our trust in what we do, as though we could somehow merit favour from God, but to do it for the sake of God and his only Son Jesus Christ and in response to his love for us.

   Finally, a word of hope. None of us can do this by our own strength, but God has given us not only Jesus to die for us, but he also gives us his Holy Spirit to dwell within us and to change us. May our earnest prayer be that God might continually be changing us to be more like him, so that we might find ourselves more and more being people who show the sorts of behaviour Jesus is talking about here. People who live up to the standards Jesus sets for us.


	Contact us	Preaching Program	Home		Last Week's Sermon

	Sermon of the Week
	25/4/99
	The Law and the Prophets?	Matt 5:17-37

	What does it mean to be faithful to God? How do you go about it? Do you ever think about that question, or is it just something that comes naturally? Well, it seems to me that if you do think about how you're going to be faithful to God there are two complementary issues that face you. They arise out of the fact that as we think about the law God has given us to follow there are two ways of thinking about it.
	Jesus obviously understood that this would be a problem for his followers because he addresses these very issues, here in the sermon on the mount.
	You see for those who are well taught and understand the gospel well, the problem is that they understand that Jesus has fulfilled the law on our behalf, and that there's nothing that we can do to make ourselves right with God. For the Christian the Law no longer has any power over us. And so the danger is that we begin to think that we don't have to worry about it. It doesn't matter how we live, as long as we continue to believe and trust in Jesus. And of course at that point we begin to take Jesus, or God, for granted. On the other hand, there are some Christians who still think that the way they live will make them acceptable to God. If you ask them what makes them think they're going to heaven, they'll say that they've lived a pretty good life and they're sure God wouldn't reject them just because of a few slip-ups.
	Well Jesus here, in this passage addresses both those groups. He says to the first: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. ¹⁸For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." So, although Jesus has indeed fulfilled the law on our behalf, although it's true that nothing we can do can make us acceptable to God, the law is still in force. In the next verse he says: "Therefore, whoever breaks 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." There's no question of our obedience qualifying us for the Kingdom of heaven - that's achieved by Jesus death on the cross - but it will affect our position in that Kingdom. It will affect how God looks upon us, the degree of praise he gives to his good and faithful servants.
	Now before I go on to look at the other group of people, I'd just like you to note something about what Jesus says. When he talks about the law and the prophets, he's talking not just about God's commandments, but he's actually talking about the Old Testament. The Law and the Prophets was a shorthand way of referring to the Old Testament. So not only is Jesus addressing those who would do away with the old laws, he's also addressing those who'd like us to think that the Old Testament is old hat. So he tells us that far from abolishing the Old Testament, he's come to fulfil it. So if you want to truly understand the significance of Jesus' life and works you need to know your Old Testament. This was Jesus' Scripture, the bible that he knew, and it's a book that talks about him.
	But let's go on. To the other group, those who'd like to think that they've lived a pretty good life, he says this: "I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Now let me remind you about the Scribes and Pharisees. Although they have a bad name because of their double standards and hypocrisy, these were the really serious religious people of the time. They were the theologians and the practitioners of spirituality. Their great aim was to so understand the law that they'd be able to keep it completely and make themselves so worthy of God that he'd feel free to send the Messiah to restore the Kingship to Israel. So when Jesus says your righteousness has to exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, it's like saying to a gymnast, your performance has to be better than Nadia Comenici, or to a golfer, you've got to be able to play better than Greg Norman or Tiger Woods. The standard God requires to enter his Kingdom is perfection. Nothing else will suffice. So if you're one of those who are relying on being a pretty good person, perhaps you'd better think again. But we'll come back to that.
	Having laid the groundwork for what he wants to say, Jesus goes on to elaborate. He wants to make it very clear what the standards are for those who belong to God's Kingdom. Now remember, what he's talking about here is not behaviour that makes us worthy of God's love, or worthy to enter God's kingdom, but behaviour that arises out of the fact that we've been brought into God's Kingdom through faith in what Jesus has done. I remember a few years back when I used to go to computer conferences. You could always tell the men who worked for IBM (and they were all men!) because they all wore the same navy blue suits. Now they didn't get their jobs because they wore a blue suit, but having joined the organisation, they adopted the expected clothing standard. Well that's what Jesus is saying here. If you've joined the Kingdom of Heaven, then there's an appropriate standard of behaviour that you're expected to follow. And it's a tough one.
	Let's quickly look at the sort of behaviour that's involved.
	First he talks about our personal relationships, about anger and reconciliation, about sexual purity and marital fidelity. And what does he say? He says first that the command not to kill derives from a deeper imperative of being at peace with one another. The desire to kill, he says is no different from nursing anger towards another. Now he doesn't mean that momentary flash of anger that you may feel when someone wrongs you in some way, but rather the cherished resentment that so many people seem to hold on to. The wrong that's remembered and brought up again and again and again. I remember a friend telling me about a funeral he took for a man in his eighties, and there in the front row of the church was the man's twin brother, who hadn't spoken to him for over 40 years because of something he'd done to him. It was as though he'd killed his brother off all those years ago, and he hadn't spoken to him since. Well, Jesus says, don't be like that. Be reconciled with one another. And don't worry about who's in the wrong. If it's you who's been wronged, don't nurse your anger. If it's you who's caused offence, stop everything, even something as important as your worship of God (v24), until you've been reconciled to your brother or sister. Remember that the great mark of Christians is how they love one another. The great task of Christians is to be ministers of reconciliation.
	The next issue that Jesus speaks about is sexual purity. Again he refers to the commandments, this time the one about adultery, and points out that God is interested not just in the overt act but also in the inner thoughts that precede it. He says: "everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Now he's not saying that the natural desire or attraction that's part of our human makeup is wrong. I mean without it none of us would be here would we? But what he's talking about is the second look, the stare or the leer, the looking at someone in order to desire, looking at them as an object, something to be possessed and controlled. And what remedy does he suggest? An urgent, decisive, even drastic action. "If your eye causes you to sin tear it out and throw it away." Why so drastic a solution? Because the danger is so great. He knows how slippery the slide is from looking in order to desire to seeking to possess. He knows how illicit relationships develop, gradually, until it's too late. And when a people find themselves in that sort of situation it's so easy to justify. She's just a friend. I couldn't just break it off, he'd be too hurt, he wouldn't understand. How could God object when we love each other. And so it continues. 'No!' Jesus says. Cut it off, like a surgeon cutting out a tumour, before it goes too far. This is no cheap remedy. The price of sexual purity is high, but not as high as the cost of failure, both in terms of the disintegration of one's whole life and in terms of our future in God's Kingdom.
	Similarly Jesus calls us to a radical approach to marital fidelity. He turns upside down the prevailing attitude of the time, which was that a woman could be divorced at the whim of the husband. He points out that to divorce your wife wasn't just an administrative detail. It carried moral implications for both the man and the woman and for the woman's future husband. In God's plan for the world, a husband and wife became one and remained that way until one of them died, and this is still the way he'd have it be.//
	Now this is as much a word for today, as it was for Jesus' day. Divorce is almost as simple a matter these days as it was in Jesus' day. It looks like a simple procedural matter that can be executed with the minimum of fuss. Well don't you believe it! Anyone who's gone through a divorce will know that it's a painful and sad experience, that affects a whole range of people and relationships. Now we haven't got time to talk about this in enough detail today, but we need to take seriously this word from Jesus, so we reject the prevailing attitude of our society that marriage vows don't really matter and if it doesn't work out then marriage partners can just walk away from it. We need to prepare people for marriage better, we need to support their marriages better, we need to give married couples in-service training courses. We need to provide opportunities for them to work out their relationships together, not just when they're having difficulty, but as they grow together.
	And finally, we need to realise that people are fallen and sometimes marriages won't work! And then we need to offer people the forgiveness of the gospel as they move on, remembering that failure to fulfil one's marriage vows is no worse in this context than anger or lust, it just happens to be more visible.
	Finally Jesus talks about truthfulness. He says discipleship applies as much to speech as it does to sexual morality. He asks that our speech be simpler, less exaggerated, more down to earth, even less spiritual, less filled with spiritual clichés. Listen to what he says (Mat 5:34-35 NRSV): "Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King."
	Now we don't take oaths now the way they did in Jesus day, but there are circles where people use pious language to make their actions appear better than they really are. "I felt that God was telling me to stay home rather than go to that church activity." "I'll have to pray about that first, before I say I'll do it." "I would have been there but I ran into an old friend and I felt God wanted me to spend time with him." Do you know the sort of thing I'm talking about?
	No, Christ wants our speech to demonstrate our Christian integrity. He's not criticising oaths as such. What he's criticising is those people who deal in double talk. They only feel the need to be truthful when they give an oath. Otherwise it's a case of buyer beware! Like when you played 'Simon Says' as a kid. It only mattered if the sentence started with "Simon Says". But that's not for us. Let your "Yes" be yes and your "No" be no. Let your speech be characterised by simplicity and honesty. For a Christian your word is your pledge.
	Well, I wonder how many of us here feel we've lived up to this sort of a standard of life? Not many? Well the good news, as I said at the beginning, is that our place in God's Kingdom doesn't depend on our standard of obedience. That depends entirely on Jesus work on our behalf, and on our decision to make him the Lord of our lives. That's the import of his statement that he came to fulfill the law and the prophets. In his life and death and resurrection, he's brought them to their fulfillment. There's nothing more that needs to be done to fulfill the requirements of the law. But the bad news, or at least the corollary of that, is that Jesus does expect us once we're his people, to live up to his standards. He expects us to seek to live like this in response to what he's done for us. Not to place our trust in what we do, as though we could somehow merit favour from God, but to do it for the sake of God and his only Son Jesus Christ and in response to his love for us.
	Finally, a word of hope. None of us can do this by our own strength, but God has given us not only Jesus to die for us, but he also gives us his Holy Spirit to dwell within us and to change us. May our earnest prayer be that God might continually be changing us to be more like him, so that we might find ourselves more and more being people who show the sorts of behaviour Jesus is talking about here. People who live up to the standards Jesus sets for us.

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