Matthew 5:17-20

The following are text excerpts from Volume II, chapters 8: “From the Beatitudes to the Antitheses: A Bridge in the Great Sermon,” pp. 255-264.

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✞ Matthew 5:17–20 On the Judaic law

17“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 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. 19Therefore, 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. 20For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

  1. To what do you think Jesus is referring when he speaks of “the law” and “the prophets”?
  2. How did Jesus come to fulfill, rather than to abolish, the law?
  3. Does this passage about “not one letter” of the law passing away require strict observance of OT dietary restrictions and liturgical practices? If not, why not?

The words attributed to Jesus about the law are among the most difficult passages in the New Testament to interpret. The difficulty begins when Matthew has him make the statement at this stage in his narrative.

o far in the first gospel, because there has been no indication that anyone has questioned Jesus’ devotion to the law, there is no apparent reason for him to deny having come to abolish it.

Nor has there been any indication that Matthew’s Jesus stands in opposition to the prophets. In fact, Matthew expends a considerable amount of energy to show that this Jesus is the new Moses—one who has come to carry on the lawgiver’s work in the new covenant community he is forming.1 Matthew also expends considerable energy showing that Jesus is the fulfillment of OT prophecy.2

Even though Jesus is favorably aligned with both the law and the prophets so far in the first gospel, here Matthew’s Jesus emphasizes that:

  1. He has not come to abolish the law (or the prophets).
  2. He has come to fulfill them.
  3. The law will not pass away until all is accomplished.
  4. Whoever breaks the smallest aspect of the law (or teaches others to break it) is least in the kingdom of heaven.
  5. Whoever keeps the law (and teaches others to keep it) is great in the kingdom of heaven.
  6. Your righteousness (which is at least implicitly related to the law) must exceed the scribes’ and the Pharisees’ righteousness to enter the kingdom.

Quite a few propositions in four verses. Some, taken literally, are quite strong. Consider how Jesus’ statements on the Judaic law might require the Christian community to live in light of Deuteronomy 14:8 :

And the pig, because it divides the hoof but does not chew the cud,
is unclean for you.
You shall not eat their meat, and you shall not touch their carcasses.

Presumably, this is part of the law that must be kept, given what Matthew’s Jesus has to say about observance of all aspects of the law. Yet, through the centuries, Christians have not viewed themselves as being bound by Jewish dietary restrictions. Nor, for that matter, have Christians declined to play football—a game that started by kicking around the ol’ pigskin some time in the nineteenth century!

If we encounter difficulty resolving these competing concepts, then perhaps we could look at another way to approach the text. Our understanding of how the synoptic Gospels came to be is a first step in untangling ourselves from some of the confusion that can be generated from the interaction between biblical statements and Christian practices.

We begin by remembering that Matthew’s gospel is based largely on Mark’s. Through a comparison of parallel passages, we are able to consider more fully what Mark was attempting to accomplish in telling his story of Jesus, and what Matthew was attempting to accomplish in his different telling of the story. An example of their divergent approaches and priorities in understanding OT law in light of Christ’s coming is found in Mark 7:18–19 and its Matthean parallel. According to Mark, Jesus said:

“[18]Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside
cannot defile,19since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and
goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

The statement of Mark’s Jesus is an unequivocal departure from passages such as Deuteronomy 14:8, above, prohibiting the consumption of pork—and from the many other dietary restrictions that the Jews practiced. For Mark’s Jesus to make such a statement would throw an observant first-century Jew into turmoil if he is simultaneously trying to follow the law and the way of the Jesus movement as its fulfillment. Perhaps because of this tension, Matthew feels compelled in chapter 15 of his own gospel to excise the most sweeping portion of Mark’s parallel statement and to offer this version as his own text:

17Do you not see that whatever goes into
the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?

Matthew’s gospel removes any reference to what you consume not being capable of defiling you. It also eliminates Mark’s parenthetical reference to all foods being declared clean.

Why is Matthew doing this? Quite possibly, his community was familiar with Mark’s gospel (which Matthew used as his principal source), but was not completely satisfied with its departure from the Old Testament. Perhaps that was even among the reasons Matthew’s gospel was written—to provide a more thoroughly traditional Jewish account of the life and active ministry of the Messiah.

Given that Matthew’s revision preserves Jewish dietary restrictions for his community, we should not be surprised to see other parts of his gospel following suit. That characteristic is present in our principal text for this section, Matthew 5:17–20. The passage broadly affirms the continuing vitality of the Judaic law. It presents Jesus as an observant Jew. Matthew dispels any notion of a Jesus who lightly brushes aside the OT legal requirements. The location of the statements, quite early in the constitution of the kingdom of God, emphasizes Judaic law as a primary Christian consideration.

Having concluded that Matthew wants to show Jesus as being in unbroken succession with the OT tradition, we can now look elsewhere in the biblical witness to see whether there is an understanding of “the law” that allows us to eat a slice of bacon every once in a while.3One understanding is that “the law” here refers only to the great principles found in the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20:1–17. God gave these commandments to his people after delivering them from Egypt:

20 Then God spoke all these words:
2I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
3you shall have no other gods before me.
4You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, 6but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
8Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
12Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

13You shall not murder.
14You shall not commit adultery.
15You shall not steal.
16You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The Ten Commandments offer a very broad perspective on the law Jesus is preserving. While they are among the most important aspects of the Judaic law, they are far from exhaustive. Most of Jesus’ contemporaries would have gone several steps further in defining what it means to say “not one letter, not one stroke of a letter [the ‘jot and tittle’ of the King James Version] will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

The Sadducees accepted the first five books of the Old Testament, or the Pentateuch, as scripture. These books were often collectively called “the law.” Other Jewish groups accepted many additional books as authoritative. For them, the phrase “the law and the prophets” described the whole Hebrew Bible, except the sayings books. Finally, the oral or scribal law, as interpreted and practiced by the scribes and the Pharisees, was a still-broader understanding of the meaning of “law.” Given this theological context, it is probable that Matthew intended his version of Jesus’ statement about the continuing vitality of the law and the prophets to reach beyond the Ten Commandments (or the Decalogue, as it is sometimes called).

While we have considered several possibilities of what Matthew was trying to accomplish in this passage, we have not yet tried to resolve the relationship between this text and the traditional view that much of the Judaic law is not binding on Christians. Here, we must consider the most important social and cultural issue of the early church: inclusion of Gentiles in the Christian community. The Judeaizing Christians, represented most strongly by James, the brother of Jesus, originally thought that Gentiles needed to follow Jewish practices—including dietary restrictions and circumcision—to become Christian.4As foreign as that seems to us today, it was understandable in its time. If the Gentiles were to participate in the kingdom of heaven that the Jewish God was establishing through his Anointed One, then the new people would need to become part of the covenant community, set aside since the days of Abraham, and characterized by the gift of the law.

But the views of James did not prevail. The Apostle Paul advocated a radically different relationship between believer and law than had either James or Matthew. Paul wanted the church to reach out to the Gentiles without imposing the requirements of the Judaic law on new converts. He stated his conclusions about the relationship between law and faith in chapter 3 of his letter to the Galatians:

23Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.

Here, Paul liberates the Galatians from the requirements of the law that James or Matthew would have insisted upon retaining. Paul takes it further still in the next chapter when addressing the Hebrew rite of circumcision. According to Genesis 17, this rite was mandated for Jewish boys beginning in the days of Abraham:

9God said to Abraham . . . “Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. 12Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old. . . So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. 14Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

This is strong language. The covenant is a lasting one. To be cut off from the community for non-circumcision is a powerful penalty. If there is a law that will not pass away, as Matthew 5:17–20 declares, it seems this would be a part of it.

But not so, according to Paul in Galatians 5:

2Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. 3Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. 4You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. 5For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. 6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.

Paul not only instructs the Galatians that following the law is not necessary; he tells them that they MUST NOT follow the Judaic law if Christ is to be of any benefit to them!5

How, then, do we resolve the NT conflict about observation of the Judaic law? We will gain a better perspective as we read through the Sermon on the Mount and see what Jesus considers to be the most important characteristics to teach for citizenship in the kingdom. For clues, we can also look at his conduct. What Jesus does, just as what he says, reflects the priorities of the kingdom. Both word and deed show movement away from the old understanding of relationship with God and toward a new righteousness.

We will also see Jesus, in both word and deed, qualify the meaning of his statements about the law. In Matthew 12, Jesus allows his disciples to violate a strict interpretation of the law to rest on the Sabbath by permitting them to glean in the fields. He also violates the same strict standards by healing a man with a withered hand at the synagogue. Therefore, Jesus’ own conduct suggests that breaking the “least of these commandments” is acceptable if done in service of some greater command of God, such as easing human suffering.

Some commentators—Barclay, for instance—treat Jesus’ statements about the new role of the law as being limited to the great moral principles underlying it.6However, that harmonizing principle is too simplistic for this text. The stubborn fact is that Matthew’s gospel does not distinguish among the great moral principles, any lesser moral principles, and the ritual law.

Other scholars, such as John Meier, view the resurrection as the critical event that terminates the operation of the law—the time at which “all is accomplished” under Matthew 5:18.7That answer also seems unsatisfactory. Paul broke ground on this issue in letters such as Galatians, written some decades after the resurrection but before Matthew was written. Because Matthew himself was struggling with opening the mission of his church to Gentiles, it seems highly unlikely that the resurrection was seen as the “accomplished” event that drew the law to a close. Nowhere in his twenty-eight chapters does he suggest as much.

It is probably most helpful to view this tension through a historical lens. The extent to which people were willing to accommodate Gentiles “just as they are” ran across a spectrum from James at the most conservative Judeaizing end, through Matthew, to Mark, and on to Paul at the most liberal end. Different segments of the early Christian communities worked out the relationship between Jewish and Gentile Christians differently. In Paul’s case, his commission was to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. In Matthew’s case, his people were struggling with having been thrown out of “the synagogue across the street” and opening their mission to Gentiles. In both examples, the kingdom of heaven was becoming more accessible, albeit in different ways.

Whatever “the law” means, those who violate it are not condemned in Matthew. Their standing is diminished in the kingdom, but they are not excluded from it (Matt. 5:19). The greater warning is found in false righteousness. The scribes and Pharisees, those who were most attuned to compliance with the Judaic law, find themselves outside the kingdom (Matt. 5:20). What they thought made for righteousness—compliance with the Mosaic code and the oral tradition—proves fleeting. The new righteousness Jesus asks for is proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount—requirements for living in the new community Jesus is forming.

Perhaps a resolution of the theological tension among James, Matthew, Mark, and Paul is still present, even if we cannot reconcile it with the strict consistency that our sometimes-small minds seek. The resolution might start by acknowledging that the law exists. Then, continue with the understanding that complete compliance was just as impossible after the coming of Christ as it was before his arrival. We fall short. We will always fall short. The resolution of the tension ends with the knowledge that what we have left is not a righteousness that proceeds from slavish adherence to every possible strand of the law, as the scribes and Pharisees thought. What we have left is God’s empowering grace.

  1. How do you understand the relationship between law and grace? Between the old covenant and the new?
  2. Do you believe that the statements of Matthew’s Jesus about the law are authentic? If so, how would you live under them?
  3. The commentary suggests that the tension between the requirements of the law and the call of the faith-based life are only resolved by God’s grace. Do you agree? If so, how do you live with that tension?
  4. How do you feel about the idea that you are entirely dependent on God’s grace for achieving righteousness? How does that affect your own sense of power? Of responsibility? Of freedom, even?

✝✝✝

The statements of Matthew’s Jesus about the law are abstract enough to create more questions than they answer. Yet, we are not left to ponder them without guidance. Some of that guidance comes in the next chapter, where we will study the Great Antitheses, Jesus’ radical reinterpretation of the Judaic law.

  1. See Volume I of the Journey at 165–169; and pp. 162–166 of this volume, supra. [↩]
  2. See Volume I of the Journey at 30–32, 143–145; and pp. 90–95 of this volume, supra. [↩]
  3. Around my house, “once in a while” is as good as it gets. I risk the wrath of Anne whenever I try to sneak a snack of cholesterol-rich food in unapproved quantities. [↩]
  4. See Galatians 2, reflecting Paul’s story of how this issue was addressed. Luke’s account of it is found in Acts 15. [↩]
  5. Paul’s focus on the law here appears to be centered on its ritualistic or purity aspects. Obviously, Paul would not have discouraged people to refrain from murder simply because the law said not to commit it. It may be that he is speaking against application of uniquely Jewish purity laws, rather than the broader laws that crossed religious divides. He requires observance of these latter laws. See Romans 13, discussing the importance of obeying lawful authority. For possible limitations on that principle, see Volume I of the Journey at 46–47, especially note 5. [↩]
  6. Barclay commentary on Matthew at 126–131. [↩]
  7. See Boring at 187, note 126 (citing John P. Meier, Law and History in Matthew’s Gospel: A Redactional Study of Matthew 5:17–48). [↩]