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Jesus says, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, Christianity is both an attack on what is worst in humanity and the best in humanity. Now this is a foundational truth that is going to be very good for us to get our heads and our hearts around. There are a lot of things, there’s a lot of different paths and options that get after the worst part of us. In fact, every reflective person that I know knows that there is something wrong in the world, and that there’s something wrong not only out there, but also there’s something wrong in here. Every person knows that they are not perfect. Every person knows that they make mistakes. Every person knows, as we think about our own lives, that we don’t do the things that we want to do or that we know that we should do, or that we do things that we know that we should not do.
Just consider, as a little example of this fault in our own humanity, consider the snooze button. At some point the night before, we decided that it would be good to wake up at 5 a.m., and then the next morning another part of us said that was the wrong idea. Now this battle to do what we know we ought to do and to not do what we know that we ought not to do—this is the battle that every single person is engaged in in this life. Every person. I mean, there might be a few people who have given up the fight; we normally put them in jail. But all of us—your Christian neighbors and your non-Christian neighbors, the people who know God and the people who don’t believe in God—all of us are fighting against ourselves to know what’s true, to speak what’s right, and to do what’s good.
But I see in myself, and everyone has to see in themselves, that we fail in that. We don’t hit the mark. Now the Bible gives us words to understand this. The Bible gives us words to understand not only our sinful flesh, it’s sin, and flesh, and all these sorts of things. The Bible, in fact, tells us how we got here; it tells us about the fall into sin. But even if you don’t have the Bible, even if you don’t have the Lord’s wisdom on how things got this way, it’s important for us to see that every religion, almost every philosophy, and just about every person that we encounter is wrestling with this problem—this getting after the worst part of us, the bad part of us.
I would wager that every person that you encounter every day is trying to be a good person. They want to be a good person, and they know that to be a good person they have to be a better person, and that is a confession that they are not yet a good person. And this is why we see people going to the gym. It’s why there’s such long lines at the natural grocery stores. It’s why people watch Oprah, if that’s still a thing. It’s why they line up to buy mindfulness journals, or it’s why the self-help section of the bookstores is packed full of books and people. It’s why people are going to the mosque; it’s why people are going to yoga studios; it’s why people are applying to go to college. I mean, all of this is an attempt—all of this—and this is just the basic venture of humanity, right? It is to try to be a good person, and to do that you have to attack the part of us that is bad. You have to attack the worst part of our own humanity, working toward the goal of a good life, and the Bible is included in this.
We started to remember that Christianity is an attack on what is worst in us, and that is true. I mean, that’s after all what the Ten Commandments are—the best ever attack on the bad part of our humanity. The Ten Commandments put before us what’s right and wrong according to God, what’s good and evil according to God, what is righteous and what is sinful according to God. And the Ten Commandments and the preaching of Moses pushes us to a life that avoids what’s wrong and does what’s right.
Now this is a good thing—that the basic experiment, or the basic venture of human society, is to try to do what’s good and fight against what’s wrong. I mean, could you imagine a world where people weren’t fighting to be good people? I mean, can you imagine this place if people just did whatever they wanted to do, and they acted on every impulse, and they pursued every desire, and where lust and rage and greed were simply unchecked? I mean, human civilization would probably last five minutes.
So we’re after something—all of us, in church and out of church—we’re after something. And the word that the Bible gives us to describe that is righteousness.
Now, I admitted, maybe I confessed to the early service that one of the problems that I have is that I’m just reading the theological stuff so often that I often don’t know if a word is used outside of church. Like I think a word is a normal word and it could be just a theology word that we only say amongst us Christians, and I’m not sure if the word righteousness is like that.
So, to check, I did a search in the Austin Statesman; I searched the archives to see if the word righteousness would come up. And it did come up, but I looked and just about every time it came up, it was in a letter to the editor written by a Christian. So I think the word righteousness might be a uniquely Christian word that just doesn’t get out there that often. I mean, we all have a general idea of what it means, but it’s an important thing for us to understand, to understand the Old Testament, the New Testament, and even to understand our own lives. And so here’s a definition: righteousness is conformity of action to a certain standard that improves relationships, or at least does not damage them.
Conformity of action to a certain standard that improves relationships. That means when we’re acting righteous toward our neighbor, we’re acting in such a way that we don’t do damage to the neighbor, that we don’t hurt or harm our neighbor. When we live righteously before our family, it is the same; we’re acting in such a way that rather than harming the relationships, those relationships are improved. And the same thing goes if we’re after righteousness before God—that we’re acting in such a way that God is not offended or hurt or harmed, but we’re acting in conformity to His will.
Now, this means that to be a good person is to pursue being a righteous person, and vice versa. To be a righteous person means to be a good person. Now there’s different standards of righteousness, depending on what you’re up to. There’s a civil righteousness, which means not breaking the law. There’s a social righteousness. Luther actually talks about this; it’s kind of interesting. I mean, it’s just having good manners. You know, there’s certain expectations on the way that we act and the way that we treat each other and interact with each other—there’s a social righteousness that’s there.
But the righteousness that all of humanity is looking for is a moral righteousness. It’s chasing after the idea of good. Now, I’ll grant you that different people have different definitions of what it means to be good, but that’s the basic idea: we’re after that thing which is good. Everyone is after it. Now, some people are more successful than others, and there has been in the history of the world perhaps one group of people who were the most successful in this pursuit of a righteous life. I’m going to tell you who they are, but I have to warn you because I’m going to tell you who they are and you’re going to think, wait a minute, that’s the bad guys. Just hold off on that conclusion.
Those people, I think, who pursued righteousness and got the closest to achieving it were none other than the Pharisees. They had devoted their life to the pursuit of righteousness. They committed their entire selves to it. Everything about them was done so that they could be obedient to the law of God, so that they could present themselves not only to their neighbor, but also to God. They could present themselves as a good person, as a righteous person. And by all accounts, they have done better than any people in the history of the world at this.
Now we normally think of the Pharisees—because we know how the Gospels go—because we know the Pharisees are the ones stirring up the crowd, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” that we normally think of the Pharisees as the bad guys. But they were the best bad guys. They were the holiest of bad guys. The Pharisees, I don’t know any other way to express it better than this, the Pharisees are the ones that you hope knock on the door to ask your daughter out on a date because you know that if she’s with them, she’s going to be safe. That’s the Pharisees. They were interested in keeping the law, and they were there when Jesus was preaching.
Now, I like to imagine these things. You guys know, I think it’s helpful when we are studying the Scripture text that we try to see it in our imagination. So we picture Jesus there. He’s teaching, and all the people are sort of spread out on the hill that slopes over the Sea of Galilee, and also a huge crowd is there, all mixed in together, and Jesus is preaching to them all, and in the midst of the crowd, the Pharisees have come, probably from Jerusalem. They mostly like to live in Jerusalem so they could be close to the temple, so they could do all the required sacrifices. But they had come up and they’re there in the crowd, and they’ve got all their Pharisee clothes on—their Pharisee robes, and their Pharisee hats, and their Pharisee long-groomed curly beards. And the people would have looked at them, “Here are the holy ones.” And they were there listening to Jesus with their critical ears. I mean, this is how the Pharisees were; they were critical of anything else. And the people had to be looking at Him, wondering what they’re thinking, wondering how they’re going to react to Jesus, wondering what they’re going to do when Jesus preaches all of these things.
Now imagine looking at the Pharisees when Jesus preaches that sentence that we’re thinking about today. Imagine just being behind the Pharisees when Jesus says, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Pharisees would say, “That’s right! Hey, wait a minute!” Because Jesus at the same time says that their righteousness is the highest and greatest righteousness of all and that that is not enough. That is not enough. And if the Pharisees are condemned, imagine everybody else who is looking up to the Pharisees as the righteous and holy ones and would say, “If they can’t make it, then who can make it? If they can’t make it, what chance do I have?”
If this, the absolute best that humanity has to offer in obedience to God’s law and to human goodness, if that is not enough to get into heaven, then nobody has a chance. Right. You see, Christianity is an attack on both what is worst and what is best in humanity. Jesus takes everyone—the best of us and the worst of us—and He puts us all in one big pile, and He says to us, “Your righteousness won’t cut it; your goodness won’t do. Your works cannot earn or deserve the kingdom of heaven.” Now, dear saints, we just have to know this: that Jesus is not only going after our sin, He’s also going after our good works. Jesus is not only condemning our evil deeds, He’s also condemning our righteousness. Everybody knows that sin is dangerous; that’s what we were talking about at the beginning. Everybody’s fighting against that part of humanity which is the worst. Everybody’s on that same pursuit, and we’re on that pursuit with them. That’s clear enough.
But we come here to hear something quite different. Christianity says something quite different. Jesus teaches that even our good works are dangerous for salvation. Now why that is, is very interesting. I mean, this is probably more than we can get into; this is a whole lifetime of study, but there’s a couple of things just to make note of, and it especially has to do with the temptation to pride. I mean, the idea is this: because nobody can actually be righteous, then to make the claim of a sufficient righteousness makes us self-deceptive and manipulative, and even leads in the end to the worst sins of all—idolatry and pride.
But here’s the point: your sin is dangerous, you know that. Your flesh is dangerous, you know that. But your good works are also dangerous; Jesus wants you to know that. Because your good works invite you to trust in them. Your good works invite you to think that that is how you will earn God’s favor. Your good works are tempting to think that you can now stand before God on your own two feet. And Jesus says that that is doomed. That your works are not enough. That your goodness is not enough. That your good intentions are not enough—not enough to reach the kingdom of heaven.
And so Jesus, in the sermon on the mount and in His preaching and in the preaching of the apostles, is sounding this alarm. And we don’t want to press the snooze button here. He’s sounding this alarm. Jesus wants you to know that you’re going to be tempted—tempted to trust in your own works and tempted to trust in your own efforts, and He wants you to know that they will fail.
Now if this is true, if it is true that this general pursuit of humanity is a pursuit that will end in destruction, if it’s true that this general work of all people to be good will end in our own damnation, then what hope is there for us? If it is true that you have to have a righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, what is the point of it all? And this, dear friends, gets us right to the heart of the gospel.
There are, it turns out, two distinct kinds of righteousness. There is the righteousness of our works, but there is another kind of righteousness—a righteousness that is not of works, a righteousness that does not belong to you and to me. There is the righteousness of Christ, His keeping the law, His perfection, and His holiness. And it turns out that that’s our only hope.
I remember when I was a kid, there were two ways to get out of the dinner table. There were two ways to be finished with dinner. There was the first way, which was to eat all of your food. Now I don’t know if you believe me when I tell you that when I was a kid, I couldn’t do it. You would never—I mean, I’d never leave a scrap of food on the plate now, but you know, when you’re a kid, you’re looking at dinner and the chicken and all the broccoli and everything, you kind of move it around so it looks like you ate some of it, and everything, and you sit there and you can’t leave the table until you’re finished with your dinner. That’s one way: is to eat everything on the plate. But we found out that there was another way to be finished with dinner, and that was with our kindest, most humble voice to ask mom, “Could I be done?” And every once in a while she would say, “Yes, you’re finished. Yes, you can be done. Yes, you can go.”
Now imagine it: there’s still food on the plate, and yet dinner is declared over. Now that is how it is with the righteousness of Christ. There are two ways to be righteous. You can either keep the law, or the Lord can say, “You’re done.” And it sounds like this: “It is finished.” It sounds like this: “I forgive you all your sins.” It sounds like this: “You belong to me. I have broken your yoke.” Christ is crucified for sinners. “I came not to serve but to be served, and to give my life as a ransom for many.” As far as the east is from the west, so have I put your sins from you.
So, that is your dinner; that is your righteousness declared finished, and there’s no work involved. There’s no effort accomplished. Now you might say, “But pastor, it’s not really works that way. After all, if you’re declared to be done with dinner, there’s still food on the plate.” Well, that’s the business of the cross. The Lord Jesus takes your plate with all your sin, with all your filth, with all this stinky nonsense that you can’t possibly choke down, with all of the things that you’ve done wrong. He takes it all and He eats it all. He takes it on Himself to give you this righteousness and to give you this perfection.
Now, I want to let Luther preach the end of the sermon because he is talking about this passive Christian righteousness, and he says this: “Do we then do nothing and work nothing in order to obtain this righteousness? I answer, nothing at all. For this righteousness means to do nothing, to hear nothing, and to know nothing about the law or about works, but to know and believe only this: that Christ has gone to the Father. He’s now invisible because He sits in heaven at the right hand of the Father, not as judge, but as one who has been made for us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption from God. In short, He is our High Priest. He intercedes for us. He reigns over us and in us through grace, and we notice no sin; we feel no terror or remorse of conscience at all.”
Dear saints, Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.” But listen, your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees because Jesus has given you His righteousness, because Jesus has declared you holy, and because Jesus has forgiven you all your sins. The kingdom of heaven is yours. God be praised. Amen. And the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
