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Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, our Lord Jesus Christ and His Sermon on the Mount is refuting Phariseeism, the doctrine that we can be righteous according to our own works and please God by our own efforts.
Now we might say, well, what good is that to us because we’re not Pharisees? We want to remember that each one of us has a Pharisee that lives in our heart. Remember what Martin Luther used to call the little monk that lives inside of us, the little Pharisee that lives there, that is always trying to make the case for our own righteousness and for our own goodness apart from the righteousness of Christ.
Phariseeism goes wrong in at least four different ways. The picture—the best picture I know of Phariseeism—is, and I think I’ve told you this story before, when I was a kid we got a new basketball hoop. It was one of those hoops that could be raised and lowered, and so I was the oldest of three brothers. Before my brothers came out, I got the basketball and I lowered the hoop to where I could barely jump and dunk the basketball. I mean, I tested it to make sure that I got it as high as I possibly could, but if I got it too high and I couldn’t do it, I would lower it a bit so that I knew I could dunk the basketball. I knew because it was that high that my brothers wouldn’t be able to dunk it, and so I got the hoop just right. Then I went inside and I said to my brothers, “Let’s go have a slam dunk contest.”
That is perfect Phariseeism. You take the law of God, which requires everything—that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and all our strength; that we love our neighbors and ourselves. The bar is set so high that nobody can keep it. We take the bar and we lower it, but we lower it just enough to where we can keep it and nobody else can. Then we can use that law to show our own righteousness and to despise everyone else because of their sinfulness.
That’s Pharisee style. We all do it. We all want to be those who keep the law ourselves and then use the law to point at how other people haven’t kept it. We want the law to declare us righteous and declare everybody else sinners. We use the law to argue then for our own goodness and our neighbor’s wickedness, at least our enemy’s wickedness. The people that we don’t like, they obviously are sinners. God must really be disappointed with them and really proud of us. That’s the idea.
So Phariseeism messes with the law, and it messes with it in four distinct ways. Number one, Phariseeism is only concerned with the external activity of the law, not with the heart. Number two, Phariseeism is concerned with using the law to justify the self. Number three, Phariseeism wants to use the law to despise or to accuse the neighbor. And number four, Phariseeism misses the whole point of the law, which is to point to Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross for us.
In fact, do you know this? That the Pharisees didn’t even have the sacrifices. Phariseeism, in fact, as a historical reality, grew out of the historical events of the Babylonian captivity when the temple was destroyed and there was no priesthood in Jerusalem. There was no temple in Jerusalem. And so the people had to say, “Well, how can we be Jewish now if there’s no temple and there’s no altar and there’s no sacrifice, there’s no lamb’s blood? How can we be Jewish?”
And the Pharisees said, “We have a better sacrifice. We can offer the sacrifice of our own works, of our own goodness.” Isaiah, we heard in the text, remember, was blasting them. They invented their own works and they neglected the love of the neighbor. You just can’t do it. God will not be pleased with your own self-invented works.
So Jesus comes and He preaches a sermon on the mount and already in the nine beatitudes which we had last week—these nine blessings—Jesus taught us faith and love and hope. He taught us repentance and to trust not in ourselves, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, and then we’ll have it by faith. The Lord declares us to be righteous. And then He taught us love, to be peacemakers, to be kind and generous, all this. And then Jesus said, “Now you’re going to suffer.”
Pharisaism, remember, is not content to live and let live. It always wants to afflict and harm the neighbor. So, Jesus knows that the Christian who is set in this life with the gift of repentance will be persecuted. In fact, that’s the last of the nine blessings: blessed are you when you’re persecuted and people utter all sorts of evil against you in my name. They did the same thing to the prophets, and that’s what comes immediately before our text today.
So, we ask ourselves, well, who is Jesus talking to? It’s kind of an amazing thing when Jesus says that you are the light of the world. Can you imagine if Jesus was standing here and He said to you, “You’re the light of the world,” and you would say, “Wait a minute, Jesus, you’re the light of the world,” which is true. He is the light of the world. He’s the light that came into the darkness, and the darkness didn’t overcome it. He is the light, but He gives His light also to us. If you want to think of it like the sun and the moon, right? The moon doesn’t have any light in itself; it just reflects the light of the sun. So it is with a Christian. We are reflecting the light of Christ.
We are the light of the world because we have Christ, the light of the world, and we are the salt of the earth because the Holy Spirit has filled us and given us faith. This is who Jesus is talking to, though, in that very first verse: “You are the salt of the earth.”
Who is the “you” there? The “you” is those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, those who are rejected because of the name of Jesus, those who are driven around the world because they are just simply not at home in the world because they belong to the Lord. Those who are not content to sin and to live according to their own desires and to listen to the ways of the world or our own sinful flesh or the devil, but rather would listen to the commands of God and suffer for that—that’s the “you” that Jesus is talking about. And He says that you then are salt in the earth.
Salt did a lot of things, does a lot of things, flavors food. They would offer the salt on the sacrifices in the Old Testament, but the main thing that the salt would do is act as a preservative. So Jesus sets His church in the world to preserve the church, to keep the earth from rotting away. So Jesus salts the earth with Christians.
And He sets us in the earth also to be this light, to have the light of the Lord’s wisdom—Him, His law, and His gospel, the light of repentance—like a lamp that shines in a dark room or like a city that sits on top of a hill.
Now, I think the Pharisees who were listening to Jesus preach would have said, “Now hold on, Jesus, you’re teaching a different doctrine than we’re teaching, and we teach Moses, so you must be rejecting Moses.” The prophets would say, “We teach the prophets,” and the Pharisees would say, “We teach the prophets.”
So you must be rejecting the prophets, and Jesus says, “No, don’t even think it for a second. I did not, in fact, listen to what He says. He says, “Don’t think that I’ve come to abolish the law or the prophets. I haven’t come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” In other words, the whole point of Moses, the whole point of the prophets, the whole point of the Old Testament is to preach me.
Do you remember the sacrifice that animal in the garden? That was me. Do you remember the Passover lamb and the blood on the door? That was me. Remember the Day of Atonement when the lamb would carry off the sin into the wilderness? That was me. Remember my coming to you to forgive your sins after you committed all these iniquities? That was me. I was the whole point of all of it. Don’t think that I came to abolish the law.
Jesus says, “I came to fulfill it.” And further, I say heaven and earth will not pass away. Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass away from the law until all is accomplished.
“Whoever relaxes one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” There’s the idea, and I think it creeps into my head sometimes, and maybe it creeps into yours. You’ll have to tell me after church if this is true. But I think this is a common idea, that God in the Old Testament is very strict, and in the New Testament is a lot more lenient. In the Old Testament, God is kind of mean, and in the New Testament, He’s nice. In the Old Testament, God is angry, and in the New Testament, God is friendly. Like Moses was pretty grumpy, but Jesus is just happy-go-lucky. That’s not the case.
That’s what Jesus is telling. He says, “Don’t you dare think that whoever relaxes one of the least of the commandments and teaches others to do the same is least in the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus doesn’t come to relax the law. That’s what the Pharisees did. The Pharisees were the ones who lowered the basket. Jesus raises it. He raises the bar. In fact, next week we’ll hear Him say it. You’ve heard it said, “You shall not murder.” I say, “If you call your brother a fool, you’ve murdered him.” You’ve heard it said, “You shall not commit adultery.” If you look with lust, you’ve committed adultery. Jesus is raising the bar.
And why? To show that all of us are guilty, all of us sinned, and this is the point of the law—to show us that all of us need a Savior. So the zinger comes at the end, and I like to imagine the Pharisees listening to Jesus because you know the Pharisees were pretty proud of themselves. The Pharisees are the guys that they walk by the mirror and then they back up to just get a second look. The Pharisees, you know, they walked around town and they knew that everybody was looking. This is Pharisee style. They’re pretty proud of how well they’ve accomplished this law business. They’ve done it themselves. They think that God is pretty lucky to have them on His team.
And so when Jesus says this in the sermon, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.” You have to think that the Pharisee says, “Yeah, wait a minute.” Because Jesus is saying of all the people who claim to be righteous, you can’t do much better than the Pharisees, but that’s not enough. You can be as righteous as the Pharisee, and you can’t get in. In other words, nobody can be good enough with their own righteousness. Nobody can be good enough by their own efforts. You could dedicate your whole life to keeping the law, and you will never achieve it.
So then we’re left with this question: well then, what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to get a righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees? Where are we going to find that? If we can’t do it by our own efforts in keeping the law, where are we going to find it?
And the answer is in Christ alone. There is the righteousness of the law, the righteousness of the commandments, and that is not enough. But there is a second righteousness, a righteousness that’s not commanded but promised, a righteousness that’s not extracted but given—the righteousness of the gospel that we have by faith.
It works like this. Paul says in, remember 2 Corinthians 5, he says that God made Him who knew no sin—that’s Him—so that in Christ you are righteous. And not just with the righteousness of the Pharisees, not even with the righteousness of Adam and Eve before the fall in the garden; you are made righteous with the righteousness of God. This is unbelievable. You could never believe this unless the Lord had written it down for us. That when you believe in Christ, all of your sin is gone, and all that Christ has done is given to you, put on your name, put into your account, so that the Lord looks at you not according to your works, not according to your sin, not according to your failures, not according to your accomplishments. He looks at you according to the blood of Jesus, His life and death, His suffering, His resurrection—Jesus—so that His perfection is given to you.
You can imagine a test where there’s some sort of thing where you’re judged for doing wrong and rewarded for doing right. Well, everything wrong that you’ve done, Jesus takes that punishment and suffers. That’s the business of the cross. And everything right that Jesus has done, He’s given to you and me.
So that you have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. You have the righteousness of Christ—the righteousness of God—the righteousness of faith. So while it’s true that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven, that the little Pharisee can never get you there, but Jesus can, and He does, and He has. His righteousness is yours. God be praised. Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.