Matthew 5 Commentary
The Beatitudes | Matthew 5:1-12
Many unsuspecting Christians approach the Beatitudes as they would a personality test. Though they may not be poor in spirit (humble), they are delighted and relieved when they learn that one of the traits they possess qualifies for the Kingdom of Heaven. But Jesus is not giving general descriptions about those who will enter his Kingdom, but a single description. And he is not describing qualities that some of his people may posses and that others will not. Jesus is giving a single list of attributes of the most plain and the most ordinary Christian.
So the average Christian is humble, but they will also mourn over their sin. They are gentle, but they thirst to know Jesus through the Scriptures and hunger to do the righteousness it teaches them. Christians are also a merciful people, but they are also unselfishly caring without an agenda. Christians are a people who seek peace, but they expect persecution because their character stands so frighteningly different than the rest of the world.
When Jesus opened his famous sermon describing what his people will look like, he was also describing himself. Since a Christian has Jesus living inside them, it is only natural that they look like him in every detail. They do not possess just one or two of his qualities. They have all of them. And so the Beatitudes describe the Christian fully, and they serve as warning for pretenders who would cheapen the grace of God and deny the power of the Holy Spirit.
Salt & Light | Matthew 5:13-16
There is no hope for the world beyond Christ, but Christ is carried around by those who believe in him. If they who have him were to lose him, just as if salt were to lose its “saltiness,” they would be worthless and good for nothing.
The same is true with light. Take a light into a completely dark room and it illuminates whatever is there according to its strength. And though some lights do a better job at showing you the contents of a room, even a dim light is far more useful than a burned out light bulb.
Again, there is no hope for the world beyond Christ. But while he is preparing for his return, his true disciples are charged with displaying their faith openly. They do so by happily preaching the Gospel and allowing the righteousness of Jesus, that lives in inside, to shine out through them. The true Christian cannot hide their joy and love for Christ anymore than sports fans can hide their love of teams or mothers can hide their love of their children. If the Light of Life lives within it will not be hidden, it will get out.
But Jesus’ message here is just as much warning as it is an illustration of the true Christian. Christians must let their light shine from the highest point possible. And if Christians do not preach the Word, no one will. If they do not show the righteousness of Christ by their life, then no one will see it. No will be warned of God’s coming wrath. No one will be told of true peace and joy in Jesus. Christians are the means by which Jesus is revealed today. They are the means by which the words of Scripture leap from the page into everyday life. They alone are the light of the world, and there is no hope for the world beyond Christ.
Salt & Light | Matthew 5:13-16
There is no hope for the world outside Christ because Christ is carried around by those who believe in him. If those who have the Holy Spirit inside them were to lose him, just as if salt were to lose its “saltiness,” they would be worthless and good for nothing.
The same is true with light. Take a light into a completely dark room and it will reveal whatever its light can reach. And though some lights do a better job at showing the contents of a room because they are brighter, even a dim light is far more useful than a burned out bulb.
So again, there is no hope for the world beyond Christ. And while he is preparing for his return, his true disciples are charged with displaying their faith openly. They do so by happily preaching the Gospel and allowing the righteousness of Jesus in them to shine out through them. The true Christian cannot hide their joy and love for Christ anymore than sports fans can hide their love of a team or a mother can hide her love for her children.
But Jesus’ message here is as much a warning as it is an illustration. Christians must let their light shine from a grateful heart. And if Christians do not preach the Word, no one will. If they do not show the righteousness of Christ by their life, then who will believe their profession of faith? And who will bring the faithless to Jesus?
Without Christians, no one will be warned of God’s coming wrath and no one will be told of true peace and joy that is found by faith in Jesus. Christians are the means by which Jesus is revealed today. They are the means by which the words of Scripture leap from the page into everyday life. And they alone are the light of the world. For there is no hope for the world beyond Christ.
Looking only at the verse, “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” it is easy to lock onto the last part of this verse and believe that Jesus meant that he set aside the Law so that we might live as we please. It is also just as easy to stress only the first part of this verse, and so believe that Jesus meant that we are to try and gain favor with God through the rules and regulations that fill the pages of the Old Testament.
For 2,000 years, Christians have wrestled over this theological divide – where faith ends and obedience begins. And for 2,000 years I think it’s generally fair to say that we have made a complete mess of things.
Jesus favors neither of these interpretations. First, he is emphatic in his sermon that the Law will never disappear. The law of God is eternal because God is eternal and because the law reflects his nature. Second, Jesus is just as emphatic in letting us know that our good conduct must exceed that of the greatest rule keepers of all. For even the Pharisees, arguably the most moral of the Jews, couldn’t keep the Law perfectly. And if these famous rule keepers fell short, what hope is there for us?
But the Law of God was given in order to show fallen humanity that it can never measure up to God. Only God is able to keep his own rules and only the Godman was able keep them in human flesh. And in Jesus we see the Law is fulfilled. It was perfectly kept and nailed to the cross; not to abolish it but provide a means of escape from it. By paving a way through it, a way that is offered to us and lies before us through Jesus himself.
The Law is the guide to the character and standards of God. It is also the mission statement of a Kingdom that transcends this world. For the Law is the cultural norm of Kingdom people. It is the essence of heaven and the ethos of God’s transcendent world.
Faith in Jesus grants us access to this transcendent world. In Jesus, we walk into the Law pure and holy, because through rebirth (repentance and faith) we walk into the One who fulfilled the Law. When we become transformed through Jesus by faith we also become transformed by the Law. We do not become rule keepers, but we do become expressors of the Law. We do this because the Law now lives inside of us, in the Jesus that lives inside of us, and out of our grateful hearts we obey the law and share its goodness with the world.
A Higher Law | Matthew 5:21-26
Sins are merely the ugly expressions of our root unbelief in Jesus. And I say not to diminish the horrors of sin we set in motion, or as if their stench before God should be thought of as any less, I say this because our outward sins are small compared to the sin factory that lies within us.
Every sin, great or small, is a willful, rebellious act that is punishable in the eternal realm – a realm where but “a moment” is eternity in itself.
And understanding that inward sins are equally heinous, if not more, is a crucial distinction that we need to make in order to avoid the same trap the scribes and Pharisees fell into.
Working feverishly to kill our outward sins accomplishes nothing. It is the inward, evil roots of our sins, those things that lie hidden below the surface and that are only detectable when they occasionally leak out and become outwards sins that needs to be confronted with the Word and by faith.
This is why Jesus tells us that Law cannot be grasped by human hands. It was one thing for the hypocrites, who paraded around in their self-righteousness, to describe the Law as a thing that could be perfectly kept. But it was quite another thing to hear that God’s Law also considered the thoughts and intentions of the heart – and treated them not only as sins, but often referred to them as the greatest of sins.
Suddenly, Jesus refocuses our attention to the heart heart. According to Jesus, adultery was not merely sleeping with another man’s wife, it was simply looking at her from a distance and undressing her with your eyes. Murder wasn’t simply taking a man’s life through revenge or greed, but wishing him dead in your heart.
By showing us the depth of our sin, Jesus reinforced his claim that his mission was to come and fulfill the law. His mission was to master the law in human flesh by humbly sacrificing himself on a cross, so that through him, sinners might find an escape for all their sins committed under it. And through Jesus, the true righteousness that is revealed by the Law can be granted and grasped.
No one will ever take hold of a remedy if they are not first shown the dangers of ignoring it. And here Jesus unveils the height of the Law and the the towering demands true obedience requires. The Pharisees tried to climb these cliffs without so much as a rope. But by faith in Jesus we have a Guide who will navigate us up its sheer walls, and who will even carry us when we are weak, up to the glories of heaven that awaits all those who put their trust in him.
A Higher Law II | Matthew 5:27-37
As Jesus progresses through his Sermon on the Mount, his conscience crippling deconstruction of the law continues. Instead of being told that you must obey the law as the current tradition had taught, Jesus’ teaching so raised the bar that no honest soul on earth could ever boast of their own righteousness again. Beginning with “You have heard it said…”, Jesus recounts the modern interpretation of the most serious breaches of the Law only to suddenly shift to his devastating “But I say…” as he unfolds the unattainable heights of the Law’s demands in order to show his listeners how it condemns everyone.
To the first-century hearer, Jesus’ message must have been astonishing. It’s one thing to restrain oneself from adultery, lying, or taking murderous revenge on one’s neighbor, but it is another thing entirely to be told that the very thoughts of the heart are moral equivalents to the outward act itself. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. To reinforce his points, he goes further, by trying to instill the sense of urgency, fervency and the desperation that one should have in ridding themselves of all sin. To draw attention to the danger, Jesus sprinkles in shocking metaphors about tearing out eyes and sawing off limbs. He grabs their attention by casting down blasphemous superstitions about modern day oath taking and the injustice of the divorce certificate that revealed the hardness of the modern man’s heart.
The Sermon on the Mount proves that Jesus was anything but soft on sin and careless with the requirements of the law. In fact, Jesus was far tougher than his contemporaries – even in the strictest legal sense. And why not? It was God interpreting God’s law. It was God unveiling the depth of his requirements and the heights of his demands.
If any of Jesus’ hearers took these words at face value, while dismissing the hope of the Good News, there would be cause for hopeless despair. Yet this passage represents the heart of the Gospel and the heights of Jesus’ compassion. He is not sugar-coating the Good News for us. Instead, Jesus is elevating its great need by showing how futile rule keeping is one’s own strength. And Jesus is not over-embellishing the serious spiritual danger that his hearers are in, nor is he hiding it. Jesus is trying to bring stiff necks and hard hearts to their knees in order that they might look away from themselves and look to him in faith.
The Law is a necessary light that needs to be shone on us, but it is not a comforter. It can act as a guide or a measuring stick, but it offers us no peace without Jesus. Having Jesus in faith will give us comfort as we read the Law, and it will bring us joy knowing that as we obey it trusting in him it will please him through out faith. But the Law cannot save us without God’s help, and by elevating the demands of the Law, Jesus is trying to show us our futility in trying face the law in our own strength.
Love Your Enemies | Matthew 5:38-48
Jesus’ characterization of the Law has hit its apex. It wasn’t enough to describe the perfect Kingdom worker in a way that no one qualifies, and it wasn’t enough to reveal that the Law condemns the thoughts and intentions of the heart on equal terms with outward actions. Now Jesus has lead us to the summit of the Law’s perfection: loving one’s enemies.
Not being immersed in first-century Judea, it’s hard to imagine the level of hatred the Jews had for the Samaritans, or the contempt they had for the Romans or Gentile pagans living in and around Jerusalem. I suppose in modern terms, it could be described as hating a person of an opposing political ideology, religion or race. But the Jews hatred went beyond our contemporary bigotries or mere theological snobbery. The Jews hatred was on par with the ethnic hatred that plagues the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia today. It was a hatred that spanned hundreds of years and was deeply and culturally ingrained.
Jesus tells his hearers that they must love their enemies in order to fulfill the requirements of the Law, and he reminds them that this is the very heart of their religion. He says that it’s not enough to be simply tolerant, you must love your adversary as you would an old friend, and that you must love your critics as a dear relative. And what’s more, Jesus tells us that you must embrace the insults of your enemies was cheer and welcome their demands by exceeding their expectations.
To a first-century zealot this would have been devastating news. “I have to give double what my enemy asks of me? He persecutes me all day long, then asks me to walk a mile with him, and now I have to go with him two miles? My adversary sues me for my tunic, for no good reason, and I have to give him my cloak as well? Why should I bless this godless pagan who’d just as soon see me dead?”
But when Jesus began recounting that the Father allows the sun to rise and the rain to fall on both the just and unjust, and that to welcome an enemy is to be “perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” Jesus reminds us how we are no better than they and he was describing what the Father has already done for us. As breakers of God’s perfect law, each of us are enemies of the Kingdom of God. God has already shown us undeserved mercy and love, even while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). So in order for us conform to the Law through faith in Jesus, we must love our enemies in the same way we have been loved by God. This is a sure sign of faith, because such a sign shows that the Jesus who loves his enemies happily resides in the one who imitates him by faith from the heart.
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