Matthew 5 Commentary

The Beatitudes | Matthew 5:1-12

Matthew 5:1-12

Many unsuspecting Christians approach the Beatitudes as they would a personality test. Though they may not be poor in spirit, 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 descriptions about those who will enter his Kingdom, but a description. He is not describing qualities that some of his people may posses and that others will not. Jesus is giving a description of the attributes of the most plain, most ordinary Christian who will spend eternity with him.

The average Christian is humble, but they 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 a merciful people, but they are also unselfishly caring without an agenda.  They are a people who seek peace, but they expect persecution because their character stands so frighteningly different than the world.

Jesus opened his famous sermon describing what his people will look like because he was describing himself.  Since the Christian has Jesus living inside them, it is only natural that they look like him in every aspect he describes, not just one or two.  So the Beatitudes describe the Christian fully and they serve as warning for all pretenders.

Salt & Light | Matthew 5:13-16

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.

Jesus Fulfilled the Law | Matthew 5:17-20

Matthew 5:17-20

Looking 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 and that we are free to live as we please. It is also just as easy to emphasize only the first part of the verse, and so believe that Jesus meant that we are to strictly adhere to the rules and regulations that fill the pages of the Old Testament. For 2,000 years, Christians have wrestled over these divides – where faith ends and obedience begins or where obedience begins and faith ends – and for 2,000 years we have made a mess of things.

But Jesus favors neither interpretation. First, he is emphatic in the passage that the Law will not disappear and that it is eternal. Second, he is just as emphatic in letting us know that our good conduct must exceed that of the greatest rule keepers of all, the Pharisees and teachers of the law. Yet if the greatest of all rule keepers fall short, what hope is there for anyone?

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 an escape from it by paving a way through it, a way through Jesus himself.

The Law is the guide to the character and standards of God in a Kingdom that transcends this world. It is the cultural norm of Kingdom people. It is the ethical essence of heaven, the ethos of God’s transcendent world.

Faith in Jesus is the access to this transcendence. In Jesus, we walk into the Law because through rebirth 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 because it now lives inside of us in the Jesus that lives inside of us.

A Higher Law | Matthew 5:21-26

Matthew 5:21-26

Our sins are merely the ugly expressions of our root unbelief in Jesus. And I say merely not to diminish the horrors we set in motion through them, or as if their stench before God should be thought of as any less. 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 itself. Instead, I say merely because our outward sins are small compared to the sin factory that lies within us.

And this 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 and are only detectable when our outward sins occasionally leak out their existence from the self-righteous clamps we use to conceal them; it is these roots that need to be killed.

This is why Jesus went about explaining the Law as a thing that could not be grasped by human hands. It was one thing for the hypocrites, who paraded their self-righteousness around, to describe the Law as a thing that could be perfectly kept. But it was quite another to hear that God considered thoughts, feelings and motives of the heart as sins, even far greater sins, than outward acts of evil.

Suddenly, Jesus is making sin all about matters of the heart. 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.

Jesus reinforced his claim that his mission was to come and fulfill the law, to fulfill all righteousness by humbly sacrificing himself on a cross, so that through him, an escape for all sins committed under the Law could be found while true righteousness could be grasped. But no one will ever take hold of a remedy if they are not first shown the dangers in ignoring it. And here Jesus unveils the full reach of the Law and the depths of the obedience that it 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, and who will even carry us when we are weak, through the most perilous stretches that can never be climbed by human will, strength or understanding.

A Higher Law II | Matthew 5:27-37

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 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 the requirements of the law. In fact, he was far tougher than his contemporaries in a strict legalistic sense. And why not? It was God interpreting God’s law. It was God unveiling the depth of its requirements and the heights of its demands.

If any of Jesus’ hearers took just 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 in one’s own strength. 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 is a guide, but it offers us no peace without Jesus. Believing Jesus in faith can give us comfort as we read the law, and it will bring us joy as we obey it. 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

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. This hatred spanned hundreds of years and was deeply and culturally seeded.

Now Jesus tells his hearers that they must love their enemies in order to fulfill the requirements of the Law, the very heart of their religion. Jesus says that it’s not enough to be simply tolerant. You must love your adversary as an old friend. You must love your critics as a dear relative. And what’s more, you must embrace their insults and welcome their demands to such extent that you not just meet them, but greatly exceed their expectations.

To the first-century zealot this is devastating news. “I have to give double what my enemy asks of me? He persecutes me all day long asks me to walk a mile with him, and now I have to go two? He 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?”

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” 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.

And such a love is not only a sign of faith, but a sign that the Jesus who loves his enemies resides in the heart.

Tagged as: Beatitudes, Christian, Jesus, Kingdom of Heaven