Matt Woodley tells the story of observing a baseball match
one day. Where one of the coaches gets angry when the umpire’s call goes
against his team. The coach gets into a heated argument with the umpire as only
they can in baseball…complaining bitterly that the umpire has got it wrong… He
gets right into the umpire’s face…but the umpire will not budge…finally in
frustration the coach yelled “that’s just your interpretation of the rule”. To
which the umpire replied “Interpretation!
No, I wrote the rule book!”… the coach went quite, headed back to the
dugout, turned to the crowd and said ‘get a hold of that guy. He wrote the rule
book’ and reluctantly but calmly got on with the game.
Commenting on the passage we had read out from Matthew 5 today
Woodley states …”Jesus is saying when it come to the Old Testament, he wrote
the rule book.’ Jesus..” claims to offer the only correct interpretation of the
Hebrew scriptures… and either this man is pomous and ludicrous on a scale
unknown to the Jewish people, or he is none other than the long awaited
Messiah, God’s mouthpiece. Either this man must be stopped, or we must stop
everything …and follow Him.”
Today I’m going to finish my series on Jesus Introduction to
the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve looked at the beatitudes, that great
pronouncement of kingdom blessing and welcome, last week we looked at Jesus
calling his disciples salt and light, that the kingdom life they possessed
would have a profound affect on the whole world. Today we are finishing off
with Jesus saying I haven’t come to do away with the law and the prophets but
to fulfil them. The law, the torah, the first five books of the bible and the
prophets is how the jew’s referred to heir scriptures, what we call the Old
testament. This saying leads into the
body of Jesus sermon. When I planned this year, we were not sure that we were
going to Whangarei, so I had planned to continue through the Sermon on the
Mount after Easter… but this seems a good place to stop.
Also, today is Palm Sunday and we remember and celebrate
Jesus entry into Jerusalem, and we had Matthew’s account of that read this
morning. The two in my humble opinion
dovetail nicely together; ‘the humble king who fulfils the law’. Palm Sunday
points us to Jesus as the messiah, God’s chosen king, humbly coming to
Jerusalem, to inaugurate his kingdom, not with a grand coronation, amidst
fanfares and festivities, but given a crown of thorns and dying on a roman
cross, amidst ridicule and rejection. This upside-down kingdom, is the kingdom
that Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, tells us how to live out… even in the
face of such opposition and violence. We are going to explore that and then tie
it together with some thoughts as to how it relates to us today… and there is
sermon bingo… so It’s kind of crazy.
Matthew as a first century Jew sees Jesus, the messiah, as
not only fulfilling the law and prophets in his teaching and embodiment of that
teaching, but also in his life itself, what happens to him.. Matthew’s favourite words seem to be ‘this
was done to fulfil what was said through the prophets’ and right in the middle
of Matthew’s account of Jesus telling his disciples to go and find a donkey tied
up with its colt… Matthew tells us that this and Jesus riding that donkey into
Jerusalem, was done to fulfil the scriptures. To show us that Jesus is the
messiah, God’s chosen king. From Zechariah 9:9 ‘Daughter Zion, see your king
comes gentle and riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey’.
The actions of the disciples reinforce that. The disciples
had an expectation that Jesus was the messiah. They threw their outer cloaks on
the road in front of him. This was a custom which is mentioned in 2 kings 9 when
Jehu is anointed king of Israel, his soldiers and commanders, throw their
garments before him. Maybe we catch something of that in English history, with
sir Walter Raleigh, supposedly laying his cloak before queen Elizabeth. Palm
branches reflected the royal psalm and were placed before judas Maccabee when
he triumphantly came to Jerusalem 200 years previously after defeating the
pagan forces that occupied the city and land. Which was the last time there was
an independent Jewish state till 1949. These actions were accompanied by words
from Psalm 118 that express that messianic hope ‘hosanna’ save us God! Which we
used for our call to worship this morning.
Both, Jehu and Judas
Maccabee were seen as messiahs freeing Israel from dark times and pagan worship.
But Jesus shows us that his kingship, his messiah ship is different. He didn’t
come as a warrior on a mighty steed The donkey was a working persons animal, a
peasants beast not a kings… AS NT Wright puts it ‘ they wanted a prophet, but
this one would tell them this city was under God’s imminent judgement, they
wanted a messiah, but this one was going to be enthroned on a pagan cross, they
wanted to be rescued from evil and oppression, but Jesus was going to rescue
them from evil in its full depth, not just the surface evil of roman occupation
and the exploitation by the rich.” They wanted a messiah who would over throw
this worlds system ad replace it with God’s Kingdom, but Jesus Kingdom would
come through sacrificial love and radical obedience.
The book of Deuteronomy foreshadows a time when Israel would
want a king. in chapter 18, it says before the king is crowned he is to write
out the law on a scroll, which he is to keep and read all the days of his life,
so that his rule and reign will be a living out of God’s law for the people of
Israel. The writing of the law means that he had time to study it, understand
it and for it to speak to his very heart. The problem is that even David was
unable to keep it fully… But Jesus the coming King kept it and fulfil it his
kingdom. Both the law and the prophets as they had applied the law in a timely
manner to their time and place.
That leads us back to what Jesus had said at the start of
the sermon on the mount.
So Jesus says hey don’t even think that I’ve come to do away
with the law or the prophets, rather I’ve come to fulfil it. Jesus reaffirms that by saying that not even
an iota, which was the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, or a jot, or dot,
which were accents used to distinguish between letters that looked alike. For
my grammatically astute friends, diacritical marks, used to distinguish between
similar looking and sounding letters. They are the dots in red in the Hebrew
verse from genesis behind me on the screen.
Jesus goes further to say, that if anyone does not keep the
least commandment of the law they will be the least in the kingdom of God. In
fact our righteousness needs be greater than the pharisees and the scribes of
the law. The people in Jesus day who were the rock stars of righteousness when
it came to keeping the law.
See we need to look at this and look at how this applies to
us. I want to make three points.
The first is that Jesus is telling us that the Hebrew
scriptures the law and the prophets are important and essential for Christians,
for his followers. I’ve often heard it said well that’s the Old Testament, we
live by the New, or that the Old Testament is somehow redundant, particularly
the law. But that is not how Jesus saw it. There is a consistency and
continuity in the story of God’s dealing with humanity through history, which
is important. I remember Ian Grant, the head of YFC in New Zealand saying the
Old Testament gives us the God frame, the big picture that allows us to
understand Jesus, his person, his life and his grace. It tells us of a creator
God, committed to reconciling fallen humanity to himself, a God faithful to his covenant relationship
with his people, a god who seeks justice, and calls those who are his people to
live that out, but shows mercy and patience, the god who is sovereign in
history, and working out his plans and purposes… As we’ve been looking at the
beatitudes, we see that Jesus imagining of the kingdom of God is very much the
fulfilment of the prophets hope for a restored Israel. The law sets out for us
how we are to connect with God and with one another.
The difficulty for people down through the ages has been how
to make that connection, what does it mean for us, what does it mean about
Christians and the laws? Paul talks of grace not law? The first Christian
controversy and council wrestled with those very questions, how Jewish did
gentiles have to be as they became followers of Jesus. In the reformation,
salvation by faith alone, rather than good works, and right rituals. Even today
how do we look at many of the old testament passages in a changing
understanding of the world and what it means to be human. Big questions?
Secondly, in this passage Jesus gives us the key for how to
understand the scriptures. They are to seen and understand through Jesus, the
messiah, the son of David in which they are fulfilled. We look at them through
the lens of Jesus, his person and his teaching. the sacrificial law do not
apply to us anymore because Jesus himself fulfilled the requirement of paying
the price for our sin. We do not come
under the need for circumcision because Jesus has bought us all into God’s
family through faith, not physical lineage, the food laws do not apply to us
because we are ingrafted into God’s family by Christ beyond those rules, the
moral laws still form the basis of our ethical living, but as you see in the
sermon on the mount Jesus pulls them away from many of the interpretations and misunderstandings
that had been built around them. Ho we live it out has been shown to us as
Jesus has embodied them in sacrificial love, generosity, grace and integrity.
Then lastly, Jesus tells us our righteousness should be
greater than that of the pharisees and the scribes of the law. Now he’s not
saying that because they set a low standard they didn’t they set a very high
standard. So much so that they built a whole structure around the law, what
they called a hedge so that people would stay away from even coming close to
breaking the law.
That greater righteousness, however, does speak about how we
live out the ethical requirements of the law and our faith. The pharisees were
known for the outward keeping of the law, cleanness of hands, but Jesus was
looking at a cleanness of heart. In the Old Testament the prophets talk of God
dealing with the problem of the heart by giving us a new heart, and Jesus is
speaking of living that life out of that new heart. Not just the letter of the
law, and remember the purpose of law is to limit evil, but rather the spirit
behind the law: which is reflecting the love and character of God in all we do.
Paul talks of the spirit behind the law as the Holy Spirit and our walking with
that spirit it as the fruit of the Holy
Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness,
faithfulness, and self-control. It’s not
the limiting of evil by the law it’s an explosion of goodness as we encounter
and come to know God in Christ by the Holy Spirit. John Wimber in the introduction to the book
riding the third wave says the church is full of people embrace legalism, that
replace external law to replace heartfelt obedience to God’s Word.
What Jesus is calling us to is a radical internalisation, it
is as we come to know the one who wrote the book and his forgiveness and mercy
that we want to live that out in life… It is why the sermon on the mount starts
with God’s blessings of welcome and inclusion… It is why in his sermon Jesus will go on to speak of six
areas of the law which have been misinterpret and turn our thinking and our
hearts to what God wants sacrificial love, for even our enemies, faithfulness
and integrity in relationships, generosity born of trust in God’s provision, a
spirituality that comes out of deep knowing of God, not simple ritual and
rite. He will conclude that sermon by
saying that Kingdom living is about hearing Jesus words and putting them into
action in our lives…9clcik for words to come up on the screen) to get hold of this guy… he is God’s humble
king and saviour who loves us so deeply… ‘get a hold of this guy because he wrote the
rule book’...
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