Friday in the First Week of Lent, February 23, 2024

Matthew 5, 20-26

Jesus said to his disciples: “I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.  You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, Raqa, will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna. Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court. Otherwise your opponent will hand you over to the judge, and the judge will hand you over to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Amen, I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.”

The Lord Jesus did not offer himself to the Jews as merely an alternative to the Pharisees, in terms of his teaching, but as one who came to restore the Mosaic Law to what it actually said.  The Pharisees had interpreted the Law through the prism of the Temple and the purity and other precepts governing it.  They also brought the Law “up to date” to a population that was no longer mainly nomadic by extrapolating from the original law, thus creating the “precepts of men” that the Lord so much opposed.  In effect, the Pharisees made it very hard to carry out Jewish duties.  At the same time, they did not teach much on the moral laws, as distinct from the laws regarding ritual purity and things of this kind.  Part of the appeal of Jesus as a teacher came from his stripping away this accretions that the Pharisees held up as the true meaning of the Law.

When the Lord Jesus says to the crowd, “I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven”, he is insisting that the people need to follow the Law as God gave it to Moses, and as Moses gave it to the people.  They could hear it — and the Prophets — read out in the synagogues so that they could know it, and they were to follow it without falling into the ways of the Pharisees.  Their teachings on righteousness made righteousness nearly impossible for the average Jew and for anyone but themselves, but their teachings were wrong.  Righteousness was within the grasp of any Jew who carried out the Law in his life — the righteousness that was possible for the Jews before the time of grace, at any rate.  And the Lord prepares them to receive grace by instructing them correctly on how to follow the Law.  He has established by his miracles, which were only possible by the power of God, that he has the authority to teach the Law, whereas the Pharisees have no real standing to do this.  They were not appointed by the high priests to teach, nor did they have anything to do with the Temple authorities and the governance of the Jews.  Indeed, their sect only arose in Israel a couple of hundred years before.  It was certainly not inaugurated by Moses.  It is, in fact, just another emperor without his clothes on.

There are many cultural forces and self-important persons which strive to tell us how to live in society, and even as Christians.  They attempt to foist their pathologies on us and to call these “normal” or normative.  But there is only one Christ, and he calls us to a salvation that cannot be surpassed.  We, his sheep, know his shepherd’s voice, for it rings out through the Church.  These forces and people are the new Pharisees whose moral code sometimes uses Christian terms, but in ways at odds with their true meaning.  They would have us think that theirs is the only ethics, the only morality, but it benefits only themselves.  The difficulty in following their shifting code makes life and even language impossible, but the new Pharisees mock and try to destroy those who fail.  Let us, for our part, listen to and follow the Lord Jesus, who is the only Way, the only Truth, and the only Life.

A final note on this Reading: “Whoever says to his brother, Raqa, will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.”  In the Greek text we can see that Matthew quotes Jesus as using two words fool”, the Aramaic Raqa and the Greek moros.  The point Jesus makes is that whatever language we speak we should not call our brother or sister “fool”.