Being counter-cultural in Matthew 5 – the Law and the Prophets

Let’s read Matthew 5:17-20

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. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven

These verses come straight after what Jesus has already said about the need to be salt and light. He taught his followers that they needed to stand out from the world around them, to both ‘taste’ and ‘look’ different, in a way that would bring honour and glory to God, rather than to themselves.

The term I am using to describe this is “counter-cultural”.

In these verses here, Jesus made it clear to those seated around him – his fellow Jews – that being counter-cultural did not mean abandoning their Jewish faith or identity. He was not suggesting that they throw away the Jewish scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) and replace them with something entirely new. Jesus himself believed in the Old Testament scriptures and understood that many of the promises God had made in those books were actually talking about him. He was the fulfilment of those promises, as he said in v17.

For Jesus, the Old Testament with all of its laws and warnings and promises was an essential part of God’s story. It wasn’t, however, the entire story on its own. If you are familiar with the book of Romans, you may know that Paul explains what the purpose of the Old Testament law was. It wasn’t to give God’s people a rulebook that would cover every possible circumstance in their lives. Nor was it to give them a checklist of things to do in order to earn eternal life.

Rather, its purpose was to teach the people that they were sinners who had failed to live up to God’s standards and couldn’t achieve eternal life on their own. Nevertheless God loved them and was willing to forgive them their sins and give them eternal life as a gift, not as an earned reward.

This wasn’t a case of God scrambling around for a contingency plan when all of his people failed to obey him, and hitting upon the idea of sending Jesus as a sacrifice. Jesus was never Plan B. Jesus was always Plan A. God knew all along that his people would fail him and that Jesus’ sacrifice would be needed. That’s why there are so many promises about it in the Old Testament.

Your repentance of your sins and God’s willingness to forgive you are the ONLY things that make eternal life possible for you.

Repentance, true repentance, isn’t just a matter of saying sorry. It isn’t even just a matter of saying sorry and meaning it. It’s a commit to completely change your way of thinking and the direction of your life from that point onward.

Jesus called us to be visibly counter-cultural not simply because it’s a good way to communicate his message to the world, but also because it shows that we’ve genuinely been converted and changed by that message ourselves. The demonstration of your transformed life should serve as evidence to anyone you meet that this is message is true and actually works.

Yet true repentance can only happen if you first reach that conclusion which the Old Testament was intended to teach. Namely that you will not and cannot ever be good enough on your own.

And that is not a conclusion which the world we live in wishes to hear. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of what Western culture wants to teach you and your children. The overwhelming message from Western intellectuals and media is that you are good enough. You are perfect the way you are. You don’t need to change. You should embrace your unique self and celebrate your identity and never be ashamed of who and what you are.

Now this can perhaps be useful advice to give someone who is suffering from extremely low self esteem, but as a foundational principle for life it’s the exact opposite of what God says. A person who believes they are good enough just as they are is unlikely to ever repent or change. It may be impossible for them to truly turn from their sins and transform their lives as radically as Jesus wants us all to do.

This is one major challenge we face as Christians in 2024. It’s not easy, in this Western culture, to tell people that they’re not good enough and need to turn to God. It might feel negative or needlessly pessimistic. It might feel as if we’re risking damaging people’s self-esteem. It seems certain to offend large numbers of people.

This is one example of what it means to be counter-cultural. It’s not easy. The culture we live in has its own ideas of what is good and true, and often these don’t agree with what God says.

And if we do or teach what God says is good and true, we run the risk that people may see us as the bad guys in this modern world. We may be called bigotted or intolerant or hateful or narrow-minded.

Modern culture long ago moved past the point when Christians were seen as generally good and decent people. Nowadays we are expected to keep our mouths shut in public and practice our faith in private if at all. This world does not want to hear about the problem of sin or the need for repentance.

Jesus, of course, knew this all too well. He was hated by powerful and influential people within his culture, largely because his teaching of God’s word did not agree with what they wanted to hear about themselves.

In Matthew 5:20 he said something that his Jewish audience would have found absolutely shocking. Namely that unless they proved themselves to be more righteous than the Pharisees and teachers of the law, they wouldn’t receieve eternal life.

Now if you are familiar with the New Testament, that statement might not strike you as particularly controversial. It’s well-known that Jesus publicly denounced the Pharisees for being hypocritical, or for focussing too much on minutiae and forgetting what really mattered, or for displaying virtue that was only skin-deep.

Yes at this early stage in his teaching career, he hadn’t said any of those things yet. His original listeners would have been shocked at the idea that they needed to surpass the Pharisees?

Why? Because they saw the Pharisees as something akin to spiritual ‘superheroes’ of their day. The Pharisees were known to be meticulously obedient to the Old Testament law, and to be faithful to God, unlike the Sadducees who were happy to collaborate with the occupying Roman authorities in order to maintain their own cushy lives.

To ordinary religious Jews it would have sounded as if Jewish was telling them they needed to outdo their superheroes if they wanted to be saved. It would be almost like a person today being told they needed to be stronger than Superman, or cleverer and more resourceful than Batman, or faster than the Flash. That is quite literally impossible! Those guys have (entirely fictional) superpowers (or in Batman’s case, entirely fictional huge amounts of money and spare time….)

That’s not what Jesus was saying. Remember, his whole point was that eternal life could not be earned and there is no way we or anyone else can be good enough on our own.

What was he saying? He was calling them to do what most of the Pharisees could not do – and what most people in our world cannot do either – to humble themselves and accept that they weren’t good enough, to turn to God and ask to be forgiven.

That’s the starting point for becoming a Christian, for having a transformed life that can be tasted and seen in the wider world like salt and light.

In the next verses Jesus began to give specific examples of how his followers were to be transformed people. He took teachings from the Jewish law and, instead of dismissing them, actually explained how keeping them faithfully was a lot harder than simply obeying them at face value.

We’ll start to look at that next time.