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Righteousness that Surpasses the Scribes and Pharisees

In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave His followers extended, detailed instructions about life in the kingdom of God.  He started with the Beatitudes, describing “blessedness” in terms those hearing Him had never heard before.  Lest they begin to think that He was completely overturning all they knew about life as God’s people, Jesus reassured them:  “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.  I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”  What did He mean?

In this Sermon, Jesus reveals that God’s law always aimed at the heart.  It was meant to lead His people into true righteousness and, thus, true happiness.  However, in their long history, the Jews learned how hard it was to keep the law that way, from the heart.  Their obedience was externalized (when it was there at all) to such a degree that by Jesus’ day, the religious elites (scribes and Pharisees) were regularly guilty of hypocrisy and hearts so hard that they could not recognize Jesus as God’s Messiah.  This problem didn’t appear overnight, of course.  Hundreds of years earlier, the prophet, Jeremiah, declared that God would someday make a new covenant with His people, because they failed so miserably to keep the first one:  “But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord:  I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts” (see Jer 31:31-34).  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins to explain what that promise meant.

Using the phrase, “you have heard that it was said,” repeatedly, Jesus tells us that keeping the law of God must begin in the heart, fully embracing the intention of the law, as well as its specific direction.  Therefore, the law that prohibits killing is the external expression of an internal law aimed at love and respect for neighbor.  It is not enough to refrain from killing someone who has wronged us.  Letting anger smolder within us, making judgments about people, and even slandering them verbally all violate the intention of the law against killing (murder starts in the heart).  This is certainly righteousness that “surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees.”

Jesus comments on other parts of the law, both the Ten Commandments (“you shall not commit adultery”) and the Mosaic law.  The latter were temporal statutes given by Moses to govern the national life of Israel, such as divorce; they were meant to restrain sin in hard-hearted people.  In every case, He looks to the heart, not just the external behavior.  If the people listening to him began to wonder how their hearts could ever be good enough to live this way, then His Sermon was hitting the mark.

Read more at Catholic Exchange 

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