Jonah Albrecht…Trinity 6…Matthew 5:20-26…Is Your Righteousness the Best?

May the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. ²¹ “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ ²² But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. ²³ So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, ²⁴ leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. ²⁵ Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. ²⁶ Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

INJ Whose perfect righteousness has fulfilled the demands of the Law in your place DFR:

When you think of the best, who comes to mind? Usually it is someone who has set such a high standard that, unless someone overtakes that standard, they are not even in the conversation. Someone like Kevin Fast fits the mold as the best. He is a strongman who pulled a 416,299 lb. airplane a distance of 28 ft and 10.64 inches. Maybe you’d think of someone like Cal Ripken Jr. who played in 2,632 consecutive games in the MLB. These are select few people that are truly in a league of their own – greater than any of their peers. Their achievements cement their legacy for all of history to remember.

Let’s go beyond feats of human strength or endurance. Who is the best when it comes to character, or righteousness. This is a harder metric to prove because what is good and right is so subjective to the world. Nevertheless, history has provided some extraordinary people who are widely considered to be good. You could point to many of the founding fathers, or philosophers of history who promoted good morals. This morning, our focus is not on the accolades of historic people. Today we are talking about you and your righteousness.

Our theme for this Sunday is: Is Your Righteousness the Best? 1. The Bible tells us that it is required. 2. Jesus tells us it is offered to you.

I mentioned just a bit ago that righteousness is a hard metric to prove because it can be subjective. Well, that is only the case if you don’t have a standard provided by someone who is righteous and holy. We have that and it was read as the Old Testament text earlier in the service: In the 10 Commandments we have the whole of God’s standard that constitutes true righteousness. We can further break the 10 Commandments down into two parts. The first table, commandments 1-3 judge our relationship with God. The second table, commandments 4-10, judge our relationship with other people. If anyone were to keep every single commandment, every single day of their lives, they would be righteous.

So, the question persists, is your righteousness the best? And our Savior provides us with some direction to answer this question in honesty. He says, For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Let me remind you of the context of this verse. Jesus is in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount where He is addressing His disciples. All of them were Jewish. They grew up learning the Jewish Law – the Torah and idolizing the scribes and the Pharisees.

It wasn’t just the disciples, but every Jew did this. They looked up to these experts in the Law because they lived their lives to a standard of righteousness that far-exceeded everyone else. It wasn’t just the 10 Commandments that they adhered to, but hundreds of extra laws and traditions that they added to safeguard themselves from breaking God’s Law. Extra rules on tithing and fasting twice a week. If anyone could be considered righteous before God, in the eyes of man, it would be the Pharisees.

But Jesus says that your righteousness must exceed even that of the scribes and Pharisees. You must be better than the best. What makes Jesus say this? Because elsewhere in the Gospels He chastises the Pharisees for their traditions and extra laws saying, in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. But here, He uses them as a stepping stone for the righteousness that will get someone into heaven. Well, in the first place, Jesus is not lauding the “righteousness” of the Pharisees. He is actually calling them out. He is saying to His disciples, “You see those that everyone thinks is the most righteous? It is not good enough to get you into heaven. Their righteousness fails them.”

The righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees failed because they viewed God’s Law the same way so many in our world today view it, and yes, even how we are tempted to view it. This is borne out in the example Jesus gives on the fifth commandment.

²¹ “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ ²² But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.

You recognize that first part as the wording of the fifth commandment. You shall not murder. As far as the Pharisees were concerned, that was as far as the fifth commandment went. Refrain from killing anyone and you have kept the fifth commandment. That is how it worked with all the commandments. As long as you don’t fully commit adultery, you keep the 6^th; don’t steal and you keep the 7^th, etc. It is a shallow understanding of God’s Law – an understanding that only wins you the righteousness of man and not the righteousness of God that actually saves.

Jesus then explains what is the proper understanding of the fifth commandment. Notice the authority with which He speaks. But I say to you… He isn’t adding to the Word of God because it wasn’t clear, rather in what He says next, He is restoring the true understanding of the Law God gave to Moses. The fifth commandment isn’t just about committing murder, but it also governs the sins of the mind and the sins of the heart.

Jesus displays how anger in the heart can quickly metastasize into other sins of the tongue. Sin always leads to more sin and the Law of God governs all, especially the origin of all sin – that which rises up in the heart. So no, it is not enough to simply avoid murder, but to achieve a righteousness worthy of heaven, there must be a drought of hatred and impurity in the heart and mind.

Is your righteousness the best? No. There is a reason the Pharisees limited the fulfillment of the commandments to just the outward acts, and we do the same. It’s because that is the only hope we have of ever coming close to being righteous. We can’t control the sins of the heart; they rise up without a notice. Jeremiah writes, the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it? Our failure to keep God’s Law in check does not negate the purity the Law demands. God doesn’t say, “Well, you got close enough, I’ll take it.” Any failure to keep the Law in the heart, mind, or body results in judgment. And, as Jesus says, ²⁵ Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. ²⁶ Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

So where is the Good News? Did Jesus not come to bring Good News to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the prison to those who are bound; (Isa. 61:1) as Isaiah prophesied? Yes, He did, and despite this section appearing as all condemning Law, that is what leads us to the Gospel. Jesus shatters any notion that righteousness that avails for salvation can come from our own works. But it must come from somewhere – it Jesus says it is a gift from God.

Just three verses before out text, Jesus prefaces the whole section with these words, 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. In other words, He did not come here to destroy the Law so that the burden of keeping it was no longer required. That could not happen or else man’s wickedness would grow far worse than it already is. Instead, Jesus’ purpose was to fulfill the Law of God in the place of those who could not.

That is exactly what He did. Though we are not given every detail of Jesus’ life, we are given assurances from God that He lived without sin. Two times God the Father declared with witnesses, This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased. Jesus’ life was God-approved. His heart, mind, and body all aligned perfectly under God’s Law.

That was the first step in God’s plan to reconcile you to Himself. Jesus obtained a perfect righteousness to be freely given to those who believe – a purely whole righteousness that would replace the sin-stained rags of our own righteousness. But that all. There remained the problem of those whose records before God were blotted in sin – who have transgressed against God’s Law.

That is what led Jesus to the cross. Paul brings this out beautifully in our Epistle Lesson this morning: ⁶ We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin (Rom. 6:6). Every time your righteousness was not the best, but was in fact the worst of the worst, Jesus took that failed righteousness upon Himself and suffered the punishment for it. By becoming your substitute, Jesus took you with Him your sin, guilt and shame, and there were you crucified with Him. Your sin becoming His and your suffering of Hell becoming His suffering.

Every last cent that you owed for sins against your brother, or against God, Jesus paid for. Hell is closed to you because you are sealed with a righteousness given by the blood of God Himself. And now your righteousness is no longer tainted by sin, but because of your Savior, Your righteousness, gifted by God, is the best. It is worthy of eternal life in heaven.

The way God gives you Jesus’ righteousness is, in itself a miracle. Going back to Romans 6: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

In Baptism, God has crowned you with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He drowned your sinful flesh and, in its place, gave you a new heart, a new mind, a new spirit that walks with God on a daily basis. This new spirit seeks to fulfill the commandments of God in their entirety. Not because you must earn something by it, but out of love and thankfulness to God for all that He has given you through Jesus Christ.

Although our sinful flesh has been put to death, and we are alive in Christ to walk in newness of life, we can still fall into sin, can’t we? – We are even more aware of it now than we were before our salvation. What that means is your life in Christ needs to be constantly fed by His Word. Jesus gives us the most practical example. ²³ So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, ²⁴ leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. When we sin, seek for reconciliation. Most importantly with God, but also with those whom we have sinned against that the assurance of God’s forgiveness would bring us peace.

I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think any one of us will ever be better than Cal Ripken Jr. He was simply better at the game of baseball than any of us combined – better even than anyone else in all of baseball history in longevity. The same is true with our righteousness. We, on our own, will never have the best righteousness. But Jesus does. His righteousness is enough for you and for anyone who calls upon His name. And because you call upon His name, Your righteousness is the best. Amen.