Am in the studio again this week with Haddon, Alice, and Brian recording Discover the Word conversations. Slowly making our way through the Sermon on the Mount, we spent some time yesterday talking about what Jesus meant when he said, “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:20).
We talked about how perplexing and discouraging that would have been for first century Jewish crowds. Regular people saw the Scribes and Pharisees as being models of extreme commitment to the law of Moses. They also saw them as cultural separatists, radically committed to resisting the corrupting influence of Greek and Roman culture. So people like us would have had reason to say, “If our own teachers of the law aren’t good enough to make it into the kingdom of God, we don’t have a prayer.”
That could have made Jesus “too depressing” to listen to.
But one of the things we keep coming back to in these conversations is that everything after verses 1-12 (in Matthew 5) sits on the foundation of those who our Lord calls “blessed” (lit. i.e. fortunate, happy, well-off, to be congratulated and envied).
What we naturally resist (vv 1-12) turns out to be the secret of discovering “what we don’t deserve on our own merits,” and “what we could never do on our own.”
What Jesus announced as “reason for celebration” draws me back to him again and again. What counts today is not what God expects me to do for him. What matters today is what he wants to do in me.
The question for all of us is whether we will feel needy enough, empty enough, and disillusioned enough with ourselves… and everyone else… to ask God to do in us what only he can do.
When that happens, the kingdom of heaven draws near…as close as the rule of Christ in our hearts… to give us a taste of relationships and a love that far exceeds the skin-deep moralism of the Scribes and Pharisees… and a reason for quiet, calming celebration.
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