This upcoming Sunday’s Gospel reading is an introduction of sorts to the core of the Sermon on the Mount, the weighty chunk of ethical material that Jesus will deal with in Matthew 5:17-7:12. Here Jesus touches on issues relating to marriage, giving to the poor, prayer, fasting, and judging others. All of this teaching is directed toward one end: the kingdom of God. What does it look like, substantially? If we want to live there, how must we comport ourselves – how do we bend our hearts and our bodies to follow its course?
Jesus’ disciples weren’t clueless about what God wanted from them. They had the Law, which God had given to their ancestors. And the Law was not merely ceremonial. From the very beginning it was understood that the sincere foundation of the Law was love of God: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5). So what new thing were the disciples looking for from Jesus, and what could it mean for him to say that he came to “fulfill” the Law?
A couple of ideas come to mind when we ask what the disciples might have been looking for. First, they probably weren’t looking for anything too different from what we are looking for each Sunday when we settle back to hear Scripture read and expounded upon. These disciples had sacred writings that they believed to be true. They sought out authoritative teachers to help them break into and explore the inexhaustible meaning of these texts. Jesus was such a prophetic teacher, and as with all prophets, the power of his words depended on the power of his person. But Jesus was more than a divine mouthpiece – he was the Son of God. His teaching revealed the will of God and his life enfleshed the love of God. So a second way of approaching the question, “What were they looking for?” might be that they weren’t necessarily looking for anything until they met Jesus. And just as he broke the Scriptures to his disciples, he broke his disciples open to the Scriptures.
To say that Jesus fulfills the Law, particularly in the context of Matthew’s Gospel, does not mean that he eradicates it, or that he stands over against it. We might say that Jesus fulfills the Law in the sense of keeping it, and in so doing he honors the Law (another way of fulfilling it). M. Eugene Boring, in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, notes that the book’s author views all of Scripture (the Pentateuch and the Prophets) as prophetic, and therefore future-oriented. Another word for this is eschatological, or having to do with ultimate things. Jesus, therefore, doesn’t supplant or replace the Law, but is the person (the event?) that the Law has been moving toward, or longing for. Again, the foundation of the Law is love of God and Jesus is God’s love. He represents the Law’s end in the fullest sense, then: its ultimate purpose and its ultimate goal.
(Danielle Thompson)
