The Scribes and Pharisees in the gospel passages were not villains in their society; they were the guardians of the identity of their religion and society. They emerged into their strictest form when they saw there was an apparent crisis of their faith and traditions.
Let’s imagine we have got a Dr’s prescription. It may have suggestions on what to do and what not to do, and which medicine to take and how. That is wonderful. This is wonderful—so wonderful, in fact, that we decide to laminate it, frame it, and place it in a golden box. We carry it around, garland it, and offer it incense. This is precisely what the Pharisees were doing.
To prevent breaking any of the Commandments, the Scribes created many fences, many subsidiary regulations, that would protect them. Though well-intended, these often overshadowed the original intention. While the goal was the life and holiness of the people, the result was merely the preservation of the holiness and honor of the Law itself. The written code of law was seen to be the Law of God that would possess the entire heart of God.
Jesus criticised the self-centred, hypocritical, and politically motivated interpretation of the law. It deprived many of their dignity as the children of god. In a shame-honor culture, public adherence to the minute forms of laws had become a source of social capital. They were proven righteous and honored in society. Such perfect following was demanded of all if they were to be worthy of God’s reward. Under the retributive ethics and theology, these well-defined the merit of the privileged and the misery of the vulnerable. The holy ones exercised power over the sinners. They used the Law to create hierarchy rather than holiness. Jesus’ strong critique, “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites…” was not a punishment or curse but a disaster they themselves have caused upon themselves by the very adaptation of the law.
The privilege of having the law also offered a guaranteed possession of ‘the way, truth and life.’ So, the New Testament approach to finding the incapacity of the law to offer life points to Christ as the way truth and the life. There was a serious mistake in identifying the Law as the Logos itself. We must move from Torah-centrism to Logos-centrism. Jesus’ saying, “I have come to fulfil the law” does not mean that he was the one who did everything in its perfect way. “I know the father, I have come to do the will of the father, the father has sent me…” are to be seen as the key for understanding his mode of fulfilling the law.
Jesus repeatedly says, “You have heard it said... but I say to you.” He is not the lawgiver like Moses, he is not an interpreter like the scribes, but he is the law in whom we can see the will of God. He is the path we need to walk, he is the truth of the scriptures, moral values and our very lives, he is the life that we ultimately desire. His drawing on the law was not on ethical perspectives on honour for parents, adultery, lies, and murder, he reorients the very first commandment ‘I am the Lord your God’ as a law-bound legislator to a Father. Ways of honouring God in the temple or in the public sphere, the sabbath etc receives the content of life from the relationship to the Father. There the reward cannot be self-centred, hypocrisy cannot work, and there cannot be any power game. Because all are the children of one Father. His choice of healing on the sabbath was to break the fences the law had created.
When Jesus says your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees, he calls us to be away from self-honouring legalism and grow into the freedom of the children of God. The law had been a guardian or a tutor (Galatians 3:24), but they had made it God. Understanding Christ as the law is the ‘Law of the Spirit of Life’ (Romans 8:2).
Anytime we believe that strict following of the law is like a ladder to go up to God there is a failure. We expect to climb the ladder to bridge the gap to the Divine through our own effort, turning salvation into a wage earned rather than a gift received. It again centres to ourselves, making God a debtor to our goodness and our faithful fulfilling of the law. The call is not just to mimic Jesus but to participate in his life. The ‘Law of Christ’ is not being a good individual, it is being in Him, it is living the beatitudes of the kingdom. We desire and make effort to do it, and grace completes what we are not able to do by our own.
The nature of Christ in us is essentially openness to life and freedom. When someone acts for the good of the other, by working for social justice, by voicing for the marginalized, offering silent forgiveness to an enemy, comforting those in shame, or practicing hospitality to the vulnerable. Its not because one sees them as commanded by God as a condition that God will give a blessing in return. They are expressing the life of Christ that naturally lives for the life of the other. If we can ask, “What does the Love of Christ require in this specific moment?” our attention changes from rigid compliance to active discernment. It is true that we seek intellectual and emotional and even spiritual comforts in definitions. While being lawful is often reduced to adhering to definitions of faith and morals, Christ liberates us into a process of discernment led by grace. Ultimately the practical living of Christ the law is done by self-emptying love. Yet we live in a tension. We are perfected in Christ, yet still struggling through our own gracelessness. So, our life is a constant returning to the union with Christ.
