This article was first published in Jan 2009

By the time that we reach chapter 4 and Jesus is led off into the desert for forty days, the reader of Matthew is agog with emotion. The gospel may have announced the Messiah, but – reading over forty years later – every Jew who listened to these words was overwhelmed with the reality of Roman religious oppression. Jerusalem’s temple was destroyed in 70 CE – an iconic statement of apocalyptic demise – and imperial persecution had intensified, for Jew and Christian alike. According to Josephus, over a million Jews perished during the siege of Jerusalem. The future of Jewish religion hung in the balance.

What options existed for the peasant Jew on the hillsides of Galilee? Religion offered nothing, only repression; Roman military muscle flexed against the establishment while the travelling bands of hyper-conservative Pharisees promulgated rules galore as the only valid plea against Yahweh’s silence. When people live without any real freedom their psychological wellbeing is tested to the limit.

As if to escape this crushing depression Jesus is led into the desert of Judea. Three chances to take control of his frugal circumstances are offered, but each is rejected. The temptation to force through change and gain the whole world is not something Jesus will do; it is at the risk of losing his soul, tantamount to suicide (or the throwing of oneself off the roof of the Temple). Instead – and this is where the fun really starts – he journeys back up north to backwaters of the province and gathers a motley crew of misfits and rebels; nobodies who could change the world.

This is the oft-ignored backdrop to the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5–7), arguably Jesus’ most famous teaching. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, he begins. Blessed –‘at peace’, ‘happy’, ‘whole’ – are those whose outlook right now is bleak. ‘Blessed are the mourning,’ Jesus continues, unfazed, ‘and blessed are those who are sold on righteousness, a justice that’s birthed from the tears of mercy. No ordinary message is finding voice here; this is the downtrodden dreamers’ invitation to imagine.

But all this is resolutely set in the context of a case for Jewish credibility. Chapters 1 – 3 portray Jesus as the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophets; chapter 4 extends this further. Here in chapter 5, with a new kind of teaching unlocking chains in the Galilean psyche, the master-narrator, Matthew, sets to work on his readers.

‘Don’t think I’ve come to abolish the Law’, says Jesus. ‘I haven’t come to abolish it, but to fulfil it. Not the smallest jot, not the tinyest tittle, will disappear from the Law, until everything is accomplished.’ (vs.17–18). In the course of the last two millennia the number of human hours given over to these few verses is beyond estimation. For they confound every reader at every turn. Whichever way you look at these words they refuse to give up their meaning; we are always seeing, but never perceiving, always hearing, but never understanding.

But what if that is the point? What if Matthew sets out to confound? With the fierce Jewish elite on the one hand and the explosion of Christianity among the gentiles on the other, Matthew faced an impossible challenge. To set the following of Jesus within its true Jewish roots took some resolute creativity. To reject the Law and the Prophets was to guarantee religious alienation, not to mention the miscommunication of Jesus’ reshaping message. But to endorse the Law and the Prophets, well that would mean endorsing the Pharisees and Sadducees. So Matthew continues… ‘anyone who practices and teaches these commands will be great in the kingdom of heaven. For unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law (Sadducees), you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven’ (vs.19–20).

To the religious nobody, the meek Galilean, mourning their oppression and broken in spirit, Matthew tells of Jesus’ hope-filled ‘law’. A religion deeper than the Pharisees’ charade of outward legalism. A law more robust even than Moses’. Jesus teachings – as one who spoke with authority (7:29) – ‘fulfilled’ the Law and the Prophets, not in some technical sense, but in the overwhelming realisation that this Messiah was everything Israel had been waiting for. This teaching is life-giving, liberating, stretching, healing. The standard response to hate Roman oppression and pray for liberation is drenched in a command to ‘love your enemies and pray for them instead.’ (5:44)

So the reader finds themselves torn. The hope for a Messiah who would restore political fortune for Israel is not forthcoming (as they knew full well it was not). But an alternative vision has opened up in the most unexpected of places. Jesus of Nazareth, the teacher, has thrown off the shackles of desperate rule-obeying and empowered the demoralised by raising the stakes. They are not to be sombre Yahweh-pleasers; they can be blessed world-changers. And so fulfil the Law.