As is always the case, our short, though potent and sometimes misunderstood Gospel today needs context. Context drawn from its place in the Gospel according to Matthew, context from the purposes of the Gospel writer himself, and context from the broader Jewish spiritual-religious culture that Matthew is part of, and so keen to preserve as a faithful response to the call of the divine.
Our text, Jesus words, are part of his extended sermon on the mount, the most well-known, most comprehensive and most ethically challenging of Jesus’ teachings in all the Gospels. Our passage today comes not long after Christ’s beautiful beatitudes, the blessings within them showing the way of God, not the way of the world. And it is within this context that we must understand our passage today.
Because the context for our text, uttered by Jesus on the holy mountain, surrounded by his disciples, shows Jesus as the new Moses. He is depicted as the fulfiller of the Law and blessings given by God to Moses for Israel and, eventually, all nations, all the people of the earth. Jesus is the one to take further, to extend, to radically actualize what begins with Moses on the Mountain, what is given to the Jews and will draw all people into loving relationship with God.
In our context we note firstly, and most importantly, that Jesus is speaking to, teaching directly, via words and breath and body, to his disciples who are on the mountain with him. In the Hebrew bible the people, the type of rag tag collection of disciples following Jesus, did not, could not ascend the holy mountain with Moses.
Moses went up, ultimately, on his own, and received the written law, which he then brought down to the people. In Matthew, the people, the students, anyone wishing to learn, are with Jesus as he speaks the fulfillment of the law, as he commands that we need to follow the law to its essence to find the Holy One, not by only fulfilling its outer requirements.
We need to be careful in our responses here. Too many Christian traditions position and present the traditional Jewish Law, often expressed in the 613 mitzvot or commandments for daily Jewish life, as a spirit deprived, rote and empty set of rituals, rituals where outer action is mistakenly seen as winning favour or grace from God.
The actual Jewish worldview is completely different. The Jews, as covenantal people, as people with grace from God, as people who were to bring God to all nations, were already, in Christian terminology, saved. Salvation was already established.
The law was, and is, for Jewish people, a delight, a blessing to undertake as conscious and chosen action in response to God’s love. The various mitzvot concerning diet, cleanliness, social relations, business practices and pretty much all of human life, kept God present and within pretty much all of human life. The practice of the Law kept the Jews bound to God, as God had bound himself to them.
But now Jesus is not only valorising, affirming the Law, but he himself has come to fulfill, he himself is the fulfillment of the law, and the fulfillment of the prophets.
The law, as a way of binding and keeping the bonds between the divine and the human realm, between God and the people, is now in and as Jesus. And the Greek word for fulfilment here is derived from pleroma, the end, the fullness, the fulfillment of an initial impetus, an initial purpose or command or drive.
Jesus is saying he is the end point, the final culmination, initiated at the beginning, before time, of the overwhelming love of God. He, Christ, is God who comes as human to show and share the culmination, of God’s very first calling of humanity, God’s providential design to fill the universe with rational human beings made in his image to reflect his eternal love, back to him and to each other, and to all creation.
All that the law intended, and intends, the binding of the human to the divine, is in Christ since he is human and divine, now and forever.
And Jesus is also the fulfillment, the pleroma, the fullness and culmination of all the prophets. The radical earth-shaking disrupters of injustice, the ones who hold even Kings to account, who accomplish and show the Word of God – Jesus fulfills all these. But whereas the prophets challenged and disrupted mainly the Jewish world, Jesus disrupts the entire world. He shares and makes real God’s justice and demand for justice to all nations and all peoples – since he is the perfect human, sharing in all humanity.
Yet, even though the law and the prophets are completed and fulfilled by and in Christ, still they are not, by his command abolished. And we should note the warning given by Christ – it is not the breaking or keeping of the law that is crucial since, every human is human, and all keepers of the Law will, being imperfect humans, at time, break it. Rather, is the teaching of the breaking or keeping. Teaching that humanity should, or should not, bind and give itself to God, as God gives herself to us.
The law and the prophets, Matthew insists, function and will continue to function – but in Christ. So, all law becomes part of Christ’s new covenant, and all prophets now become prophets of Christ.
So, the law as the means of continuing and enacting the bond between humanity and God, to bring God to all humanity and all the earth, continues to exist and continues to operate. That original intention by god is not, abolished, is not negated; God’s promise to Abram and all the earth continues. And will continue … Until the heavens and the earth are gone, until time itself is redeemed and the age to come is upon us
Nothing can stop or hinder or sway or move God’s promise in the law … until, as the text states, “until all is accomplished”.
Until all is accomplished. In Greek this is ginomai, hard to express in a single word … until all is accomplished, until all has become, has come into being, has happened … as it was meant to be, as it was envisioned and lovingly commanded by God.
And this all literally means all, everything and every ONE … until we have happened, until we and everyone who has been and will ever be, have become, until we have unfolded as we are meant to be - until that time beyond time, the love and law of God is there.
But it is now in and as Christ, as his New Covenant, which includes and makes real the old covenant, a new covenant we will shortly share today, as his body and as his blood. A new covenant that will surely help and make and grow us to be who we, and all people, are meant to be.
In his name, Amen.