For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
This
would have been a shocking statement for everyone listening to Jesus. We are used to thinking of the Pharisees as the bad
guys but, at the time, there appeared to be no
group of people more committed to following and serving God. The
Pharisees devoted their entire lives to God's law and went to whatever
lengths necessary to avoid breaking it, making laws around the laws to
avoid going anywhere near sin.
So
if Jesus is saying it is necessary to be more righteous than that, then who
stands a chance? Exactly. I have not tried as hard as the Pharisees to
be righteous and neither have you. But they were not righteous enough.
The greater righteousness that Jesus talks about is not about going
further than them - following 700 laws instead of 600 hundred - but about
going deeper. The righteousness that the Pharisees were concerned with
was about modifying behaviour but Jesus looks beyond that into the
heart. As he will go on to explain, Jesus says that it is possible to
obey a command externally but break it internally. If
you thought your actions were ok, there's a deeper level were you
fail to be righteous. If you already thought your actions were bad enough, it's worse
than you thought!
That
is why it's such great news that God made him who knew no sin [Jesus]
to become sin, so that , in him, we might become the righteousness of
God (2 Corinthians 5:21)