February 6, 2011

Let me repeat the last words of today’s gospel, in case your mind was wandering as they were being read: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” There are some very hard statements in the gospels, things Jesus says that seem, if taken for face value, to offend us, challenge us, perhaps make us rethink everything we do. This is one of those statements. Spoken directly to the disciples, Jesus seems to be telling them that the Pharisees, who seek to keep the law as faithfully as possible, are exemplars of moral behavior for the disciples, that indeed, the disciples must do better than the Pharisees, or risk damnation.

When confronted by such texts, we are inclined to respond in one of several ways. We might discount it, giving reasons why it can’t mean what it seems to mean, that it can’t apply to us or our efforts. We might also take it as a challenge, seek to be more righteous than the Pharisees, to live as Jesus taught his disciples to live. A third alternative would be to worry that because we can’t be as good as that, it must mean we will one day burn in Hell. These are the sorts of questions that the Gospel of Matthew confronts us with, and will continue to confront us with, for the coming months. And in these weeks, we are in the heart of that challenge. At the same time, we all also need to confront our own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual responses to Jesus’ challenge. Continue reading →