Matthew 5:18 – Jots & Tittles, Abolish or Fulfill – Brad Jersak

Jots and Tittles:

Jesus’ most foundational message, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), begins with the Beatitudes (“Blessed are they…) and proceeds with the call to live as salt and light in this world. Challenging and inspiring, to be sure. But the following verses are more perplexing, especially to New Covenant believers:

“I’ve not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Matt. 5:17-18)

Whether the Law (nomos) refers to the whole Torah (Genesis to Deuteronomy) or to the Ten Commandments etched in stone, Jesus assures his Jewish audience that his mission and message were not about obliterating Moses’ legacy. He promises that not one apostrophe in the law would ‘disappear’ [pass away] until… Until what? Until it is fulfilled or accomplished, and everything comes to pass.

How or when does Jesus fulfill the Law?

In that same sermon, we see Jesus fulfill the Law in two ways:

a. Jesus fulfills the Law by showing us that the Law is not fulfilled by outward appearance, but through inner transformation. To fulfill the law re: adultery, it does not suffice to abstain from sex with someone else’s spouse. The fullness of the Law goes to the heart of the matter, which begins as lust in one’s mind. To fulfill the law re: murder, it does not suffice to abstain from killing another person. The fullness of the Law goes to the heart of the matter, which begins with hateful thoughts and words. To fulfill the Law in this way is a righteousness greater than Jesus’ legalistic opponents, who only “washed the outside of the cup” but whose insides were filthy.

b. Jesus fulfills the Law (and more) by accomplishing something greater than the Law could achieve, through a more radical and narrower path: the way of self-giving love. I.e., “take up your cross and follow me.” Thus, Christ’s commandments far exceed the Law. To be like our heavenly Father, we’re not merely to invite our friends to dinner, but also show radical hospitality to the stranger. He calls us to love and bless, not only our friends, but also our enemies.

Breaking, Keeping & Fulfilling

When Jesus says, “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye,” he is citing the Law. And when he adds, “But I say to you…” is he breaking the law? Is he keeping it? Or is he fulfilling it?

· To break that law would be to take revenge that escalates the violence.

· To keep the Law is to exact retributive justice through equivalent harm.

· But to fulfill the law goes further.

“But I say to you” takes us into Jesus’ new teaching. He calls us to end the cycle of violence by refusing to repay evil with evil, turning the other cheek instead of retaliating, and forgiving, blessing, and praying for our enemies.

So, Jesus says, effectively, “Look, when I preach the grace of God, you’ll think I’m just a lawbreaker. But I’m not breaking the Law. I’m fulfilling all of its righteous demands, summarized as ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.’”

This is Jesus’ summary of how he fulfills all the Law and the Prophets. He echoed God’s heart cry, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” even though the sacrificial system had been central to the Torah.

Ultimately, those words “fulfill” and “accomplish” are crucial because Jesus lived the Sermon on the Mount to its fullest possible extent: he willingly laid down his life in love, even in crucifixion, forgiving those who conspired to take his life. In doing so, he can cry out from the Cross, “It is accomplished. It is fulfilled.”

I will add that while Christ fulfilled and accomplished that Greater Law in his own life, death, and resurrection, here in the Sermon on the Mount, we see how he intends also to accomplish the Greater Law in us. We fulfill the living, beating, heart of God that exceeds the demands of the Torah through the empowering grace of God’s indwelling Spirit. By grace, we are being transformed to live the life of Christ, who fulfills the Perfect Law of Love in us. I.e., YOU are the fulfilment Jesus brings about!

Inerrancy or Obedience?

The Evangelical tradition of my youth proof-texted the “jot and tittle” verse to make the case for what they called “the inerrancy of Scripture.” Inerrancy is a modern claim about the Bible, defined in “The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy” in 1978 (but coined in the early 1800s by Thomas Horne). Inerrancy purports that every line of the Bible is true in all it affirms, and not only spiritually. It claims that the Bible is factually true in all matters, including history and science, read literally. Its assertion is that Scripture never contradicts itself, nor is its perfect accuracy subject to the limitations of the human authors.

This proved disastrous, because any skeptic with Google can show young believers 500 contradictions in the Bible. Those students who believed inerrancy is essential to faith (as the Chicago Statement claims) could lose their faith almost overnight. I’ve seen it. The reality is that inerrancy is a modernist, ideological premise about what the Bible can’t do or be, even when it does and is.

But in his Sermon, Jesus is not talking about the accuracy or veracity of the Torah. He’s talking about obedience to it. He’s denying that his gospel of compassion and mercy is an erasure of the Law, but rather, reveals it’s deepest meaning. This is his point in vs. 19-20.

Thus, in fulfilling the Law, Jesus must and will move beyond the letter of the Law (which Paul describes as bondage, death, and condemnation) to see the Spirit of the Law (which Paul describes as freedom, life, and transformation). See 2 Corinthians 3:

⁴ Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. ⁵ Not that we are qualified of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our qualification is from God, ⁶ who has made us qualified to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

⁷ Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’s face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, ⁸ how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? ⁹For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory!¹⁰ Indeed, what once had glory has in this respect lost its glory because of the greater glory, ¹¹ for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory!

¹² Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with complete frankness, ¹³ not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. ¹⁴ But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, the same veil is still there; it is not unveiled since in Christ it is set aside. ¹⁵ Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds, ¹⁶ but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. ¹⁷ Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. ¹⁸ And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

The problem wasn’t the Law per se… the problem was a “letter of the law” heart problem—the blindness of imagining the Law could be fulfilled by literal adherence, by dotting every i and crossing every t. This was the stumbling block for Jesus’ detractors and, frankly, the authors of the Chicago Statement.

Rather, the Law is fulfilled in those who are led by the Spirit and bear the fruit of the life of Christ. “Against such, there is no law” (Gal. 5:22).

But didn’t Paul say…?

But didn’t Paul say the Law was abolished? He writes,

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two.” (Ephesians 2:15)

And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it (Colossians 1:13-15).

Now, Paul will deny that Gentiles need to keep Moses’ ordinances concerning circumcision. And he says that the Laws around special days, feasts, and foods no longer apply. Certainly, Hebrews sees the end of the temple priesthood, sacrificial system, and Sabbath prohibitions. Isn’t suspending direct obedience to all those Torah ordinances a kind of cancellation, abolition, or erasure. Isn’t that a contradiction of Jesus’ denial that he’s abolishing the Law?

Yes, in terms of practice, those Laws no longer apply under the New Covenant. But to say that Christ abolished them isn’t the whole truth. He truly fulfilled them:

Even before Jesus, the prophets knew the laws concerning circumcisions were fulfilled by the circumcised heart of repentance. The apostles saw how all the regulations re: days, feasts, and foods pointed to their fulfillment in Christ. They weren’t merely cancelled. They were fulfilled in Christ. Jesus IS the Sabbath rest we were waiting for. And the self-giving offering of Jesus’ own life was the sacrificial love the Torah could anticipate but never fulfill.

A law or promise fulfilled does not cancel the promise. But the fulfillment can so exceed the law or promise that we too must burst beyond the law or promise to live in its fulfillment. To do this, we put our faith in the Jesus Way by the transforming grace of the Holy Spirit.

Living the Sermon on the Mount

Matthew 5 is sometimes read as a spiritual moral imperative that is humanly impossible to produce, more difficult to obey than the old covenant. Rather, he is proclaiming an other-worldly manifesto of God’s transforming grace.

This is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer parted company with certain streams his Lutheran brethren. Whether or not he was being completely fair to Luther, Bonhoeffer critiques the now popular idea that “The point of the Sermon is not obedience to Jesus directives, but to despair of them and cast oneself one grace. In fact, to attempt to obey them would be the works of the Law and a denial of the gospel.”

Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace,” because it overlooks the “cost of discipleship.” The Jesus Way requires us to rely on the transforming grace of God. By the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, we are empowered to take up our cross to follow Jesus. To “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” is not fleshly perfectionism but growing toward being made “complete in Christ.”

Bonhoeffer’s reading of the Sermon on the Mount is compelling because it takes seriously Jesus’ own call to practice what he’s preaching:

1. Matthew 5:15b “…whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

2. Matthew 7:21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

3. Matthew 7:24 “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

So much debate about the Sermon on the Mount hinges on its practicability:

1. Is this a new, stricter Letter-of-the-Law we must obey in the flesh? No.

2. Is this a new, stricter Letter-of-the-Law we should ignore because it’s impossible? No.

3. Rather, this is a deeper Law, written on the heart by the Spirit, that emerges in the grace-filled life, marked by love.

Then the question is whether this other-worldly manifesto of grace is possible in this life (“as in heaven, so on earth”). By grace, can we become those who grow beyond hatred into kindness, beyond resentment into forgiveness, beyond lust into faithfulness, beyond hoarding into hospitality? Those who pick up the cross, dying to the demands of the ego, also rise in the other-centered love of Jesus. We discover grace to live by the Sermon on the Mount.

To those who are united with Christ and filled with the Spirit, the Sermon on the Mount is not a harsher, impossible Old Covenant on steroids… but the very evidence of what grace can do in a heart turned toward Christ. Bonhoeffer’s concern was for those who reduced the gospel to “You can’t follow Jesus anyway, so just believe in him.” Instead, “Following Jesus requires us to be infused with and animated by grace. We are powerless to overcome your hatred, lust, resentment or greed in the flesh. We won’t earn this liberty through self-will. We receive it through the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

I would add that while Christ expects his followers to put his words into practice through surrender to the Spirit, he also knows that growing includes stumbling… so, he also embeds within the Sermon the invitation to ask the Father for forgiveness, expecting to receive it, along with a caution against judging other stumblers, since we’re all in the same boat.

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