Quote of the Day

…Now we can see why up to now Jesus has said nothing about himself in the Sermon on the Mount.  Between the disciples and the better righteousness demanded of them stands the Person of Christ, who came to fulfill the law of the old covenant.  This is the fundamental presupposition of the whole Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus manifests his perfect union with the will of God as revealed in the Old Testament law and prophets.  He has in fact nothing to add to the commandments of God, except this, that he keeps them.  He fulfills the law, and he tells us so himself, therefore it must be true.  He fulfills the law down to the last iota…he alone understand the true nature of the law as God's law: the law is not itself God, nor is God the law.  It was the error of Israel to put the law in God's place, to make the law their God and their God a law.  The disciples were confronted with the opposite danger of denying the law its divinity altogether and divorcing God from his law.  Both errors lead to the same result.  By confounding God and the law, the Jews were trying to use the law to exploit the Law-Giver: He was swallowed up in the law and therefore no longer its Lord.  By imagining that God and the law could be divorced from one another, the disciples were trying to exploit God by their possession of salvation.  In both cases, the gift was confounded with the Giver:  God was denied equally, whether it was with the help of the law, or with the promise of salvation.

Confronted with these twin errors, Jesus vindicates the divine authority of the law.  God is its giver and its Lord, and only in personal communion with God is the law fulfilled.  There is no fulfillment of the law apart from communion with God, and no communion with God apart from fulfillment of the law…Jesus, the Son of God, who alone lives in perfect communion with Him, vindicates the law of the old covenant by coming to fulfill it.  He was the only Man who ever fulfilled the law, and therefore he alone can teach the law and its fulfillment….It is Jesus Himself who comes between the disciples and the law, not the law which comes between Jesus and the disciples.  They find their way to the law through the cross of Christ……Because between the disciples and the law stands One who has perfectly fulfilled it, One with whom they live in communion.  They are faced not with a law which has never yet been fulfilled, but with one whose demands have already been satisfied.  The righteousness it demands is already there, the righteousness of Jesus, which submits to the cross because that is what the law demands.  This righteousness is therefore not a duty owed, but a perfect and truly personal communion with God, and Jesus not only possesses this righteousness', but is himself the personal embodiment of it. He is the righteousness of the disciples.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer