The inviolable character of the commandments
Matthew 5:17-20 Part 2
Don’t make the assumption that I came to do away with the Law and the Prophets; I did not come to do away with but to fulfill. For in truth I say to you, until such time as the heaven and the earth disappear, neither one iota nor one mark shall disappear from the Law, until all things have happened. Therefore, whoever should loosen one of the least of these commandments and instructs people likewise, will be named least in the kingdom of the heavens. But whoever should keep and instruct, this one will be named great in the kingdom of the heavens. For I say to you that if your righteousness does not abound more than the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of the heavens. Matthew 5:17-20
If “fulfill” in Matthew 5:17 refers to Jesus Messiah as the endpoint of the Law and the Prophets (see Part 1), then why does Jesus go on to talk about the commandments?
Is Jesus speaking about the perfect keeping of all of the traditional 613 commandments in Torah?
These commandments
First, Jesus is not referring to the 613 commandments but to twelve of them: The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:5-6), and the command to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18):
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself a graven image.
You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God emptily.
You shall remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it.
You shall honor your father and your mother.
You shall not murder.
You shall not steal.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not bear a false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not desire your neighbor’s house … your neighbor’s wife … or anything belonging to your neighbor.
Hear O Israel, Yahweh your God, Yahweh is one and you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your life and with all your strength.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The Ten Commandments and the Two Great Commandments are closely connected. Commandments one to four are connected to the positive command “Love Yahweh your God” and commandments five to ten are the negative counterpart to the positive “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The rest of the commandments flow from these, but are not the core.
Jesus refers to this core not only here in the Sermon, but in his other teachings.
The authors of the New Testament documents validate only these as the commandments (see especially Paul and James). The others are principles and cases that flow from the core twelve (but should still never be loosened).
Loosen
A cursory reading of what Jesus says here might imply the necessity to keep them all perfectly.
But that is not what he says.
Look carefully:
Whoever should loosen one of the least of these commands and instructs people likewise will be named least in the kingdom of the heavens.
Jesus does not say “whoever breaks one of the least of these commands” but “whoever should loosen one of the least of these.”
Many of the translations use “break,” though others use nullify, ignore, disobey, reject, do away, relax, set aside, refuse to obey, undo, abolish, annul, loose.
Once again we see an array of renderings that are not synonymous.
The term luō has the basic idea of “loosen, untie, undo” or “let go, liberate, set free.” In the gospels the main use of this verb is “untie” either for a donkey or sandals. At its extreme “destroy” or “dissolve” is a good translation: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19); “the elements will be dissolved with fire” (2 Peter 3:10).
Other uses flow from these basic ideas.
Jesus called out anyone who would alter these commands in any way. There were other perfectly good words for the idea of disobeying the commandments.
To alter them in any way (whether making them either stricter or easier) was to loosen them—untie, dissolve.
To modify them with any change was to alter their character.
And to misunderstand them.
The character of the commandments
Jesus, the Incarnate Son, knew that these commandments are akin to the law of gravity.
They were unassailable declarations from the character of God that existed as his perfect desire for humanity as he created them.
These commands existed prior to God giving the words to Moses.
They existed from the beginning.
The entirety of Genesis shows this reality: when humanity “broke” any of these commandments, they suffered the consequences, even though they did not have the commands “in stone.”
“Breaking” the commandment was breaking oneself against the immovable object of God’s character:
A vehicle hurdling toward a thick stone wall at high speeds is destroyed the moment it hits the wall. It wasn’t the wall’s fault, it was the driver’s.
Sin
Humanity sinned prior to the commandments (all of Genesis) and when they were given at Sinai, the people were exposed for what they already were—transgressors against the righteous character of God.
In Paul’s words, sin multiplied.
Sin was revealed as sin because the character of God in the Ten Commandments was clearly set out.
The Ten Commandments were the same sign-post as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden—the prohibition not to eat from the tree indicated God’s love for them by showing they were fully free to love him back.
Total freedom was the expression of total love.
Adam and Eve’s (free) transgression of the first prohibition—and later those of the Ten Commandments—led to dire consequences, not because God was angered, but because the commandments indicated the holy character of God that could not be changed by definition.
Once again, humans were already idolatrous and given over to their desires as the entirety of Genesis clearly showed; the commandments just made that reality plain to see.
Later, Paul brilliantly saw that sin (aka Satan) coopted the law for its own ends and covered up its purpose—the Law became idolatrous itself as self-referential in place of God (see Romans 7).
The reason Jesus said “Law and Prophets” becomes clear.
The prophets attempted to show that the true intent of the law indicated the inviolable righteous character of God. When the character is God was transgressed in the breaking of the commands, the natural consequences ensued, ultimately to death.
Though the prophets saw the hand of God in the judgments that came, those judgments came as a logical outcome of “disobedience,” that is the abrogation of the commandments (both the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments and the two great commandments to love God and your neighbor).
None of the judgments were arbitrary.
Judgment was and is never arbitrary.
The commandments show sin to be sin. The logical consequences, called judgment, follow.
A necessary frame
The commandments give the necessary frame for understanding all human sin as sin. Sin cannot be explained away in the presence of the commandments.
This understanding of the commandments makes full sense of why Jesus used “loose.”
What is perfect cannot be altered in any way and retain its purpose and character.
Although “break” does not get the nuance of “loose” here, to loose by altering any commandment any way is in itself to break the commandment, aside from the actual transgression.
The outcome of altering even one of the commandments and teaching others to do so is to bear the consequence, a judgment in the heavens of “least.”
Legalism
Jesus’s words might seem to be legalistic but they are actually the opposite. When one attempts to turn the commandments representing God’s character into rules that must be kept to please God, the commandments become idolatrous. But when a person loves God and allows God to love your neighbor through you, then the Ten Commandments are kept by default: the person loves God, honors father and mother, and does not steal, kill, etc. They are not loosed at all, nor broken.
The inviolable word of God
In very practical terms, we as Jesus followers are called to read and interpret scripture as the very word of God. We may have differences of opinions, but not on the nature of scripture as the written revelation of God for us. We cannot explain scripture away in any way (i.e. “loose it”), especially at the insistence of a culture that would dispense with the Bible in a heartbeat.
In the next post we will consider what Jesus means by “but whoever does and teaches will be called great in the kingdom of the heavens.”
Observations on the Greek Text
ὃς ἐὰν οὖν λύσῃ μίαν τῶν ἐντολῶν τούτων τῶν ἐλαχίστων καὶ διδάξῃ οὕτως τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, ἐλάχιστος κληθήσεται ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν·
1. ὃς ἐὰν. “Whoever.” The relative pronoun and ἐὰν together produce an indeterminate pronoun with a conditional sense always followed by a subjunctive verb (here λύσῃ … καὶ διδάξῃ).
2. οὖν. This post-positive conjunction, usually translated “therefore” has a specific discourse function. Like καί it joins to what came before, but like δέ it indicates that the discourse is developing a new idea connected to what came before.
3. οὕτως. This adverb must be translated to the sense of the context. Here “the same way” or “likewise.”
4. ἐλάχιστος is the superlative form of ἐλάσσων/ἐλάττων. The term is not truly superlative but “elative” according to A. T. Robertson. The term shows extreme emphasis. Not little or littler, but least in a qualitative sense.