Righteousness According to Jesus

“For I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.” ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭20‬ (CSB)

If anyone in Jesus’s day was famous among their peers for righteousness, it was the Pharisees. Their whole brand (so to speak) was that they were the ones who did the right things. they followed God in ways no one else did. In their minds and the minds of their contemporaries, they were the model of perfection. 

To the Pharisees, righteousness meant following all the rules God had set forth in the Old Testament, as well as a bunch of other rules that people had made up. The making up of the rules probably started well. You can almost hear the conversation, ‘if we set more strict rules than God, then even if we break the new rules, we still won’t have broken God’s rules.’ Practically, the rules became everything. The Pharisees believed that the combination of their special connection to Abraham and their perfect obedience to all the rules of God and all their own rules gave them a special status in God’s eyes.

It was actually a little worse than that. The rules became everything to the extent that justice, mercy and faithfulness took a back seat to the Pharisees own traditions. (Matthew 23:23, Mark 7:13) 

So when Jesus came and said to his audience and said that anyone who wanted to get into heaven must have righteousness that “surpass[es] that of the scribes and the Pharisees,” He was saying something shockingly radical. For some, Jesus’s statement would have been almost incomprehensible. How could anyone possibly have righteousness equal to those most righteous Pharisees, let alone surpassing them?

What was Jesus saying?

To understand Jesus here, we have to understand what He meant by righteousness.

Jesus doesn’t think about righteousness in terms of outward obedience to rules.

To be sure, there are rules, and we have to follow them. (Matthew 5:19) But our righteousness doesn’t come from our obedience. 

That idea—that righteousness doesn’t come from our obedience—would have shocked Jesus’s hearers. There are times when maybe it shocks us today, or at the very least it makes us nervous. (“What do you mean? Doesn’t that mean people can just do whatever they want?” A good question for another post.)

But Jesus doesn’t flinch. Instead, He begins with Matthew 5:20, “unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven,” and then describes to us what real righteousness looks like.

He starts with murder as an example. It’s a fairly basic command and not that hard to keep for most people. Jesus acknowledges the way everyone had heard this commandment taught in the past, “You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment.” For the Pharisees, they would have checked the box for successful obedience to this command every day that they didn’t actually murder someone. But Jesus has a different take. “But I tell you,” He says, “that anyone who is angry with his brother or sister [the best scholars think He was saying ‘without cause’] will be subject to judgment.” 

This is our first glimpse into what Jesus means by righteousness surpassing that of the Pharisees. 

It’s not enough to simply not murder anyone. You have to guard your heart against misplaced anger. This is a much more difficult command. We have to remember, as Paul will say later in the New Testament, that “Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against…spiritual forces in the heavens.” (Ephesians 6:12) We have to remember that God has forgiven us a great debt, so we have to forgive even the despicably wrong things that other people do to us. (Consider Matthew 18:32-33.) 

If this weren’t difficult enough, Jesus goes on! “Whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court. Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be subject to hellfire.” The words, “you fool” would have been incredibly offensive in Jesus’s day. Even with that in mind, Jesus is painting a picture here of something that’s hard to understand. How am I supposed to go through my life making sure I obey all these commands?

Of course, Jesus isn’t talking about obedience to commands. He’s talking about heart change.

It’s not just heart change, it’s radical transformation of the way we experience and interact with the world in our emotions, our thought lives, and yes, outwardly. 

To stay with the murder example that Jesus uses: we are certainly to refrain from the action fo murder. But Jesus wants more than that. He wants our very hearts to be different. He doesn’t want us to just not technically murder. He wants us to not be angry without cause. Our hearts need to be changed from the inside out by the Holy Spirit so that we are different people, not just people who avoid certain actions. Jesus goes on in fact, and says don’t just. Refrain from being angry, but don’t use the language of contempt at people. Don’t speak to them like they are less than you or like they are your enemy (remember Paul in Ephesians 6:12). Unjustified anger and contempt are the enemies of righteousness.

So what is Jesus saying about the righteousness of the Pharisees? He’s saying that their ‘righteousness’ is all about outward actions. But as we’ve come to know about Jesus, He isn’t interested in our outward obedience or rule following. He wants our hearts. What’s more, righteousness lives in the heart as a result of the saving and transforming work that Jesus and the Holy Spirit have done in our lives.

Jesus goes on with his examples. He says that adultery is wrong, but that so are thoughts of lust. Why? Because righteousness begins in the heart. Our words and actions overflow from our hearts. It’s not ‘righteous’ to just refrain from adultery–the action. Jesus wants our hearts to be righteous–we don’t even lust because our hearts have been fundamentally changed by the Holy Spirit.

When we understand this principle, we see what Jesus wants from us. He isn’t after behavior modification, though our behavior will certainly change. He wants to make us fundamentally different people–people that are righteous like He is.

When we are evaluating the state of our righteousness, we can’t just look at our actions. Actions matter of course, but they don’t tell the whole story. We should ask ourselves, “Am I thinking like Jesus about this person or this situation?” We are to evaluate what’s going on in our hearts, and when we find things that need to be conformed to Jesus’s standard, we join the Holy Spirit’s work of transformation.

One of the really beautiful things about following Jesus is that the Holy Spirit is already living inside us to help us become the person God designed us to be. For us, that means when we notice (or the Holy Spirit brings to our minds) an area of our hearts we need to change, we are not making the effort to change on our own. The Holy Spirit has already powerfully begun that work, and all we’re doing is joining Him.

Jesus calls His people to be righteous. Let’s pursue His righteousness the way He teaches us: not that we would be outwardly perfect, but that our hearts would be transformed to look like His.