Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Everyone could tell that Jesus represented something new and different. He spoke with an authority that was independent of the merely human traditions of the religious leadership. He did not ground his teachings in statements by this or that famous rabbi. If he wasn't careful people would assume he represented something entirely different from the faith handed down in the books of the law and prophets. Christian heretics would later assert exactly this. They suggested that the God of the Old Testament was a cruel, evil God, and that Jesus Christ, who was instead kind and wise, supplanted him. But nothing could be further from the truth. There were not multiple God's, but one. There were three Persons, but always perfectly united in love.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.
This disclaimer was necessary since Jesus was about to launch into a set of teachings where he contrasted what he had to say with what was written in the law. These are the famous antithesis of "You have heard it said" and "But I say to you". Yet what he taught was not going to invalidate the earlier principles of the law. Rather, he was going to bring the inner logic of the law to a more complete fulfillment. He did not leave aside the morality with which the prohibitions of the law were concerned. But rather he asked that his disciples respond not only by avoiding specific actions, but by an cultivating an intense concern for the genuine goods those negative commandments were meant to protect. He called for a fulfillment in the form of a more complete observance of the law that began at the heart.
When it was noon, Elijah taunted them:
"Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating,
or may have retired, or may be on a journey.
Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened."
Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal by insinuating how his lack of presence and power and consistency made him appear more human-like, created in the images of those who worshiped him, than divine. We must not make the mistake of thinking of our God as subject to change and imperfection in this way. We ought not think of him as having changed his mind about bad laws to arrive at better ones. We should not imagine that our prayers convey anything he doesn't know or convince him of anything about which he was previously unsure. That he is unchanging is in some ways intimidating. But the things that are most fundamental to his identity, and therefore displayed with the utmost consistency through revelation, are his mercy and his love. His condemnation of evil isn't going to change. But the reason for that condemnation is because he won't ever let us settle for less than love. Human idols might be content to let us off the hook because doing better is sometimes humanly impossible. But God calls us higher because he has the power to bring us higher, to himself.
Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments
and teaches others to do so
will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.
Our love for the law is not because we are legalistic like the scribes and Pharisees. It is because we love the lawgiver. We know his rules are given to allow his family to flourish and to grow in the image of the God who is himself love.
Chris Tomlin - Everlasting God
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