NOTES for Mat 5:20-26

Why, if I do not live at peace with my neighbors, am I unworthy to stand before the Lord? Is peace of soul attainable in this vain and passionate world? Are there not prayers for enemies - and therefore enemies themselves? Is not the entire Psalter full of curses against the wicked ('let death come upon them,' 'But You, O God, will bring them down into the pit of destruction,' 'blessed is he who takes and dashes your little ones' and others)? And the Savior Himself says: 'Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword' (Matt 10:34). How are all these to be held together - peace and sword?

In our modern Orthodox usage, which in many ways did not escape and could not have escaped the influence of the Soviet worldview, which urgently needed the image of an enemy and simply collapsed without it, very many people seize on this dualism from the end convenient to them. But every true dualism is unconfused and undivided. And what does the Soviet period have to do with it? This is as old as the world. It is enough to remember witch hunts and the Inquisition as a whole, or persecutions of Jews in every age. Sergei Averintsev wrote about this as follows:

With all my mortal heart
consenting to decay I forgive those who offended me
Only who offended me
This woman who imagined that it seemed to her
That she trembled at the sound of my voice
…………
This man who imagined that it seemed to him
that he was trampling my face
…………
God, console with tenderness those who offended me
I do not know You know who they are
('Spiritual Verses / Bewilderment')

Only in this way is it possible to understand, only in this way is it possible to avoid the most terrible thing that opposes God - hatred, even when it hides behind righteous anger. 'You know,' and 'I do not know.'

The Torah, the commandments given by God, were always understood as a guide along the path of righteousness. It is no surprise that Jesus turns to the Torah, or more precisely to the Decalogue, interpreting its commandments from the point of view of the Kingdom that He brought into the world. And from the point of view of the Kingdom, what comes to the foreground is not the action as such, but the intention standing behind it, the intention a person puts into the action he performs. If the intention is present, the mere fact that the action is performed or not performed changes nothing in principle. If, for example, a person hates his neighbor so much that he is ready to kill him, Jesus, as we can see, equates such hatred with murder.

At first glance, such an approach may seem too strict. But one must keep in mind that the inner Torah, about which many learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah spoke in those days, placed precisely intention first. Deliverance from evil intentions was considered the most important step on the path toward receiving the inner Torah.

But the issue is not only the inner Torah as such. The issue is also that intentions have special importance for the Kingdom. The substance of the Kingdom is the breath of God, and its fabric is formed by the relationships that bind a person both with God and Christ and with his neighbors. Not only the quality of a person's life in the Kingdom, but the very possibility of remaining in it, depends on the quality of relationships. That is why Jesus gives so much attention to intention: every one of our intentions, if we are inhabitants of the Kingdom, concerns not only us and the people toward whom it is directed, but also the whole Kingdom in all its fullness.

Jesus calls the disciples to the highest measure of righteousness, which must surpass the virtue even of the scribes and Pharisees, who were marked by great piety. And He says directly that without this it is impossible to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Reading the explanations that follow, one cannot help being struck by how difficult and uncompromising the path is that the Lord offers us. Anger is equated with murder, abusive speech is equal to a mortal sin; finally, losing peace with one's neighbor means losing connection with God. Accepting this system of coordinates, you immediately understand how great God's mercy is, covering our daily "murders," "betrayals," and "rejection of the Lord." You understand that not our merits, but He alone, can bring us into His Kingdom.

The verse begins with the word “for”, i.e. it is a continuation of previous verses. Jesus says that he came to execute law and not to transgress it. But it turns out further (V 19) that the executor of commandments and the transgressor will both find themselves in the Kingdom of Heaven, however in different status. The 20 verse looks rather strange in this context. It appears that the righteousness of strict zealous of law is entirely not enough to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Oh, come now! If from the verse 19 we found that the transgressor – even the slightest will enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Jesus never blamed the Pharisees and scribes for their strict observance of the law when rebuking them. He pointed out that law was executed on letter and not by the spirit of law. Formality superseded love to people, so and to God, since one without other is impossible.

The Kingdom of Heaven is the Kingdom of the loving God, the Kingdom of love. We know it is impossible to please God without faith (Heb 11:6), but if love is greater than faith (1 Cor 13:13), then can we please God without love?

“Your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees”—these words were probably received like a proposal to drink the sea or leap higher than one’s own head. The scribes and Pharisees were precisely the people who paid special attention to righteousness: they tried to fulfill every religious prescription so as to please, by their life and conduct, the God who had given people the Law. Yet these words were addressed to Jesus’ disciples, among whom were people of limited understanding, weak people, people of doubtful reputation—in a word, sinners. And they were supposed to live more righteously than the “specialists” in right living! Perhaps this obvious moral dead end was meant to transform fundamentally His listeners’ whole understanding of the world. God cannot be pleased by our wretched righteousness; in His eyes, irritation or a lustful look at another man’s wife is as much a crime as murder or adultery. He does not count our sins and good deeds—it is useless, because a relationship with Him is not a trade. Clearly, Christ’s disciples must live differently, in a new way, as the salt of the earth and the light of the world. They must become a place of God’s presence on earth.

In conversations with the disciples and in sermons, Jesus often speaks about the Torah and its proper understanding. In the Synodal text the Torah is usually called the "Law," but, though such a translation is formally correct, it still does not fully convey the meaning of the corresponding Hebrew word. Torah is more than simply law in the sense in which we usually use that word, more than only legislation or the legal order defined by it. Torah also implies a way of life corresponding to the law, including the inner, spiritual state of a person that corresponds to such a way of life. In Gospel times, in the rabbinic environment and in the Synagogue in general, the concept of the "living Torah" had spread rather widely, and ideally every believing Jew was to become such a Torah. What was meant was a person's spiritual state in which the Torah becomes something inwardly inherent to him, defining the whole of his life in all its manifestations. This understanding was very close to Jesus; it is no accident that He Himself says that He came not at all to destroy or change the Torah, but to bring it to fullness (v. 17; in the Synodal translation this thought is conveyed by the word "fulfill").

And the first thing to which He draws His listeners' attention is their intentions, or, as psychologists say today, their intentionalities. If you hate, consider yourself a murderer (vv. 21-22); if you lust, consider yourself an adulterer (vv. 27-28). Otherwise, according to Jesus' word, our righteousness does not go beyond ordinary religiosity, it "does not exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees" (v. 20), who, being deeply religious people, outwardly, on the behavioral level, of course kept all the commandments of the Decalogue.

But it turns out that for the Kingdom this is not enough. And this is not about requirements raised especially high in order to be "holier than everyone else." It is simply that in this world our spiritual quality and state determine our actions, while in the Kingdom our intentions do. One might say that in our fallen world we are what we do, while in the Kingdom we will become what we desire. And if, while hating someone, we refrain from murder for God's sake, this is a serious spiritual achievement for our fallen world. But for the Kingdom it is a failure. And the spiritual bar raised so high by Jesus is needed in order to protect us from such a failure.

Jesus teaches, "as one having authority," clearly moving sin from the realm of actions into the realm of thoughts. For us this is a hard saying: we can still somehow control our actions, but thoughts... It is like "not thinking about the white monkey" (remember the old fairy tale about how, in a certain situation, you could receive the fulfillment of all your wishes if only, at the most important moment, you did not think about the white monkey?)

But we can avoid thinking about the white monkey, if only we think about Someone else! We can avoid sinning in our thoughts if we think about Someone Sinless, Who is righteous and true.

And when do we think about someone constantly? When we love him. That is the whole secret.

The first property of salt that comes to mind, the salt with which Christ compared His disciples, is its ability to keep any substance from decay, the companion of death. We also know that only a very small amount of salt is needed to change the taste of a large portion of food, which means that even while remaining a minority, Christians can have a positive effect on the whole world. But the point is not only in these qualities of salt, which have not changed over the centuries: the listeners to the Sermon on the Mount knew and observed ancient customs connected with salt. Salt was a symbol of faithfulness; sharing salt together sealed an alliance more firmly than an oath and was a sign of unbreakable friendship. This means that Christ's disciples too are called to be such bearers of truth and reconciliation in a world torn apart by hostility.

He also called the disciples the light of the world, and this is striking, because another time He called Himself that (John 8:12, 9:5). Here is one of the first indications of the height to which He wants to raise those who trusted Him and followed Him. Yes, He came not to trample us into the dirt by His greatness, but to pull us out of the dirt and cleanse us.

And naturally, though for many people still unexpectedly, He begins to emphasize how His actions correspond to the law. Today many find it hard to connect what Christ brought into the world with the provisions of Old Testament law. But what seemed to some people to be a novelty was revealing precisely what had been laid down from ancient times.

Speaking about the need to surpass the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus reveals that the motivation of actions, and the condition of soul that dictates them, are no less important than the actions themselves. If hatred leads to murder, then hatred is already the beginning of murder. And however important it is to cut down a poisonous tree that has grown large, it is even more important to keep it from taking root.