Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity
Romans 6:3-11 + Matthew 5:20-26
In today’s gospel, Jesus teaches His disciples about righteousness. The Scriptures speak of three kinds of righteousness, actually, or even four. One is God’s own essential divine righteousness, His quality of being righteous, good, loving, and just. We won’t focus on that righteousness for the moment, because that’s who God is, with or without us, just as He is omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. It’s an attribute of God, and we’re concerned today with the attribute of righteousness that God demands of us human beings.
In that regard, there are two kinds of righteousness that are necessary, and a third that is theoretically necessary. The first is the righteousness by which we are justified and enter the kingdom of heaven. There is a second righteousness in which justified Christians begin to live within the kingdom of heaven. The third kind, if we want to speak of a third kind, is more theoretical in nature. It can’t actually be performed by any of us who are born from a man and woman. But it is, nonetheless, required of us, so we’d better understand it.
It’s actually this third “theoretical” kind of righteousness that Jesus speaks of in today’s Gospel. You have to be righteous in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. That’s what Jesus says. And not just a little bit righteous. Not just pretty righteous or very righteous or extremely righteous. The scribes and Pharisees had that going for them already, but Jesus informs His disciples: I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.
Perfect righteousness. Utter sinlessness. Complete obedience to God’s Law, in thought, word, and deed. That’s the requirement for entering the kingdom of heaven. The Ten Commandments do not say, “Do your best! Try your hardest!”, or, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!” No, they say, “You shall! You shall not!” And they go deeper than most people imagine, including the scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’ day. The commandment says, “You shall not murder!” They thought they were righteous because they had never actually murdered anyone. But Jesus reveals in the Gospel that angry words, hurtful words, make a person just as guilty of hell fire as murdering someone. The apostle John, in his epistle, applies the commandment also to the heart, “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer.”
Likewise the scribes and Pharisees thought they were righteous because they didn’t sleep around with other men’s wives. But Jesus reveals in the words just after our Gospel that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
The righteousness that God’s Law requires is high and lofty. You have to be good and loving, just and upright all the time. Honoring God all the time, and not according to your version of who God is, but honoring Him according to His Word, recorded in the Bible. Loving your neighbor all the time, and again, not according to your version of what love looks like, but according to Holy Scripture. That’s what God demands of His creatures. That’s the righteousness that earns a place in the kingdom of heaven.
But it’s theoretical. It can only be performed by people who start off righteous. That’s not you or I, or anyone born of man and woman. We’re doomed from the start, not because God made us incapable of being righteousness, but because our parents did, and their parents before them, back to Adam and Eve. Original Sin has infected us all and turned us into people who don’t even want to be truly righteous, by nature, people who trust in ourselves first, who look out for our own interests first, people who easily find fault in others, or even in God, but who imagine ourselves to be, well, righteous—or at least, righteous enough, more righteous than a lot of other people.
Now, the Law’s penalty for unrighteousness— for every misstep, for every transgression, for every rebellion, for every “oops,” is the shedding of blood. Without shedding of blood there is no remission. And not just a little blood. All of it, till you die. And not just physical death, but eternal death and the suffering of hell fire. So the price for forgiveness and reconciliation with God is a price so high that to pay it is to perish.
In the Old Testament, God offered some temporary remedies for Israel’s unrighteousness, the death of animals, one after another after another, to atone for, to make up for the sins of the people, to earn reconciliation with God. But, as you know, those animal sacrifices were only temporary remedies until the true price could be paid, the sacrifice of God’s own Son, true God and true Man. His perfect obedience under the Law, His suffering and death for the sins of mankind—that’s the righteousness that counts before God.
And so the Gospel goes out into the world, calling all men to repentance, because all have sinned. All have transgressed the Law of God and all are under its condemnation, by nature, because no one can perform the righteousness that the Law requires. But see, in the Gospel, in Holy Baptism, God holds out to us poor sinners another righteousness, or better, the righteousness of Another, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The righteousness that counts before God. He offers it to us a free gift, already purchased for us by the blood of Christ. This is the righteousness of faith.
Faith saves, faith justifies, not because it’s such a good and noble work, but because faith lays hold of Christ, who offers us His righteousness—His perfect obedience in doing and suffering, living and dying—to hold up before God as our own. God counts this faith to us for righteousness—again, not a righteousness that we had done, but a “foreign righteousness,” the righteousness of Christ, credited to our account through faith in Him.
By this faith, by this righteousness of faith, we are justified before God. This is the righteousness that is necessary for us to enter into the kingdom of heaven, to be reconciled to God, to be adopted as His children and made heirs of eternal life, and it’s entirely ours by faith in Christ.
That’s our great comfort, because, when we believe in Christ Jesus for righteousness, we know that it is certain, because His righteousness is certain. His perfect life was already lived for us. His death as the payment for sins has already been accomplished. And so eternal life depends on Him, not on you.
There is still that other righteousness that is necessary—not necessary in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, but necessary, nonetheless, for those who have been justified by faith, for those who have been made heirs of heaven by the righteousness of faith. This other righteousness is the new life of obedience to which God has called us. It is the ongoing renewal of the Holy Spirit as He sanctifies us and forms us Christians more and more into righteous people, who think what is right, who want what is right, who do what is right. This righteousness within us who believe is necessary, because it’s what a living faith always produces, and it’s God’s will that we live in it.
What did Paul write to the Romans in chapter 6? As many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin… Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ. That’s what daily contrition and repentance looks like, saying no to sin, and living each day for God, which includes living each day to serve your neighbor, in love. That’s what the Ten Commandments teach us how to do, now that we’ve been justified by faith. They guide us in the new obedience of the children of God, in righteous attitudes toward God and our neighbor and in righteous behavior.
We recognize that this righteousness of new obedience is only begun in us in this life. We never reach the goal of perfection here on earth, because of the weakness of our sinful flesh. But we keep working together with the Holy Spirit. We keep striving to be righteous like God, and we keep watching out for sin and temptation, always taking it seriously, because God has warned us that, yes, we’re saved by faith, but faith can’t coexist with an evil intention or with impenitence. And if we allow ourselves to grow indifferent toward sin, indifferent toward righteousness, then we will make shipwreck of our faith, as the Scripture says, and drive out the Holy Spirit.
So let us pray that God would preserve us from that, through His Word and Sacrament. He has already promised to hear such a prayer and to work through His means of grace, to keep us steadfast in the faith by which we stand righteous before Him, and to strengthen us in the love and obedience in which God’s righteous children walk, being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. Amen.
