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Every Christmas as a child I pulled out our family’s nativity set and I set up all the figures: Mary, kneeling with her halo; Joseph, sort of captured in mid-tumble to the ground, his hair and beard sort of breeze-blown; and the camel with the front broken leg; and with the angel who couldn’t stand up on the manger roof no matter how hard I tried to balance that thing; and there was the baby Jesus—his arms flung wide—who was injection-molded all-of-a-piece with his manger. There’s no way you could have pulled the two apart; it was all one thing. So with Mitch Miller crooning “Silver Bells” on the record player, I lay on the floor of our living room and I played, arranging and rearranging those pieces.

That is the image that many of us associate with Christmas: the baby Jesus—sweet little Jesus—asleep in the hay forever stuck to the manger.

 

But Christmas isn’t about a birth, so much as it is about a visitation.

 

Jesus’ birth was no more the point of Christmas than placing the turkey in the oven is the point of a Thanksgiving meal, or the opening kick-off is the point of the Super Bowl. Christmas, above all, marks a beginning—a commencement, a setting in motion of events that move inexorably toward a purpose-filled conclusion.

 

Jesus was on a mission. He came for a reason. His birth was on purpose.

In movie theaters this month there is an adaptation of the oldest known story in the English language: Beowulf, which was written in about 1100. I haven’t seen the movie, but based on the trailers, I’m sorry to say I wouldn’t recommend it. True to form, it seems as though Hollywood has taken a heroic story threaded with Christian language and biblical imagery and turned it into an edge-pushing tale of violence and seduction starring Angelina Jolie.

 

But the original story provides a wonderful way of thinking in completely fresh terms about the incarnation, one that presses us past the cozy image of a baby in a manger and stretches us to think about the story of Christmas in a whole new way: in terms of a visitation, a rescue mission, from above.

 

Beowulf is the story of a kingdom in Denmark that is plagued by the beast, Grendel—a demonic descendant of Cain, interestingly—who terrorizes the kingdom, robbing the land of its wealth and taking the lives of its people. Life is bleak for the Danes, and the story says that sad songs are sung across the land.

But then, unsummoned, unbidden, the mighty warrior, Beowulf, learns of their struggles from Sweden across the sea, and he sets out to rescue them. “There is no one else alive who is like him,” we’re told. “He was the mightiest man on earth, high-born and powerful.”

 

He orders a boat and he sets out. Soon, he arrives at their shores, we’re told—“an outsider from across the water”—and vaults onto the sand dressed for battle.

 

“We arrive here on a great errand,” he announces to the sentries along the coast. “Tell us if what we have heard is true about this threat, this danger abroad in the dark nights, mongering death in the country. I come to proffer my wholehearted help and counsel. I can show a way to defeat this enemy and find respite. I can calm the turmoil and terror…. Now I mean to be a match for Grendel, settle the outcome in a single combat. My one request is that you won’t refuse me, who have come so far, this privilege…a life and death fight with the fiend.”

 

“I had a fixed purpose when I put to sea,” says Beowulf. “I meant to perform to the uttermost what your people wanted, or perish in the attempt. And I shall fulfill that purpose.”

 

When the king of the land hears this and learns of his “his sea-braving” and why he has come, he says, “Now Holy God, in His goodness, guided him here to defend us. This is my hope…God can easily halt these raids and harrowing attacks!”

 

Likewise, the queen “welcomed him and thanked God for granting her wish that a deliverer she could believe in would arrive to ease their afflictions.”

 

And then the narrator of the story continues: “The King of Glory (as the people now learned) had posted a lookout who was a match for Grendel, a guard, a special protection. And Beowulf placed complete trust in his strength of limb and the Lord’s favor.”

 

“The Lord was weaving a victory on his war-loom. Through the strength of one they all prevailed; they would crush their enemy and come through in triumph and gladness. The truth is clear: Almighty God rules over mankind and always has.”

 

Then “the man (we are told) who had lately landed among them purged the land, sending the beast away with a mortal wound and freeing the land from his grip.”

 

And this is how the narrator concludes this portion of the story:

“And Beowulf’s doings were praised over and over again. ‘Nowhere,’ they said, ‘north or south, between the two seas or under the tall sky on the broad earth was there anyone better to raise a shield or to rule a kingdom.’”

 

Ours is a visited planet. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world—that we are from below, but he is from above.

 

Why did he come? What mission moved him to step from the shores of heaven and venture to earth?

 

Jesus himself answered that question on numerous occasions during his ministry. This morning, and over the next four times that we meet for worship, we will focus on the most central of these. In the weeks to come, we’ll explore passages that tell us that:

Jesus Came to Ransom the Lost,

Jesus Came to Bring the Sword,

Jesus Came to Give Us Life,

Jesus Came to Reveal God.

 

And this morning, to begin the series, we’ll be looking at Matthew chapter 5 verses 17-20, which says that Jesus came to fulfill the law, to satisfy God’s requirements.

 

To set the stage before we turn to the passage, I want to tell you about a wonderful conversation I had a few weeks ago with a bright teen-age friend of mine who said that he couldn’t understand why there were so many world religions, and he said that he didn’t think Christianity was any different from any of the rest of them.

 

In response, I told him that I believe that all world religions have come into existence as a response to two things that every human being, at some level, experiences.

 

First, all of us have a sense that there is a God, but He feels far removed and uninvolved in our lives. Religions are ways that humans have come up with to try to close that distance between us and God, and to have God somehow be part of our day-to-day lives.

 

Second, I told him that I believe that all of us have a sense of what is right and wrong: a sense, like our sense that there is a God, that has been planted in us as human beings. We call it our conscience. But each one of us is aware at some level that however vague our sense of right and wrong is, we all fail all the time to live up to what it asks of us.

 

The different religions are also ways that we humans have come up with to try to fix the problem of our not living the sort of life that we know deep down God wants us to be living: a way for us to try to do something to rid ourselves of a sense of guilt and shame as a result of our failure, and to try to experience some sense of forgiveness and a fresh start.

 

I told him that I believe that all of the world religions were started as a result of those two things: to solve the problem of our distance from God—to try to work our way closer and to solve the problem of our moral failure—to try to make ourselves better.

 

Can you identify in yourself with those two most fundamental of human impulses? Do you recognize them in yourself—that longing to be closer to God, the longing to be right with God?

 

And as you probably have discerned as you’ve looked across the horizon of the various religious options, that there isn’t one that offers a clear solution to those two longings of the human heart.

 

But the thing that makes Christianity different from all of those world religions is that, where all of the other religions are about our effort to close the distance between us and God from our side and our effort to fix the problem of our moral failure and make ourselves better from our side, Christianity is the only religion where the solution comes from the other side: from God to us.

 

And that’s what the passage that we’re looking at today is all about.

 

Matthew chapter 5 verses 17-20. You’ll find this on page 1502 in your pew Bible. Jesus says:

Do not think I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

 

Now, at first glance, it might seem as though Jesus is saying what all of the other religions have been saying: that it’s all up to us to somehow come up with a way to fix our failure and to do it right and to earn God’s pleasure and to enter the kingdom of heaven—to bring God near.

 

But let’s take a closer look at it.

 

What does it mean that Jesus came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets?

 

First, it might be helpful to be clear about what this expression, “the Law and the Prophets,” means. Whenever you see the expression used in that way—those two ideas linked together—it means the whole Jewish Bible. The word “Law” refers to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and “the Prophets” refers to the rest of what we call the Old Testament, the rest of the Jewish Scriptures.

 

So what does it mean that Jesus came “to fulfill the Law and the Prophets?”

 

Three things:

1. First, it means that Jesus came to fulfill a promise—that is, to fully complete, to perfectly bring to pass the predictions and the promises that we find in the Old Testament about his coming and about his ministry.

 

In the verses that lead up to this passage in chapter 5 in Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew has already talked about Jesus fulfilling Scripture eight different times: Matthew 1:22 that a virgin conceives a child and will give birth to a son whose name means God with us, chapter 2 verses 5-6 that that child will be born in Bethlehem, chapter 2.verse 15 that that child will at some point in its childhood be called out of Egypt, chapter 2.verses17-18 that there will be heard in the region of Bethlehem the sound of weeping and mourning related to the massacre that Herod does of the children, chapter 2 verse 23 that Jesus would be called a Nazarene, chapter 3 verses 2-3 anticipating the ministry of John the Baptist preparing the way for the Lord and making straight paths for him, chapter 3 verse 15 that Jesus will fulfill the requirements of righteousness that are laid out in the Old Testament, chapter 4 verses 14-16 that Jesus’ ministry will be based in Galilee and that there the people living in darkness will have seen a great light.

 

That’s just in the first four chapters. In the verses that follow this Sermon on the Mount, this same expression will be used again and again of Jesus fulfilling what has been written in the Scriptures (8:17, 12:17, 13:35, 21:4). On and on it goes. You see this used again and again.

 

So when Jesus says that he came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, part of what he is implying is that every promise made about the Messiah, the One who was to come, is being fulfilled in the circumstances of his birth, in the thirty three years of his life, in his death on the cross, in his rising from the dead, and in his coming again.

 

And unlike the visit of Beowulf to Denmark which came as a surprise, the sojourn of Jesus from heaven to earth was announced and has been anticipated for fifteen hundred years before it happened: clear evidence of the manner in which God is ordering all of human history to accomplish His loving purposes and reason for us to trust Him to order the circumstances of each of our lives according to His loving purposes as well.

 

So part of what it means for us to become one of his followers is that we would recognize and believe that Jesus is the answer to 1500 years of predictions and promises. But that’s not all.

 

2. Second, when Jesus says he came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, it means that Jesus came to fulfill a claim or demand—that is, to fully satisfy, to perfectly meet the requirements of, God’s standard for a holy life, requirements that we are incapable of meeting.

 

Some of you may have seen this book that came out earlier this fall called The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

 

This is the journal recorded over the space of a year of A. J. Jacobs, a non-practicing Jew, who decided that this might be just the thing to jump-start his spiritual life. So he sat down and spent a month reading the Bible cover-to-cover. And every time he came to a requirement or a recommendation or a word of wisdom that he thought it was calling him to follow, he wrote it down. He ended up with 72 typed pages of requirements and guidelines—more than 700 different rules and words of wisdom. And then he spent a year trying to live his life in keeping with all of those requirements.

 

As you can imagine when you think about some of the civil and ceremonial law in the Old Testament, this led to some interesting moments in his year.

 

In an interview on MSNBC at the end of this year-long experiment, he was asked by the interviewer:

Now on your average day, did you find that you were unable to fulfill this, or were there days when you could absolutely fulfill it for 24 hours at a time?

 

Never, he said, you’re always gonna break rules. I mean, especially the rules like coveting and gossiping and lying. I was astounded by how much I sinned once I started trying not to. [It’s a little hard to hear in the interview what he’s saying at that point].

 

How much you lied? the interviewer says.

 

I’m afraid so.

 

So, in other words, you had a rude awakening that on a daily basis you covet and lie?

 

Absolutely. It was a rude awakening. And I never fully followed all the rules.

 

Towards the end of the conversation, the interviewer said:

Think fast. When is the last time you broke one of the Ten Commandments?

 

Probably during this interview.

 

How tempting it is to think that our efforts to keep the moral code is the way for us to make our hearts clean or to bring God near. But our efforts to satisfy God’s requirements, even if we restrict ourselves to the moral code that Jesus upheld in the New Testament and set aside the civil and ceremonial laws of the Old Testament that no longer apply, even then those efforts will inevitably fail.

 

Jesus is not merely saying here that he is keeping the law or even upholding the law, he says he is fulfilling it: meeting its demands and satisfying its requirements.

 

One commentator has pointed out that there is another Greek word that was available to Jesus if what he was wanting to say was that he came simply to follow the law or to reinforce the law or to set it up or to establish it or to make it stand. Instead, he chose a word that means fulfill the demands of, satisfy the requirements of.

 

Now, it’s important to understand the question that this comment is the answer to. And this is where my conversation with my friend comes in.

 

The Scriptures teach that God is perfectly morally holy. Another way to say that is to say that God is a holy God. The Scriptures go on to teach that the reason God seems far away from us is that our sin—our indifference towards and our rebellion against God—plus the outworking of that active rebellion in our relationships with one other and in the interiors of our heart has caused us to be separate from God and there isn’t anything that we can do through our own efforts to bridge that gulf. We can’t fix it. We can’t repair the broken bridge. No matter how hard we try to live by the guidance that God has given us, we cannot do it perfectly.

 

So we’re left with God feeling far away and us feeling guilty and ashamed—painfully aware that we have failed to meet God’s requirements.

 

As it says in Romans chapter 3 verse 20 describing our condition:

No one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by observing the law (the law of our conscience or the law of Scripture).

 

But then Jesus, the warrior, crosses the sea and comes to rescue us. Listen to what follows in Romans chapter 3 verse 21:

But now a righteousness from God, apart from the Law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness comes from God through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely [that is, declared not guilty according to the demands of the law] by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ.

 

Because of the morally perfect life that Jesus lived in our midst and the substitutionary death that Jesus died in our place, he perfectly satisfied God’s moral requirements for us.

 

God doesn’t hold the moral code up against us and determine whether or not we’ve earned our way into His forgiveness and into His loving presence. He holds that moral code up against Jesus and determines whether he has earned our way into God’s forgiveness and new life and a place in His loving presence.

 

In his book Becoming a Contagious Christian, this is how Bill Hybels sums up this idea:

“The difference between religion and Christianity is religion is spelled ‘D-O.’ It consists of trying to do enough good things to somehow please God, earn His forgiveness, and gain entrance into heaven. This self-effort can take many forms, from trying to be a good moral person to becoming an active participant in an organized religion.

“The problem is, we can never know when we have done enough. Even worse, the Bible makes it clear that we never can do enough. Simply put, the ‘D-O’ plan does not bring us peace with God, or even peace with ourselves.

“Christianity, however, is spelled ‘D-O-N-E.’ In other words, that which we could never do for ourselves, Christ has already done for us. He lived the perfect life that we could never live, and he died on the cross to pay for each of our wrongdoings. And now he freely offers us his gift of forgiveness and leadership for our lives. But, it’s not enough just to know this; we have to humbly receive what he has done for us. And we do that by asking for his forgiveness and leadership in our lives.”

 

Guilt is an important and profound spiritual reality. Our failure to meet God’s standard is what drives us apart from God, and it is what makes us feel He is far away. And it is a reality to all of us: failing to be true to your word, fudging on taxes or sales records, plagiarizing someone else’s work, getting involved sexually before or outside of marriage, harboring anger or unforgiveness or envy, or being dishonest about something and not coming clean. Whatever it is, all of us are guilty. And that sense of guilt and shame that accompanies our moral failure—our inability to meet God’s requirements, that’s a powerful set of emotions. It can bind us, tying us to the past and keeping us from living with freedom.

 

But Jesus came to purchase our freedom, to purchase our forgiveness, to set us free from our guilt and our shame and to open a way of access into the loving presence of God and a relationship with Him. His satisfaction of the demands of the law sets us free from having to live a perfect life in order to experience freedom from guilt or the loving presence of God. All we need to do is to place our trust and confidence in his ability to do so.

 

So a person who becomes a follower is someone who not only recognizes that Jesus is the answer to fifteen hundred years of promises, but is also someone who places his or her confidence on the work of Jesus to satisfy God’s requirements, to purchase our forgiveness and new life, and to open the door into the presence of God for us. But that’s not all.

 

3. Finally, when Jesus says he has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, it means that Jesus came to fulfill—and, in doing so, to uphold a norm—that is, to fully obey, to perfectly pattern his life according to the ethical requirements of God’s instruction, and to call his followers to seek to do the same.

 

In that interview on MSNBC at the end of his year-long experiment, A. J. Jacobs admitted:

I never fully followed all the rules. But you can try, and you can become a better person.

 

The interviewer was surprised. He asked:

Are you still following many of the rules?

 

Absolutely, he said.

 

Now as someone who, by his own admission, is not a follower of Christ, A. J. is someone who doesn’t have the spirit of God resonant within him to make it possible for him increasingly to live a life in conformity with that holy standard. But even he recognizes the benefits of living a life that follows the guidelines and the wisdom that God has laid out before us.

 

He went on to talk about a number of the different aspects of the law and especially those that pressed him to become a more honest and respectful person of others.

 

Remember, “Law” is the English word that we use to translate the Jewish word torah. But torah is a word that means instruction or teaching more than it means commands or laws or rules. As we said this summer in our “Life’s Ultimate Questions” series, when we encounter the word “law” we should think “God’s best way to live,” not “God’s rules and regulations.” The law is an invitation, not an accusation.

 

Jesus satisfied the requirements of the law before God so that we could be in relationship with Him and be set free from our guilt and shame.

 

But Jesus makes it clear in these words and what follows that he is not in any way casting aside the law—the teaching or instruction of God—as the ethical standard by which we should seek to live our lives. He is, to the contrary, upholding it, and insisting that we not merely seek to conform externally to the letter of the law as the spiritual leaders of the day were known to do, but that we would let that ethical law probe our inner thoughts and motives as well that would define the way in which we act.

 

Jesus says, “Don’t think I’ve come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I haven’t come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law [that is, engages the interior as well as the exterior], you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

 

It is crucial that we understand this as we come to the end of our reflection on this passage that there are two different questions that this passage—these words of Jesus—answer in two different ways:

1. First question: What is the way for me to be right with God? Not through my effort, but by trusting in faith to Jesus’ perfect satisfaction of the law’s requirements. I could never earn God’s love. I could never satisfy God’s requirements. I could never bring God near. I could never make myself pure. Only God can do that work. And, in Christ, He has and He is.

 

This is the greatest insight of the Protestant church, one that many Catholic followers miss.

 

2. The second question is: What is the best way for me to live? The answer that Jesus gives is by conforming my life as closely as possible to the moral and ethical guidelines that are given to me in the Ten Commandments and summarized in the Great Commandments by Jesus: to love God with an exclusive, uncompromising and unwavering devotion; to live life before God with honesty and integrity and moral purity; and to love people with honor for who they are and with respect for what they have.

 

The is the great oversight of the Protestant church, one that Catholics tend to understand better than we do: that the moral code of the Bible has not been overturned, but has been upheld and reaffirmed, not as the way for me to be made right with God, but as the best way for me to live.

 

I will always fall short. But no matter how far I may fall short, this is the life that has been modeled for me by my savior, and this is the life to which I am called by the Scriptures: a life of love and holiness and obedience.

 

So a person who becomes a follower of Christ is someone who not only recognizes that Jesus is the answer to fifteen hundred years of promises about him, and who not only places his or her confidence on the work of Jesus to satisfy God’s requirements, to purchase our forgiveness and new life, and to open the door into the presence of God for us, but is also someone who resolves to follow the pattern set by our master and who sets out to live a life of obedience to the Scripture—a life of love for God and of love for neighbor.

 

Why did Jesus come?

 

“I had a fixed purpose when I put to sea. And I shall fulfill that purpose.”

 

According to this passage, Jesus came to fully complete—to perfectly bring to pass—the predictions and the promises that we find in the Old Testament about his coming and his ministry. Jesus came to fully satisfy, to perfectly meet the requirements of, God’s standard for a holy life—requirements that we are utterly incapable of meeting.

 

And finally, Jesus came to fully obey—to perfectly pattern his life according to—the ethical requirements of God’s instruction and to call us as his followers to seek to do the same.

 

And Jesus’ doings were praised over and over again. Nowhere, north or south, between the two seas or under the tall sky on the broad earth was there anyone better to raise a shield or to rule a kingdom.

 

Would you pray with me?

 

Every Sunday we have printed in our bulletin the words to a prayer that a person can use to enter into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and I’m going to pray that prayer out loud now; and if this prayer expresses the conviction of your heart, I’d just like to invite you to pray along in silence as I pray out loud.

 

God, I need You. I am sorry for all my sins, for the many ways

that I’ve lived my life for me rather than for You. I now put my trust in Your

son, Jesus Christ. I believe that through his life and death and resurrection he

rescues me, making me right with You, and I accept His gift of forgiveness and

new life. I turn for a life lived for me, and choose a life lived for You.

Lead me into the life You intend for me, Lord, and I will follow.

In Jesus’ name we pray this. Amen.