In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Even though Jesus Christ came to usher in a glorious, eternal, and heavenly kingdom, when we look more closely at the Scriptures, we soon find out that not just anyone or everyone enters it. No, that privilege, we learn, is reserved only for the righteous. As we read very clearly in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Likewise, there is also what we see happening with the sheep and the goats on Judgment Day. In that account, where Christ gives out the inheritance of His Kingdom at the end of the world, our Lord tells us plainly that some “will go into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” And finally, there are also the words of Jesus in our Gospel lesson today from Matthew chapter 5. After explaining how He came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, Jesus reminds us how “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God.”

So, given the fact that not everyone enters into God’s Kingdom, but that this privileged is reserved only for those with a certain kind of righteousness, let us consider together in this morning’s sermon what kind of righteousness that is, and how a person gets it.

First, what kind of righteousness is required to enter the Kingdom of God? The unanimous answer given to us by the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures is that in order to enter the Kingdom of God we need to have not just any kind of righteousness but a perfect righteousness. Again, as our Lord tells us in our reading today, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God.” While this statement may not sound shocking to us as twenty-first century Christians, since through reading the Bible, we have come to know the scribes and Pharisees as the hypocritical sinners that they were, it’s important for us to remember that this is not actually how people would have seen them during the time of the New Testament.

In fact, the opposite was true. Far from being the villains, these men would have been known as the “good guys.” The Pharisees were the ones who read their Bibles every day and never missed a Church service. They were ones who kept themselves free from gross immorality and never did anything that was blatantly wrong. Remember what we learn about one of the Pharisees from the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the temple? That man fasted twice a week. He never had an affair. He never killed anyone. He never stole anyone’s money. Not only did the Pharisee tithe what he was supposed to, but he went above and beyond what God even said, giving ten percent of literally everything that he had to the Church. Or think about what Saint Paul once said about himself when he used to live as a Pharisee. As he writes in Philippians chapter 3, “If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more; circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law a pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” There is no one who would have looked more outwardly righteous than the scribes and Pharisees did.

So, when Jesus tells us in our reading today that we need to have a better righteousness than them in order to enter the Kingdom of God, that statement would have been devastating to those who heard it. How could anyone live as good of a life as the Pharisees lived? How could anyone do as many “good works” as they seemed to be doing on a daily basis? How could anyone be as innocent of as many sins as it looked like they were? It would be impossible. And that is the point that Jesus is trying to make. He is trying to show us that the righteousness that we need to go heaven is not just a pretty good righteousness that looks nice on the outside, like the Pharisees did, but a perfect righteousness that is completely clean on the inside. It’s not just your hands that need to be free from sin, your heart has to be free from it too. As Jesus goes on to explain in the second half of our text, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Being righteous in the sight of God, or having the kind of righteousness required to enter into His Kingdom, means much more than simply looking righteous in the eyes of men. God sees beyond what men see. God sees right into the heart. God knows what the motivation is for the things that we do, even if no one else does. God knows what terrible things sometimes pass through our minds even if we never say them out loud. And God is not satisfied by our behavior just because other people might be.  God demands perfection in thought, word, and deed. As Jesus also tells us later on in Matthew’s gospel, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That is the kind of righteousness that is required to enter into God’s Kingdom. We need a perfect righteousness.

So how then do we get it? How do we get that perfect righteousness that is required enter the Kingdom of God? For starters, it should go without saying, even though it needs to be said over and over again, that we cannot get this kind of righteousness simply by the things that we do. It does not come from our own good works. Listen again to what Jesus says in our reading will happen to those who try and pay back God on their own for all the sinful things that they have done. He says, “Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.” If we try to earn a place in God’s Kingdom through our own acts of righteousness, we will never be able to get there. If we try to work our way out of hell by doing things that we think please God and merit His favor, we will only condemn ourselves even more in the process.

The reason why it is impossible for us to obtain the perfect righteousness required to enter God’s kingdom by the things that we do is not only because we have already done things that are wrong and committed enumerable sins against the Lord, so many, in fact, that as the Psalmist reminds us it’s impossible for us to even discern all of them, but also because even when we did do things that appeared to be right, often times our motivations were not. Yes, we may have gotten up in the middle of the night to change the baby’s diaper, but part of us wished that someone else would get up and do it for us instead. Yes, we may have listened to our parents and taken out the trash when they asked us to, but did we always do it joyfully, or did we sometimes do it only because we didn’t want to get in trouble for not doing it? And yes, we may have helped our neighbors in need and went out of our way to take care of them when they were in trouble, but how would we feel if they never said, “thank you?” What would our reaction be if sometime later on in the future we needed their help and they refused to return the favor? We know how we would feel then. We would feel angry. And our anger would reveal that we were not entirely innocent. As Jesus says, our anger would make us liable to God’s judgment.

The best place to look if you want to know what most people think about good works is to a funeral for someone who wasn’t a Christian. Even if they never admitted it out loud, as soon as someone dies who was outside of the Faith, often times people start talking about all of the wonderful things that they did, and how because of those things, the person who died must be in a better place now. But that is the most abominable false teaching that there is. And that completely disregards the Word of Jesus and the central message of the Scriptures.

According to the Bible, there is not a single person on this earth who has the kind righteousness required to enter the kingdom of God on their own. As we read in Romans chapter 3, “No one is righteous, no not one.” Furthermore, God’s Word teaches us that even our most righteous deeds are still not enough to remove our sin and pay God back for all the evil that we have done against Him by breaking His Law. As the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” That’s what God thinks of our so-called “good works” when we try to give them to Him as restitution for our sins. That’s what it’s like to try and work your way into His Kingdom. It’s like handing God a pile of used toilet paper and expecting Him to be impressed with it.

No, the answer to how we get the kind of righteousness required to enter God’s Kingdom is not found in our own works, but only in the works of another. It is found only in the work of Jesus. That’s where we find perfect righteousness. That’s exactly what our Lord came down from heaven to do. The Second Person of the Trinity did not become a man in order to show us how to become righteous by the things that we do. he became a man to give us His own righteousness as a gift. What did Jesus say at the beginning of our reading today from Matthew chapter 5? He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Jesus came to fulfill the law. He came to keep all of God’s commandments in our place, down to the smallest letter, and then to suffer and die for the full cost of our sins so that none of those sins could keep us out of heaven. Remember what Jesus once said to John the Baptist when John would have prevented Him from being baptized? Our Lord replied, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” From His Baptism in the Jordan river, to His Baptism in blood on the cross, everything that Jesus did, He did so that we could have the rightlessness necessary to enter the Kingdom of God. As Saint Paul writes so clearly in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, “For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” And as He also says in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, “because of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”

Jesus Christ is our righteous. He alone has the righteousness that we need to enter the Kingdom of God and we receive that righteous from Him as a gift through faith alone. We receive it simply when we believe the Gospel promise that all of the things that Jesus did, He did for us. His keeping of the law, His death on the cross, His resurrection from the tomb, every miracle and every sign, Jesus did all of it so that through trusting in Him we could have something that was otherwise impossible. We could have the perfect righteousness needed to enter God’s Kingdom. Just listen to how many passages from the Bible teach us that we are righteous in the eyes of God through faith alone and not our works:

Romans 4:5, “And to the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”

Romans 10:4, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”

Titus 3:5, “He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.”

Romans 1:17, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Philippians 3:9 “[So that I may be] found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”

Romans 4:3, “Abraham believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him as righteousness.”

And Romans 3:21, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

That’s how a person gets the perfect righteous needed to enter into God’s Kingdom and be saved. It isn’t through doing a bunch of righteous deeds. It is through trusting in the righteousness of Christ. We don’t have any righteousness of our own. It may look like we do sometimes on the outside, but God knows what is going on on the inside. And yet, even though we don’t have the perfect righteousness that we need to go to heaven, Jesus does. And Jesus gives it to us as a gift. He takes all of His law keeping, and all of His suffering for our law breaking, and He gives us the credit for it through faith alone. When we forsake ourselves and our own works, and rely instead on the work of the Lord in our place, then, and only then, do we have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Then, and only then, do we have the promise that no matter how unrighteous we have been, someday we will be called great in the Kingdom of God. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.