Completing the Covenant

Completing the Covenant

My New Testament professor in Seminary highlighted ch. 5, v. 17 — Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill — as the key verse in Matthew’s Gospel. Nearly 50 times Matthew either quotes or alludes to what we call the Old Testament. Matthew mentions himself as the tax collector who would have been estranged from the Jewish community, a collaborator with the Roman Empire and idolater wallowing in Roman coinage with Caesar’s image. And yet Jesus reached out to Matthew, went to his home for dinner. Jesus welcomed Matthew without strings attached and then called him to repentance as he called other tax collectors and “sinners” to repentance after being their friends without strings attached.

No other disciple would have felt within himself the chasm between his previous estrangement and his reconciliation to the people of Israel that only Jesus could bridge. Thus, no other disciple would have wanted as much to emphasize the continuity between that community’s teaching, or “law” and the Good News of God’s love revealed by Christ Jesus. And more so than Paul, who many Jews felt had turned his back on the Judaism in which he was raised; while understanding that Jesus’ Good News was for all people – even Roman centurions – Matthew wanted those Gentiles who came to Christ to understand the story of Israel that Jesus came to fulfill, and into which we have been adopted.

“Once you were not a people,” according to 1st Peter, “but now you are God’s people.” There are many peoples with their stories of triumph and tragedy, rise and decline. But there is only one people in whom all those stories can be redeemed from their futility; a people who began with a man and a woman named Abraham and Sarah, to whom God said, “all nations on Earth will be blessed because of you.” We need to understand the law and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible because it was Jesus’s Bible, the purpose of which he came to complete.

When Jesus said to his then-Jewish disciples, “You are the salt of the earth…you are the light of the world,” who else would he be referring to but the nations of the earth that God had promised their ancestor Abraham would be blessed because of him? Not just In Matthew’s Gospel is it clear that Jesus had a harsh critique of the Judaism of his time. He believed that the religious leaders of his people were sitting around in their chosenness waiting for their God to destroy their Roman enemies when they should have been reaching out to them as Jesus reached out to the “sinners.”

Nearly two millennia later, the movement that Jesus started has changed. The late Reverend Richard Halverson, Chaplain to the U.S. Senate from 1981 to 1995, summarized those changes thus: In the beginning the church was a fellowship centered on Jesus. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. Finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise. To these descriptions I might add words like empire, civilization. And in truth, we have been as overly self-protective as Jesus felt his community had become.

But always lurking, ready to critique our pretensions and hypocrisies, is the Covenant that God first made with Abraham then Moses, and the Prophets who keep calling us to renew that Covenant. “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers [who themselves couldn’t fast because they were serving their masters who were fasting]. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist…Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?…Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”

Here are the Law and the Prophets that Jesus came to complete. Here Is the tasty salt and the warm light that Jesus calls us to be for all the peoples of the world, not just ourselves. This is the Christ Jesus of the Old and New Covenant, one and the same, that Matthew knew him to be.

February 8th, 2026

The 5th Sunday after Epiphany Year A

The Rev. David Kendrick