Fulfilling the Law

Jesus manifests His perfect union with the will of God as revealed in the Old Testament law and prophets. He has in fact nothing to add to the commandments of God, except this, that He keeps them. He fulfills the law, and He tells us so Himself, therefore it must be true. He fulfills the law down to the last iota. But that means that He must die, He alone understands the true nature of the law as God's law: the law is not itself God, nor is God the law.

It was the error of Israel to put the law in God's place, to make the law their God and their God a law. The disciples were confronted with the opposite danger of denying the law its divinity altogether and divorcing God from His law. Both errors lead to the same result. By confounding God and the law, the Jews were trying to use the law to exploit the Law-giver: He was swallowed up in the law, and therefore no longer its Lord. By imagining that God and the law could be divorced from one another, the disciples were trying to exploit God by their possession of salvation. In both cases, the gift was confounded with the Giver: God was denied equally, whether it was with the help of the law, or with the promise of salvation.

Confronted with these twin errors, Jesus vindicates the divine authority of the law. God is its giver and its Lord, and only in personal communion with God is the law fulfilled. There is no fulfillment of the law apart from communion with God, and no communion with God apart from fulfillment of the law. To forget the first condition was the mistake of the Jews, and to forget the second the temptation of the disciples.

Jesus, the Son of God, who alone lives in perfect communion with Him, vindicates the law of the Old Covenant by coming to fulfill it. He was the only Man who ever fulfilled the law, and therefore He alone can teach the law and its fulfillment aright.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship