Grant Osborne gives us a picture of the scribes (or “teachers of the law”) and the Pharisees in his commentary on Matthew. The scribes were initially recorders of the law, but later became interpreters and legal experts of the law. The Pharisees were the lay leaders of religious observance, closely connected to the oral tradition. The group arose during the Maccabean period; their name comes from a Hebrew word meaning “separatist.”

If anyone was going to get into the kingdom of heaven, Jesus’ listeners might have pointed to the scribes and Pharisees as sure bets. Yet Jesus spends a lot of time in the Gospels addressing the religion of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus compared their lives to “whitewashed tombs” –“outwardly appear[ing] righteous to others, but within … full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” (Matthew 23:28 ESV) He also decried their setting aside the law to uphold a tradition. Their religion had been made external in many ways, which leads to hypocrisy and self-sufficiency.

What Jesus demands in verse 20 surpasses anything imagined by the scribes, Pharisees, or the disciples. In the verses that follow (5:21-48), Jesus will illustrate how challenging and demanding this righteousness is. It is a righteousness inside as well as outside; it is a righteousness based on the “heart of faith in Christ.” (Osborne)

Paul illustrates this well in Philippians 3. He pulls out his amazing natural credentials: a Jew by birth, raised as a Hebrew (not a Greek), from the tribe of Benjamin, of the people of Israel. He throws on top of that his moral qualifications: a Pharisee, zealous, and “blameless” under the law. He is at a pinnacle of moral and religious development. But he counts it all as loss for the sake of Christ – as “rubbish” in order that he may gain Christ. Paul wanted the righteousness from God that depended on faith. It was this righteousness from God that drove Paul to press on to attain the resurrection from the dead. Having the righteousness from God didn’t cause Paul to rest, but it spurred him on to greater holiness and sacrifice. Jesus had made Paul his own, and now Paul would not stop till he had made Jesus his own.