IT WAS 1977, and though I didn’t know it, I was about to have the cinematic experience of a lifetime. I had recently graduated from college, and my best friend from high school and I got together to go see… the first Star Wars movie. By the time the triumphant John Williams score ended and we left the theater, we were so pumped that we would have jumped into X-Wings on the spot to go fight bad guys.

It’s easy to take such films for granted now. But back then, it was an unprecedented technical achievement, winning six Oscars for things like sets, costumes, and special effects. You believed R2-D2 and C3PO were friends with conflicting personalities. You believed Wookiees were real, not just tall guys in Halloween costumes.

And you really, really wanted a light saber.

More importantly, though, the story was like a breath of fresh air. Again, it was the 1970s, and anti-heroes like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry were the rage. The good guys weren’t… well, good, not in the traditional sense. They were morally ambiguous characters that you couldn’t quite root for without feeling a bit tainted.

Star Wars flipped that script, returning to the kind of hero story that originated a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. In writing the screenplay, George Lucas purposely crafted the story around Joseph Campbell’s notion of the so-called Hero’s Journey. In the process, he gave us Luke Skywalker, a youthful, exuberantly innocent good guy dressed in white, and Darth Vader, a faceless, menacing bad guy all in black.

Spoiler alert: the good guys win in the end. Audiences cheered, particularly when Han Solo returned to help Luke defeat Vader and the Death Star. It settled the one remaining question in the audience’s mind: Is Solo a good guy or not? And when in the final scene Luke and Han receive their medals from the beautiful Princess Leia and they turn to receive a standing ovation, all felt right with the world.

I think of Campbell, Lucas, and Star Wars as all having touched something primal in us. As beings created in the image of God, we know in our spirits that good is supposed to triumph over evil; righteousness will be rewarded, and wickedness will be punished.

This is, for example, the vision of Psalm 1, which sets a tone for the entire Psalter. There are two paths in life: the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked. The first is the path of blessedness, while the second leads only to destruction. If you delight in God’s law and follow it, you will prosper; if you don’t, you won’t.

Other psalms, like Psalm 37, recognize that things don’t always seem that way: it’s the wicked who prosper while the righteous suffer. But the psalmist still insists that the dualistic vision of good and evil, blessing and destruction, will still play out in the end.

Something similar could be said about the vision of the Sermon on the Mount, which begins with words of blessing and ends with a description of the different fates that await the wise versus the foolish, those who listen to Jesus and those who don’t. For in the kingdom of heaven, the righteous will indeed be rewarded.

But the question is: what does it mean to be righteous?

AGAINST THE IMPLIED criticism that he didn’t take the Law of Moses seriously, Jesus reassured his hearers that he did — perhaps even more seriously than some of his detractors. Not a bit of the Law was to be ignored; all was to be fulfilled. Having said this, he continued in the same vein:

Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly 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. (Matt 5:19, NIV)

His words imply that some of the commands of the Law may seem weightier than others. The commandments to not commit murder or adultery, for example, may seem more important than the commandment to not “cook a young goat in its mother’s milk” (Exod 23:19). Jesus, however, suggests that all of the commands are to be treated with full respect.

But Jesus isn’t just talking about the content of the Law; it’s about the attitude and behavior of those who teach the Law. Do they pick and choose what to teach? Do they emphasize some commands and dismiss others as unimportant? And just as importantly, do they practice what they preach?

Psalm 1 declares that those who are blessed take delight in God’s Law and meditate on it constantly. Similarly, according to Jesus, those who both revere the whole Law and seek to embody it will be called great in the kingdom of heaven, while those who don’t will be called least. Notice that he doesn’t say that those who take the Law less seriously won’t be in the kingdom of heaven. Rather, it seems, the assumption is that the Law is being kept, at least in part, and the honor that these teachers receive will be in proportion to their fidelity and reverence.

All of this, I imagine, would have met with the approval of the Pharisees. If any were present in the crowd, they may have nodded in agreement, albeit a bit cautiously. But then Jesus said this:

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. (vs. 20)

Only the humblest of legal experts and Pharisees would have been able to hear this without feeling insulted and defensive. But this would likely have been a shock to everyone else as well. The scribes and Pharisees were the experts on all things having to do with Mosaic Law and Jewish piety; how could anyone’s righteousness surpass theirs? How could any normal person hope to out-Pharisee a Pharisee?

Note too the shift in language. In the previous verse, Jesus spoke in a way that assumed it was possible to be in the kingdom but receive either more or less honor depending on one’s degree of reverent obedience. After all, no one would be able to keep the Law perfectly, and if that were required, the kingdom would be empty.

But then Jesus says you must surpass the scribes and Pharisees to even get into the kingdom in the first place. What gives?

HERE, I THINK it’s important to remember the rhetorical context: it’s a sermon. When Jesus begins a statement with the words “For I tell you,” he’s about to say something authoritative and possibly counterintuitive. And he’s going to say that several more times in this chapter. His point isn’t to declare that the Pharisees aren’t trying hard enough and that the people must do better; rather, he’s trying to jolt the people into a new way of thinking about righteousness.

His shocking statement about the inadequacy of the scribes and Pharisees, therefore, is not a personal attack, even though they may have experienced it that way. It’s a statement designed to get people to sit up straight and pay attention, to lean forward and catch every word of what he’s going to say next. The entire chapter will be a back-and-forth, tit-for-tat lesson in true righteousness in which Jesus first says, “Here’s what you’ve been taught,” then immediately counters with “But I’m telling you this instead.”

It will be enough to leave some of his hearers dizzy. And not being one to mince words, Jesus will begin right off the bat with murder.