Righteousness

“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.” Matthew 5:20
The word righteousness means ‘right-standing before God’. Here Jesus gives His disciples what seems like an impossible task: to enter heaven, they must have a level of righteousness that surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.
We can read the Bible and think that the Pharisees were self-righteous hypocrites, but this was a secondary effect of how they lived. To be a Pharisee was to be a professional law-keeper. They were so obsessed with ensuring that they did not commit sin, that they went to what would seem to us like ridiculous lengths to even get close to those things. For example, when walking in a city through a crowd, they would gather their robes as tightly as possible around them to avoid touching anyone with any part of their garment, just in case that person was unclean because of touching a dead body or other unclean thing. Naturally in many Pharisees this led to an attitude of thinking they were better than other people, but their first motivation was towards keeping the law of God as they understood it. The Pharisees were the pinnacle of righteousness according to keeping the law, in that society (see Phil. 3:5-6).
But Jesus said that even the righteousness of the Pharisees was not enough to get them into heaven. We must then ask, “Who then can be saved?” This is the crux of the gospel: none of us are good enough to get to heaven by our own efforts. The Bible tells us, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away” (Isa. 64:6). But, the righteousness of Christ, who lived a perfect life as a man, without sin, can be imputed to us by faith. This is the righteousness that surpasses that of the Pharisees, and the righteousness which we must depend upon.