Non Nihil Obstat Musings
The Law in the OT seemed to serve the function of making it apparent to men that they are not God. In other words, to help them to humility by offering a Law they could not keep perfectly. (St. Augustine said that the law was necessary so that we see the necessity of grace.) Unfortunately the scribes and Pharisees circumvented this by seeming to keep the Law, and worse, by making it impossible for non-scribes and Pharisees from keeping the Law. (There is a nice reversal of this in the Church today -- our priests have heavier burdens placed on them - in the form of chastity, poverty and obedience - than lay people.)
Enter Jesus. He not only fulfilled the Law but blew by it - by erasing the distinction between thoughts with actions. By creating an equivalency between harboring anger against our brother and killing him, Jesus effectively laid an unbearable burden on the Pharisees, as if to say, "okay, so you thought you could keep the Law, 'eh. Try this on for size!" In the eternal war between presumption and despair, Christ battled against presumption by asking us to be perfect. He battled despair by reminding that "what is impossible for man is possible for God" and by giving us the Holy Spirit.
In a way, Jesus is to the Old Testament what the Holy Spirit is to Jesus, with the apostles playing the part of the anti-Pharisees. In other words, Jesus seemed to re-enact the bible in the sense that his teachings were Old Testament, and the post-Pentecost was the New. Christ's Law is a perfected one, which caused his apostles to stumble, unlike the Pharisees who felt they weren't stumbling under the imperfect Law.
My sense is that the bible is well-balanced between instruction on what pleases God and instruction on the remedy for doing that which seems impossible.
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