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Jesus began his new giving of the law with one of the most foundational commands of God: “Do not murder.” Our first observation here is that Jesus skipped the first four of the ten commandments. These commands had to do primarily with loving God: Having no other gods but Yahweh, not making idols, not bearing his name in vain, and keeping the Sabbath. These commands were not addressed for his point here, because they were, at least on the surface, a given. The Jews stopped their pagan religious practices in a very strict way with the formation of the Pharisees. This happened during the Second Temple Period, sometimes called the Intertestamental Period. But where they succeeded in religious life, they failed in the social order. This is where Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount comes in. Before touching on matters of religion, Jesus focused on ethics.
Just before his discourse about murder and anger, Jesus said he came to fulfill the Law. And again, the Jews had mostly no problem with obedience to the religious laws around idolatry and monotheism and such. But the way they treated their neighbors needed a serious reform.
Muder and the Jewish Legal Tradition
The following pattern happens several times in Matthew 5: “You have heard that it was said… But I say to you…” Jesus quotes the legal command, then he corrected its application. Matthew 5:21-22, is the first of these statements:
“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”
Jesus makes this contrast clear from the start by adding a tradition that is not part of the law of Moses: “Whoever murders will be liable to judgment.” This tradition was to “those of old.” Some translations say, “the ancients.” However, this does not have to refer to the giving of ten commandments. Acts 15:21 uses the same term for “of old” (archaios) in reference to the law of Moses taught in synagogues since “ancient (archaios) generations.” The concept of synagogues was only a few hundred years old at that point, so “ancient” is a bit too strong of a translation. The term just means “older” here, pointing to the Pharisaic oral tradition, not the Ten Commandments.
So why does Jesus offer this correction? Someone guilty of murder ought to face legal repercussions. This is a good thing. But the teachers of the law were missing something. They were missing the spirit of the law.
It isn’t enough not to murder. That is the bare minimum. Beyond that, Jesus says we must not even be angry with our brothers without cause. We must not insult them, and if we do, we will be held liable.
The Judgment
Jesus mentions a few terms that are worth defining: judgment, council, and hell of fire.
In the oral tradition Jesus began with, the law commanded the examination of accused murderers by a judge. Jesus indicated that the religious leaders “sit on Moses’ seat” (Matthew 23:2). Moses served as a judge for Israel, and then he appointed more people to delegate the workload of judging cases. This law about murder addressed who the offender would be presented before: an official magistrate who had authority to condemn those who are found guilty.
Out of the Heart
But the “judgment” mentioned by Christ is not merely about actions. On the other hand, it is also not about merely an emotion. In his commentary, C. J. Ellicott says, “Ethically, the teaching is not that the emotion of anger, with or without a cause, stands on the same level of guilt with murder, but that the former so soon expands and explodes into the latter, that it will be brought to trial and sentenced according to the merits of each case, the occasion of the anger, the degree in which it has been checked or cherished, and the like.”1 Jesus shows a progression of unchecked anger and exposes it as the root of murder.
So this warning against anger is not a universal one against all anger, or even really against the emotion itself. But it is a warning about the result of refusing to deal with our anger in a godly way.
Although there is scholarly debate about whether “without a cause” belongs in the text originally, it is largely inconsequential. Whether or not we have a justification for our anger, anger by its very nature, if left unchecked, leads to quarreling, suffering, and even tragedy. There is a kind of anger that is divine in origin and totally just, such as when Jesus cleansed the temple, or when God pours out his wrath on injustice. But James, gleaning much of his wisdom directly from his experience with the teachings of Jesus, says, “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Festering anger leads to hatred, and “everyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). And as Jesus says later in his ministry, “What comes out of the heart is what defiles a person” (Mark 7:20, paraphrased).
Hell of Fire
Ellicott continues, “As no earthly tribunal can take cognisance of emotions as such, the ‘judgment’ here is clearly that of the Unseen Judge dealing with offences which in His eyes are of the same character as those which come before the human judges.”2
“Judgment” and “council” are synonyms here, both referring (typically) to the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, or possibly to local officials in other places. However, knowing where Jesus takes this issue, we understand he is speaking of God’s heavenly judgment. After all, the third clause has “hell of fire” as a synonym for these other two.
In Greek, “hell” is the word gehenna, a transliteration of the Hebrew Ben-Hinnom, referring to a valley outside of Jerusalem. The place had a dark history of pagan worship, but in Jesus’ day it was a place to burn garbage. Due to the ever-burning flames, teachers of Jewish law began to associate it symbolically with the post-mortem suffering of the wicked. So here, Jesus warned about the attitudes of the heart and the words of the mouth that can put someone into this “hell of fire,” outside of the city of God, cast aside with the refuse. Just as he said in John 15:6, any branch of the Vine (which is Christ) which does not bear any fruit is “thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”
Hell will not be pleasant.
Insult is Injury
As we addressed above, Christ is more concerned with the heart than the hand. What the hand does only comes out of what the heart believes and feels and thinks. Jesus showed that a person so fueled by their anger that they resort to calling people fools and hurling insults is guilty of sin before God as though they had murdered them.
After Jesus warns against anger, his progression moves from an emotion to a word. Where the version we read from says, “whoever insults his brother,” in many translations, the word for “insult” is not translated. Instead, it is transliterated as “Raca.”
This term appears only once in the Bible, so its meaning must come from outside the Scriptures. “Raca” is an Aramaic expression meaning “vain, worthless, idiot, good-for-nothing.” Related to the Aramaic word for “spit,” it is the verbal equivalent to spitting on them, a gesture of utter contempt and disrespect. So, the recent trend of translating this phrase as “insults his brother” is accurate to the point Jesus made.
A Jew calling another man “Raca” was degrading to the very image of Almighty God. This sort of insult is the heart of murder.
For more on this topic, check out the book Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters!
And this is truly the point: God expects us to treat one another as his own image. If you would not spit on a picture of Jesus on your church walls, then neither should you belittle a brother. It is no different, no less disrespectful to the Lord they represent. As Christ indicated in Matthew 25, how we treat our fellow man is how we treat him.
Lord, have mercy upon us.
“You Fool!”
Similar to “raca,” calling someone a fool is also just as dangerous to one’s soul. The Bible uses the word “fool” many, many times. It carries the idea of moral bankruptcy. To be a fool is to live unwisely, ethically corrupted, and godless.
Proverbs warns us to be wise and teaches how not to become fools. In Paul’s letters, he sometimes refers to Christian theology and practice as “foolishness” to the world. But this use of the word, is unique. This exact form in Greek, Mōre, appears only one time in the New Testament. It is in the vocative case in singular form.
Now, I am not a Greek language scholar, but the vocative word case identifies a title in a sentence. So when Jesus calls his mother “Woman” in John 2:4, this is also the vocative case. He isn’t simply calling her a woman, but is using it as a title, like Mom, or a name, like Mary.
Likewise, to call one’s brother Mōre is to give them that title; it is to make Fool their very identity. And this comes right back to heart of belittling our fellow man. This is, once again the heart of murder.
Is Jesus a Hypocrite?
At this point, one major problem to anyone familiar with the Gospels is this: Jesus tells his listeners that calling our brother a fool is sinful, but he himself calls the scribes and Pharisees fools in Matthew 23:17! So the question is, Does Jesus fail to practice what he preaches, or is there something else going on?
Context Matters
In Matthew 5:21-22, anger seems to stem from personal offense. This can be seen in verses 23-26 when Jesus addresses how we should respond when we find that we have wronged our brother or when we are being taken to court for restitution. So Jesus’ primary concern with anger is when we are personally angry over something done to us.
However, in Matthew 23, speaking to both the crowds and his own disciples, Jesus calls out the scribes and Pharisees with his famous “seven woes.” These are prophetic condemnations of sin. This discourse follows the various ways that the Jewish leaders acted like hypocrites, or actors, who say one thing and do another. Jesus is calling out the hypocrites, not being one himself. He is not personally offended by a wrong done to him. Rather, he is righteously angry over the wrongs that the supposed shepherds of his people were doing to his people in the name of Yahweh.
A major difference between these two scenarios is that Jesus is talking to a crowd, not an individual; his address is general, not universal. So he is not saying that all scribes and Pharisees are fools in their identity, or belittling them, or saying they cannot change. There are even a few Pharisees who are explicitly on Jesus’ side. Rather, this whole discourse is an “if the shoe fits, wear it” situation. So when Jesus says, “You blind fools!” (Matthew 23:17), it is intended for those who fit the description to see the error of their ways and change them. Jesus did not murder them in his heart. Rather, he pointed them to the way of life. On the other hand, the hypothetical person in Matthew 5:22 intended by his words to identify the object of their anger with disdain.
Love is Everything
Jesus says the offender here is “in danger of the hell of fire.” For to deface God’s image is to defy God himself. In this way, Jesus elevates love of one’s neighbor as the very definition of what it means to love God. As John says in 1 John 4:20-21, “If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” This has always been the very heartbeat of the Torah, where we find the two greatest commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).
