Matthew 5:21-26 — Murder & Anger

LINDA: An offering plate going down the row on Sunday, and a name in your contacts you keep scrolling past. Most of us would say those two have nothing to do with each other... one's worship, the other is just life. Jesus puts them in the same sentence, and then he tells you which one has to happen first.

FRANK: First. That little word is going to do a lot of work today. Welcome to Dig Deeper, I'm Frank Edwards, and I'm really glad you're here, because this is a passage that sounds simple right up until you stand in front of it. We're in Matthew five, verses twenty-one through twenty-six, where Jesus starts with murder and somehow ends up at an altar, then a courtroom, then a prison cell.

LINDA: Linda Brown here with you, and I'll admit the slide from murder to the altar to jail is not where I'd expect a sermon to go. Is that going to hang together by the end, Frank?

FRANK: Better than hang together, it's one argument from start to finish. Read it for us, and listen for how many times the scene changes.

LINDA: You have heard that it was said to the ancients, 'Do not murder' and 'Anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' will be subject to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be subject to the fire of hell. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift. Reconcile quickly with your adversary, while you are still on the way to court. Otherwise, he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.

FRANK: The very first line is the key to the next several days of this series, so I want to slow down on it. "You have heard that it was said." That was the language of the synagogue. A rabbi taught by citing what earlier rabbis had said, and those rabbis had cited the ones before them, so ordinary people received the Law through this long chain of tradition, handed down, teacher to teacher. That's the world of the strict law-keepers we met with the Pharisees earlier in the series. So when Jesus says "you have heard," he's naming the settled understanding everybody on that hillside grew up with: murder is the crime, and the court punishes it. Then he says... "But I tell you." And no rabbi talked like that. A rabbi would say, "Rabbi so-and-so taught." Jesus doesn't quote anyone. He doesn't reach up the chain to a higher authority, because he is the top of the chain. So who, exactly, gets to say "but I tell you" about the Ten Commandments?

FRANK: Only he who gave them. He isn't amending Moses here, and he isn't adding a stricter rule on top. He's showing what the sixth commandment always meant, from the day it was spoken on Sinai. Theologians call this the spirituality of the law: God's law was never just about hands and feet, it was always aimed at the heart. And the six times Jesus uses this formula in this chapter, you'll hear the same move every time. The tradition stopped at the deed. Jesus goes underneath it.

LINDA: Underneath it is exactly where I start to push back. Anger goes on the same docket as murder? But I'm angry at a coworker right now, and I'm not a killer. Jesus is flattening everything here—like there's no difference between a bad mood and a body.

FRANK: A fair objection, and the text actually answers it, because it doesn't flatten anything. Listen to the courts he names: judgment, which is the local court, then the Sanhedrin, the high council, then the fire of hell. He's escalating. Anger, then "Raca," then "you fool." It's the anatomy of murder in slow motion, every stage worse than the last, and every stage under judgment. What he refuses to say is that the first stage is harmless. And the Bible told us this long before Sinai. Before there was a law against murder, there was murder. Cain's face fell. God came to him and said, "sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it." He said that before anyone lifted a hand. So where did the first murder actually begin, in the field, or in Cain's face?

LINDA: His face. The field is just where it finished. And I'll grant you the root and the fruit aren't the same size... but then why does Jesus go after words? "Raca" is a word. Most of us say worse in traffic.

FRANK: Traffic is exactly where he'd look. Raca is Aramaic, roughly "empty-headed," and the point of it is to strip a person of worth, to say there's nothing in there. Then "you fool," which in the Old Testament sense is a verdict on someone's soul. The fool is what the psalmist calls one who says in his heart there is no God. So the second word writes a person off entirely. And the fire Jesus names is Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where children had once been burned to Molech, and which later became a refuse ground that smoldered, so the name became a byword for judgment itself. James picks up the same word. He says the tongue is "set on fire by hell." The tongue feels like the cheapest thing we own. James, and Jesus before him, say it's the most dangerous.

LINDA: Cheap is right, though. The sigh when your brother starts on another one of his business ideas. The look across the table that says "here we go." Nobody at that dinner feels like they're near a fire.

FRANK: Nobody ever does. Matthew Henry put it plainly: "Christ told them that how light soever they made of these sins, they would certainly be called into judgment for them." How light soever they made of them. The sigh, the look, the word under your breath. What contempt decides is that a person isn't worth the trouble, and at bottom, that's the same decision murder makes. John says it without any softening at all: "Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer."

FRANK: Which is where this gets sharp, because Jesus doesn't leave it in the courtroom. He walks it into the temple. Picture a man from Galilee who's traveled for days to Jerusalem, animal in hand, and he's finally standing at the altar with the priest, the one moment in the year he's been preparing for, and right there, he remembers. Somebody back home has something against him. And Jesus says leave it. Leave the gift sitting right there and go. Why would God stop his own worship? Because God hears what's wrong between brothers. He said to Cain, "the voice of your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground." The altar can't drown that out. The word Jesus uses for "be reconciled" is diallagēthi, which is about an exchange, hostility traded for friendship, one relationship turned into a different one. So listen again to who has the grievance in this verse. Who's holding something against whom, and who is told to get up and move?

LINDA: Me, apparently. And that's what I want to argue with. The verse says my brother has something against me. What if his grudge is over something he did first? Why am I the one abandoning my offering to go fix his problem?

FRANK: Jesus frames it that way on purpose. He doesn't hold a hearing on who was mostly at fault. There's no "if you're the guilty party." The only condition is that you know there's a breach, and the moment you know, the move belongs to you. You remembered at the altar. You go.

LINDA: Going first, though, sounds a lot like grovelling. Some listener right now got actually wronged, and they're hearing "go make it right" as "go let him win." Go apologize for something you didn't do so everybody can be comfortable again. That can't be what this means.

FRANK: It isn't, and you're right to insist on that. Reconciliation isn't pretending. You name what's actually yours, and you don't confess what isn't. Going first means you open the door, it doesn't mean you lie about who shut it. Paul says "if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with all men," which tells you that sometimes the other person won't come through the door, and that's on them. And Paul can also say "be angry, and don't sin," so the anger that sees a real wrong isn't the problem. The problem is the anger that sets up camp and starts deciding the other person is empty. Does going first still feel like losing, if losing isn't what it means?

LINDA: Less like losing. It still costs something, though, the pride of being caught off guard. I'll give you the text on this. Opening the door is not the same thing as admitting I slammed it. Why does Jesus seem so worried about the clock, though? He says "quickly."

FRANK: Quickly, because of the picture he paints next, and every person on that slope knew it by heart. A man is walking to the magistrate with the person suing him. Same road, same destination. And while they're still walking, there's a window. Once they arrive, the accuser hands him to the judge, the judge to the officer, the officer to prison. And prison in that world wasn't a sentence. It was leverage. A debtor was locked up so that pressure would go out to his family and friends to pay on his behalf. No wage to earn in there. No mercy built into the system. You stay until the last penny, one of the smallest coins there was.

FRANK: So everything depends on the road. Once the judge rules, it's fixed. And "reconcile quickly" isn't advice about getting along, it's a rope thrown to a man walking toward a door that locks from the outside. Paul says the same thing in his own words: "Don't let the sun go down on your wrath." Delay doesn't keep things neutral. Delay is how a grudge sets.

LINDA: The road, for somebody right now, is the call to her sister she keeps saying she'll make after the holidays. It's the name she scrolls past, the apology she's written in her head six different ways and never said. And every week she waits, it gets a little easier to leave the whole mess alone, and a little harder to imagine ever raising it.

FRANK: Easier to leave alone. The silence feels like safety, and it's actually the road getting shorter.

LINDA: That changes the next question, though. If contempt is murder in seed form, and I'm already on the road, and I owe down to the last penny... who's paying that? Because it isn't going to be me.

FRANK: [short pause] That's the question the passage has been walking toward from the first line. Because underneath the brother-to-brother story is a bigger frame. We were the adversaries. Not of a neighbor, of God. Hearts that were murderous toward heaven, on the road to the Judge, with a debt we could never pay down from inside a cell. And Christ went into the prison for us. He paid the last penny himself. Hebrews says we've come "to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel." Abel's blood cried out for justice against a murderer. Christ's blood cries mercy over murderers. And the tongue that could have called us fools said, from the cross, "Father, forgive them." He commands reconciliation because he purchased it. Does that make the command lighter, or heavier?

LINDA: If he went into the prison for me, then the sister I'm avoiding isn't someone I get to write off. Whatever it costs me to go first is pennies next to what I've been let off.

FRANK: Pennies is exactly the right scale. Because he made peace with you at such cost, you can afford to make peace cheaply with someone who wronged you. And Jesus ties those together tightly in the next chapter: "if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." Not as a way to earn his forgiveness, but because a heart that's been let out of prison can't comfortably keep someone else locked in. So the offering plate and the name you scroll past were never separate things. God won't take the gift from hands that are still nursing contempt, because he's the kind of God who crossed the whole distance to you first.

LINDA: Does leaving the gift mean I skip church until everything is fixed? Some people are going to hear it that way.

FRANK: Look at where the gift goes. It stays there, before the altar. He doesn't send you home with it. And the sentence ends "then come and offer your gift." The order changes, not the worship. God wants the offering, and he wants it from someone who's walked back toward their brother first.

LINDA: Before you bring your next offering, go to whoever has something against you and make the first move, while you're still on the road.

FRANK: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA: Thanks for listening. Go make that first move, and we will see you next time.