Matthew 5:22

_ _ But I say unto you — Mark the authoritative tone in which — as Himself the Lawgiver and Judge — Christ now gives the true sense, and explains the deep reach, of the commandment.

_ _ That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca! shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool! shall be in danger of hell-fire — It is unreasonable to deny, as Alexander does, that three degrees of punishment are here meant to be expressed, and to say that it is but a threefold expression of one and the same thing. But Romish expositors greatly err in taking the first two — “the judgment” and “the council” — to refer to degrees of temporal punishment with which lesser sins were to be visited under the Gospel, and only the last — “hell-fire” — to refer to the future life. All three clearly refer to divine retribution, and that alone, for breaches of this commandment; though this is expressed by an allusion to Jewish tribunals. The “judgment,” as already explained, was the lowest of these; the “council,” or “Sanhedrim,” — which sat at Jerusalem — was the highest; while the word used for “hell-fire” contains an allusion to the “valley of the son of Hinnom” (Joshua 18:16). In this valley the Jews, when steeped in idolatry, went the length of burning their children to Molech “on the high places of Tophet” — in consequence of which good Josiah defiled it, to prevent the repetition of such abominations (2 Kings 23:10); and from that time forward, if we may believe the Jewish writers, a fire was kept burning in it to consume the carrion and all kinds of impurities that collected about the capital. Certain it is, that while the final punishment of the wicked is described in the Old Testament by allusions to this valley of Tophet or Hinnom (Isaiah 30:33; Isaiah 66:24), our Lord Himself describes the same by merely quoting these terrific descriptions of the evangelical prophet (Mark 9:43-48). What precise degrees of unholy feeling towards our brothers are indicated by the words “Raca” and “fool” it would be as useless as it is vain to inquire. Every age and every country has its modes of expressing such things; and no doubt our Lord seized on the then current phraseology of unholy disrespect and contempt, merely to express and condemn the different degrees of such feeling when brought out in words, as He had immediately before condemned the feeling itself. In fact, so little are we to make of mere words, apart from the feeling which they express, that as anger is expressly said to have been borne by our Lord towards His enemies though mixed with “grief for the hardness of their hearts” (Mark 3:5), and as the apostle teaches us that there is an anger which is not sinful (Ephesians 4:26); so in the Epistle of James (James 2:20) we find the words, “O vain (or, empty) man”; and our Lord Himself applies the very word “fools” twice in one breath to the blind guides of the people (Matthew 23:17, Matthew 23:19) — although, in both cases, it is to false reasoners rather than persons that such words are applied. The spirit, then, of the whole statement may be thus given: “For ages ye have been taught that the sixth commandment, for example, is broken only by the murderer, to pass sentence upon whom is the proper business of the recognized tribunals. But I say unto you that it is broken even by causeless anger, which is but hatred in the bud, as hatred is incipient murder (1 John 3:15); and if by the feelings, much more by those words in which all ill feeling, from the slightest to the most envenomed, are wont to be cast upon a brother: and just as there are gradations in human courts of judicature, and in the sentences which they pronounce according to the degrees of criminality, so will the judicial treatment of all the breakers of this commandment at the divine tribunal be according to their real criminality before the heart-searching Judge.” Oh, what holy teaching is this!