What Christ teaches about contempt, anger, and judgement of others
Christ condemns not just murder, but the anger, contempt, and malice that lead to it—revealing that justice must begin in the heart.
Christ condemns not just murder, but the anger, contempt, and malice that lead to it—revealing that justice must begin in the heart.
Editor’s Notes
The following passage, read on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, is taken from Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. This was delivered early in Christ’s public ministry, after the first Passover and our Lord’s initial preaching and miracles.
The section itself appears early in the Sermon on the Mount, in the section which Coleridge titles “Evangelical Justice.” This begins with Our Lord’s comments about having come to fulfil the Law and the Prophets; following his treatment of the fifth commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”) and anger, he treats divorce, oaths, and other matters.
Our Lord shows that the demands of the Gospel radically exceed the teaching of the Pharisees and the Scribes—awakening an awareness in his listeners of their dependence on God, rather than themselves.
This is a difficult passage, and easily misunderstood. One reason for this is that the word anger refers both to a passion, and a sin.
We have addressed this matter in more detail below:
To summarise:
The passion of anger is a good part of our nature, experiencing it is morally indifferent, and it may turn us to an act of virtue or of sin, depending on the circumstances.
The sin of anger is that which is not regulated by the order of reason, and it may be a mortal or venial sin depending on the circumstances.
Losing sight of these distinctions has caused much confusion in our day, as have confused explanations of this particular Gospel passage.
The text from Fr Coleridge
Our Lord’s purpose in this passage was to present the scope of the Fifth Commandment, rather than to present a thorough analysis of anger, or the passions in general. The point is that the Fifth Commandment includes interior malice, not that anger can never be justified.
This is why Coleridge’s text focuses on the sin of anger. He does not address the concept of just or righteous anger; nor does he exclude it, or suggest that all forms or feelings of anger are sinful. His focus is on a deliberate “malice and evil intention” which is contrary to temperance, justice and charity.
It is also a salutary warning – because in some cases, what we feel to be justified anger may not really be so. Our Lord’s words may serve as a check on a wounded sense of self-love, and hold us back from seeking revenge or justice in a disproportionate way.
In this first section, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ explains that meaning of the fifth commandment extends beyond the act of murder alone
That God wants the heart, rather than mere external compliance
Why even internal and secret acts can be grievously sinful.
He shows us that true righteousness begins in the soul—where hatred itself is already murder before God.
The Gospel Law as to Anger
The Sermon on the Mount (To the End of the Lord’s Prayer)
Chapter V
St Matt. vi. 20-30
Story of the Gospels, § 32
Burns and Oates, London, 1878
Loss of true knowledge about God
The justice of which our Lord spoke when He declared to His disciples that their justice must abound more than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, cannot be limited to any special virtue, but must be understood as embracing all the duties of a holy life, whether in relation to God, our neighbours, or ourselves.
But our Lord does not proceed at once to give special directions as to the duties which relate to God, although these are not omitted, as we shall see, in the Sermon on the Mount. He begins with some of the commandments which regulate our duties to our neighbour, perhaps because it was most natural that as to them the false or imperfect teaching of the Pharisees should have been most at variance with the intentions of God in giving the commandments, and should have produced the greatest mischief in souls.
This mischief had been caused, in great measure, by the loss of true knowledge about God in connection with the several duties to man which were protected by the commandments of the second Table. Our Lord’s corrections may be said to be based upon the restoration of this knowledge.
The fifth commandment
The fifth commandment given on Mount Sinai had simply forbidden murder. In doing this, it had republished the natural law on a point on which, of all others, it was likely that the passions of men would lead them to interfere with the ordinance of God the Creator, to Whom alone it belongs to take away life as to give it.
The letter of the commandment forbade only the outward and extreme act of taking away the life of man. But, inasmuch as desires and intentions are open to the judgments of God as well as actions, it is clear that He could not give a law condemning guilt which was limited to the external act alone.
The sin which is committed in murder must begin in the heart and intention, otherwise it would not be the sin of murder in the eyes of God. That which makes it murder, therefore, is the malice and evil intention of the heart, and these God could not possibly allow. The outward act might be the result of an accident or of mistake, and in those cases the sin would not be committed, though the outward act would take place.
Even in human judgment the sin would be considered to be committed, as to its guilt, if the execution of the wicked design had been accidentally hindered from following on its conception. Nevertheless, as it appears, the Law of God was so far interpreted as if it had been a merely human and civil law by the Pharisees, that their teaching did not go beyond the prohibition of the outward act.
It is this interpretation which is corrected by our Lord. He takes the commandment, as it were, at its root and principle, and points out that it forbids the very beginning of the evil passion, which, when carried to its full development, ends in actual murder.
False interpretation
‘Ye have heard that it hath been said to them of old, Thou shalt not kill, and he that shall kill (any one) shall be guilty of the judgment.’
The first clause of the sentence is to be found in the Decalogue as rehearsed in Exodus and in Deuteronomy.1 The latter part is an addition, as it seems, made in the traditional teaching of the Jewish schools, and specifying the legal tribunal before which causes of homicide were to be brought.
Here again we may trace the influence of a false teaching, inasmuch as the whole sentence, as quoted by our Lord, might seem to leave out the fundamental notion of the guilt of murder as a sin against God, the Creator and Father of all, the Lord of life and death, the Founder and Guardian of human society, and to limit the sin, as well as the judgment of the sin, to the external act, as dealt with by the human tribunal—as if a murderer had been declared guilty of what could be brought before the judgment of that tribunal, and of nothing more.
Our Lord’s correction
Our Lord next places His own legislation in direct contrast to the interpretation thus put upon the Law of Moses.
‘But I say unto you, every one who is angered against his brother shall be guilty of the judgment, and any one that shall say to his brother, “Raca,” shall be guilty of the council, and whoever shall say to his brother, “Fool!” shall be guilty even unto the gehenna of fire.’
There are here three grades of sin, and corresponding to them three grades of punishment.
For the phrases, ‘guilty of the judgment,’ or ‘guilty of the council,’ seem to show that the persons of whom they are used came under the jurisdiction of the tribunals which are severally named, and were liable to the punishments which those tribunals had the power to inflict.
Three degrees of anger and punishment
The three degrees of sin are clearly marked out by our Lord, Whose words only require a short commentary to make the distinction intelligible. The sin begins in the heart, and may stop there, or go on further to word or to deed. As to the deed, our Lord does not add any new legislation. His words refer entirely to three degrees of anger, deliberately felt or expressed.
The first is the interior fault of deliberate anger fully consented to.
The second is the same anger expressed in words which signify contempt as well as ill-will, for such seems to be the meaning of the word ‘Raca.’
The third degree is also in word, but the word ‘Fool,’ by which the interior feeling is expressed, must be taken in its Scriptural signification, according to which it implies a judgment on those to whom it is applied that they are in a state of sin, alienation from God, and reprobation.2
And although the words in which the anger is in each case expressed more directly imply a judgment that a person is such or such, than a wish that he be and should be treated as one who deserves that judgment, still the ill-will and malicious wish cannot be excluded in this case when the question is as to the degree of anger.
There are then these three stages of increasing and deepening anger, first conceived in the heart, and then deliberately expressed, against which our Lord proceeds to denounce corresponding degrees of condemnation and punishment.
The distinction of these degrees of condemnation and punishment may be explained as follows. Our Lord takes up the words of the gloss on the commandment, and uses them to express, in the first instance, His own high legislation on the subject.
The word ‘judgment,’ as has been already seen, seems to refer to a legal and human tribunal. Offences of homicide were judged on the spot—that is, in the town or country where they took place—by tribunals which had the power of inflicting death. This is the ‘judgment,’ which, according to the law, was incurred by an act of homicide. As to this, our Lord says that deliberate anger is the same as the act to which it might lead, just as with regard to the next commandment, He lays down that a lustful look is the same as the committal in the heart of the act of adultery.
Therefore interior anger is liable to the same punishment as actual homicide, because it is, in truth, homicide in the heart. This is the first degree of the sin of anger, and the punishment which is due to it.
Our Lord then passes on to a second degree of the sin and of the punishment.
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The Gospel Law as to Anger
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Exod. xx. 13; Deut. v. 17.
For example, ‘That foolish people that dwell in Sichem’ (Ecclus. i. 25) of the Samaritans who were heretics and schismatics. ‘Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh’ (Job ii. 10) of Job’s wife, who is advising her husband to curse God and die. ‘The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God’ (Psalm lii. 2).