The Same Punishment for Name-Calling

Mat 5:22 But I say to you, That whoever 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 high council: but whoever shall say, "You fool!" shall be in danger of hell fire.

In this passage, Jesus "fills out" the law in an most interesting way. It is as much a prediction as it is a description of the deeper law against "murder." Notice that Christ isn't talking about heavenly judgment here. As in the last verse, we explained that the term translated as "danger of judgment" just suggests that someone who murders might have to go to trial. Here, Christ says the same of "bad-mouthing others," that they will have to appear before earthly authorities for these "crimes." To make certain that those around him understood that this was an earthly judgment, he repeated the idea specifically refering to judgement by the "high council" specifically the Sanhedrin, the high court of his time.

How insane this must have seemed at the time, the idea that you could go on trial if you just called someone names. Indeed, this idea must have seemed insane until our own times, when political correctness has brought us to exactly that point. And though I don't approve of political correctness, Christ was clearly telling us about the progress of "the kingdom of God," where Christ's views of what was right and wrong would, over time, completely change the world. We clearly live on the cusp of that time.

Then Christ takes a step further, repeating the idea a third time, but now showing that this crazy-sounding earthly judgment was in conformance with heavenly judgment, saying that those who called others names would also be boudn, not to trial, but to genna pur, literally "the hell of fire," a specific reference to what happens in the afterlife and the first such reference to punishment in the afterlife and the first of many mentions in this section. Genna, is not a Greek word for "hell." (Our word "hell" comes from the Greek, helleboros, the hellbore plant that makes people insane.) Genna is from Gehenna, the name of the valley of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem, where the sewage, trash, dead animals, and everything foul was taken to be burned.

So in this one verse, Christ is predicting the future of society, connecting that future with heavenly judgment, and telling us that punishment is a part of the afterlife. These are major new ideas, even for our time, which make this an important verse in understanding Christ's words.