Murder without Knives: Jesus's Teaching on Anger | Matthew 5:21-26
Brian Hedges | January 18, 2026
I want to invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to Matthew 5. We’ll be reading Matthew 5:21-26.
I recently came across a story about a farmer in Argentina who planted an orchard as a gift for his wife. From the ground, of course, it was a beautiful orchard with beautiful trees and these various groves and so on. But the real beauty of this orchard can only be seen from the air, from a plane, because he planted the orchard in the shape of a guitar, and he did this because his wife so deeply loved music.
I think the Sermon on the Mount is sort of like that. When you look at the individual sayings of Jesus that are in the Sermon on the Mount, there’s great beauty, there’s great meaning, there’s great wisdom in those. But really, when you stand back and you look at the sermon as a whole, and you look at its place in the Gospel of Matthew, you see the artistry, you see the way this sermon is crafted together, and you see the portrait of life in the kingdom of God. That’s really when you begin to see the beauty and the majesty of these words.
So one of the things we’re trying to do in this series is situate the Sermon on the Mount within the broader teaching of the Gospel of Matthew and the broader teaching of the New Testament, reminding us that these words of Jesus are not just giving us rules to live by, but it is a portrait of life in the kingdom of God, given to us by Jesus the king, who also comes to us as Jesus the sage, the wise teacher who is giving us a picture of life in the kingdom, a picture of true flourishing, what it means to be blessed and to live the good life. And of course, Jesus gives us all of this teaching not only as our king and as this wise teacher, but he gives all this teaching to us as the savior, the one who has come to redeem us from our sins and to lead us into this life, life in the kingdom of God.
It’s important now, as we begin to work into the body of this sermon, that we begin to see exactly what Jesus is doing. Jesus is giving us a portrait of a kind of life, a life in which our righteousness in the kingdom of God exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. We saw that last week. Jesus comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law and the prophets. We read that in Matthew 5:17.
There’s a parallel verse in Matthew 7:12, where Jesus again refers to the law and the prophets. It’s where Jesus gives us his famous golden rule, where he says that we are to treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated. And he says, “This fulfills the law and the prophets.”
Those two phrases, or those two verses with the law and the prophets, really bracket everything that comes between. What Jesus is showing us, then, is what kind of life is the fulfillment of the law in the kingdom of God. And that will become very important, especially as we begin looking through case studies of this kind of life, as we will do over the next several weeks—beginning today with Matthew 5:21-26.
Jesus here begins the passage by saying something that will be repeated essentially six times, with some variation, in the rest of this chapter. He says, “You have heard that it was said....But I say to you.”
The question you have to answer here is, who is Jesus correcting? “You have heard that it was said....But I say to you.” Is Jesus here correcting the scribes and the Pharisees, or is he correcting the Old Testament law itself? If he’s correcting the scribes and the Pharisees, then what Jesus is doing is showing us the true interpretation of the law of God over and against the distortions of the scribes and the Pharisees. If Jesus is correcting the Old Testament law itself, then he would be showing us the superiority of his teaching and the teaching of the new covenant over the old covenant.
I think there are good reasons to take the first option, to say that Jesus here is correcting not the law itself, but the scribes and the Pharisees, because he has just said, “Unless your righteousness is greater than that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones said it was similar to the situation of the church before the Protestant Reformation. He said that before the Protestant Reformation, the church was receiving the Bible, but they were only receiving the Bible kind of second- and third-hand from the priests. They didn’t have the Bible in their own language. They were not able to read it and understand it for themselves. So what they were getting was the Bible, but it was refracted through the distortions of the medieval Roman Catholic church at the time, and the Reformers then gave the word of God to the people. They didn’t invent the word; they just gave the word of God back to the people.
Lloyd-Jones says that’s similar to what Jesus is doing here. He is restoring a true understanding of God’s original intention in the law of God, and that true intention is not merely rule-keeping, but it is a life of love—love that protects human dignity, that resists violence in all of its forms, that makes room for repentance and healing and reconciliation and restored relationships. This is what God brings to us in the kingdom of God as he gives us the great new covenant gift of the Holy Spirit, who writes the law on our hearts.
We need to understand all of that if we are to understand and interpret these words appropriately. So let’s read the text now, Matthew 5:21-26. Jesus is speaking.
“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. 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 and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.”
This is God’s Word.
So these are the words of Jesus that initially confront us with a problem, a problem in the human heart. Jesus here is exposing what we might call the hidden disease of anger as murder in the heart. He warns us of its deadly seriousness before God, and he calls us to urgent reconciliation that is made possible through the grace of the gospel and the power of the Spirit.
So we could work through the passage in this way: we could say that Jesus here is giving us a
1. Diagnosis
2. Prognosis
3. Cure
Let’s look at each one of those.
1. Diagnosis
Verse 21: “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ’You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’” So Jesus here begins with a commandment that everybody agrees on. Everybody agrees that you shall not murder, and most of us just instinctively feel safe when we hear those words. “’You shall not murder.’ Well, I haven’t killed anyone.”
But Jesus refuses to let obedience remain at the surface level. He’s quoting, of course, the sixth commandment, but I think representing a distortion of the scribes and Pharisees, who thought that they had kept the sixth commandment as long as they didn’t kill someone. And Jesus ups the ante, showing us that the true intention of the sixth commandment was not just not killing, but not even harboring the kinds of attitudes in the heart that lead to the dehumanizing and the destruction of other people.
Verse 22: “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”
Sinclair Ferguson calls this, in a very memorable phrase, “murder without knives.” Listen, Jesus is not redefining murder, he is exposing its roots, because Jesus knows that long before violence takes physical form—before anyone pulls out a gun or pulls out a knife—it often takes verbal and emotional form. It is anger that hardens into contempt, and contempt that dehumanizes others. So Jesus says, “Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ’You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”
Jesus is using words that people would have understood. “Whoever insults his brother.” Literally Jesus uses an Aramaic word that was an insult. The word is raka, and it means something like empty-headed. So it would be like saying, “You blockhead,” or, “You bonehead,” or, “You lame-brain,” or, “You’re stupid,” or whatever. It’s an insult. It’s something that diminishes another person. It’s an expression of contempt.
Then when he says, “Whoever says, ’You fool,’” that’s literally the word “moron.” “You moron! You idiot!” But it’s a word that carries not just an insult regarding someone’s intellectual capability, but also regarding their moral status. So Jesus here goes after words and attitudes that are at the root of anger and murder.
He is confronting us with something that matters so deeply in our hearts and lives. It is the attitude of contempt for another person. Contempt for another person—that is, when we begin to dehumanize another person who has been made in the image of God. And it shows us that Jesus is profoundly concerned with doing harm and with correcting that tendency in our hearts, in our lives.
Now, it is important for us to distinguish righteous anger from sinful anger, because there is such a thing as anger that is righteous, that is just. And I think we can distinguish them in this way: Righteous anger is anger that is aligned with God’s concern for truth and justice. So Ephesians 4:26 says, “Be angry and do not sin.” We know when we read the Gospels that there were occasions in Jesus’ life when Jesus was angry. Think about when Jesus goes into the temple and he chases out the moneychangers in the temple. Or think about times when Jesus was angry with the hardness of people’s hearts, when they were critical of him for healing people on the Sabbath, and so on.
It’s right to be angry at certain things. When we see great injustice being done in the world, we should be angry. When we see children who are being abused or neglected or hurt, we should be angry. When we see crime that is rampant in the world, that should make us angry. So Jesus is not saying we should never be angry, but he is confronting a way of handling anger that is sinful.
Sinful anger, rather than being aligned with God’s concerns for truth and justice, sinful anger is rooted in disordered desire in our own hearts. It is anger that is self-referential, self-protective, and that then diminishes another person.
You might think, for example, of James 4:1-2, where James asks,
“What is it that causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions [your desires] are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder.”
Probably James wasn’t writing to people who were literally killing each other. He’s applying here Jesus’ words. They were angry. They were embittered with one another because of their competing, selfish desires.
Now, of course, most of us just don’t think that we are angry people. We don’t think we’re angry people. We just think that we have really good reason to be frustrated with the ignorance or the ineptitude or the incompetence of other people! Right?
“If my husband wouldn’t be so inconsiderate, then I wouldn’t get angry.”
“If my kids would not be so disrespectful, then I wouldn’t get angry.”
“If my fellow workers were not so lazy and incompetent, then I would not get angry.”
“If that guy in the car had not been so rude, then I wouldn’t have lost my temper.”
That’s the way we reason, isn’t it? Because anger in the moment feels so right. It feels so justified, and so we tend to justify ourselves. We tend to rationalize anger.
And it feels good to get angry. It feels good to blow off steam, to say what we really think, to stop suppressing our emotions, to stand up for ourselves.
But there’s the danger right there. In that moment of self-justification, in the expression of anger towards another person, when we begin to express contempt for someone else, something is happening in that relationship and something is happening in our hearts and our souls that is very, very dangerous.
Listen to how one author, Frederick Buechner, puts it. He said,
“Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back…in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
This is the problem of anger. Jesus recognizes this problem, he names it for what it is, and he shows us the great seriousness of this issue.
I think it should just prompt some self-diagnosis this morning in our own hearts and lives. None of us are immune to anger. We tend to express it in different ways. Some of us are yellers, and some of us are brooders. Some of us blow up, some of us clam up. Probably, most of the time, you’ve got one kind of person married to the other kind of person, right? So you’ve got the explosive person in the marriage, and you’ve got the person that just brews in quiet resentment.
But we need to ask ourselves, Where do we find ourselves with anger? Where does anger surface quickly in my words or reactions? Where does it simmer quietly and brew to a slow boil in my heart? And who do I tend to treat with contempt rather than with kindness? Ask the Lord to search your heart this morning for anger in your life.
2. Prognosis
Jesus gives us a diagnosis, but he also gives us the prognosis, as he speaks here about the reality of judgment. He’s exposed the disease, and now he shows us the seriousness of this disease. Look again at verse 22.
“But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment [literally ’the court’]; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council [that’s the Sanhedrin]; and whoever says, ’You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”
The word there translates two Semitic words that refer literally to the Valley of Hinnom. You can read about the Valley of Hinnom in the Old Testament. It was a place that had received God’s judgment. It was a ravine to the south of Jerusalem, and many scholars believe that at the time Jesus said these words it was a place where the rubbish was taken. It was the garbage dump, where the garbage was burned, there in this ravine. And it became a euphemism for the fires of hell, the fires of eternal judgment.
I don’t think Jesus here is giving us so much escalating consequences. I think he is using the language of the court, the language of the Sanhedrin or the council, and the language of the garbage dump, the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna—he’s using all of those words as metaphors to show us the seriousness of sin that ultimately results in the judgment of God.
Here’s the point: the sin of anger, expressed in contempt and abusive words, renders someone as liable to divine judgment as the sin of murder itself. And this judgment language is not given, I don’t think, to crush us as much as to wake us up, because it signals something very important. It signals that human dignity matters so much to God that anything which destroys it, whether through physical violence or through corrosive words of contempt, cannot be ignored, because anger does something to our hearts. It does something in our relationships.
Listen to how C.S. Lewis put this. I found this helpful. He said,
“One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands and another so placed that however angry he gets, he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted. It will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. The bigness or smallness of the thing seen from the outside is not what really matters.”
You see, it’s what’s going on in the heart. It’s this heart of anger and contempt. And it helps us understand why Jesus warns so often about hell and judgment as he does, as we will see in this chapter. It’s not because of just the badness of the external action; it’s because of the distortion that the heart motivations bring into our lives.
So we could say that judgment really is God’s refusal to trivialize the harm that we do to ourselves and to others. God must judge sin; otherwise, God would not be just. God would not even be a loving God if he turned a blind eye and refused to deal with sin and justice.
And listen, Jesus is not alone in his warnings. You can find the same kinds of warnings in the apostles. Let me just give you one example, the apostle Paul from Romans 2. It would be worth your reading the entire chapter, but let me just read two verses, verses 4 and 5.
“Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.”
You see, this is what sin does to us. It harms others, it harms ourselves, and it is an affront to God. Sin hardens the heart, the sin, particularly, of anger trains us in contempt, and it makes reconciliation increasingly unlikely.
3. Cure
That’s why I think Jesus does not simply give us diagnosis and prognosis, but he gives us a step to take. And this is very practical. What follows is very practical. Jesus gives us a step of reconciliation to take in our relationships when there has been a fracture because of anger.
So that leads us to the third point, the cure, which we could word in this way: urgent reconciliation rooted in the gospel.
It’s important here for us to see both what Jesus says—an emphasis on urgent reconciliation, as Jesus will show us in two examples—but also to keep this framed within the bigger picture of what Jesus has come to do in fulfilling the law and in delivering us from sin and death. So we’ll look at this from two different angles.
(1) First of all, just look again at Matthew 5:23-26. It’s the longest part of the passage, where Jesus gives us two examples of reconciliation, and he stresses the urgency of it. First of all, here’s a religious example. This is someone at worship, verse 23.
“So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother [this could be brother or sister; the word embraces anyone who is a part of the fellowship of faith] has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother [or sister], and then come and offer your gift.”
So Jesus is saying, if you come to worship and there you remember not just that you have something against somebody else, but you remember that someone has something against you—in other words, you know that there’s a fracture in the relationship—he’s saying, stop. Stop praying. Stop listening to the sermon. Don’t take communion. Right? Quit singing. This is urgent! Go be reconciled with your brother or sister.
This is important. Jesus is showing us that even the most sacred act of worship must be interrupted in order to repair the relationship. There’s an urgency to the reconciliation.
(2) Then he gives another example. This is an example from ordinary life. These are two people who are going to court to have something settled in court. Look what Jesus says in verse 25.
“Come to terms quickly with your accuser [or your opponent] while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.”
So he’s speaking to the people of his time, and he’s using an everyday example. He’s saying it’s better to settle out of court than to risk getting a verdict from the judge that could land you in prison. It’s a way of emphasizing once again the urgency of repairing the broken relationship.
I think that’s the main point for us to get from these two examples, is that Jesus wants us to feel an urgency in our relationship so that we are quick to repair, we’re quick to forgive, and of course quick to seek forgiveness. The goal here is reconciliation.
Now, what I want to do is just take a moment and apply. I’ve tried to explain the text, but let’s apply this. I want us to just think about how this is so important in our personal relationships.
Let’s just think for a minute about what we could call the corrosive power of contempt in our relationships. And I want to focus for a moment on marriage, but this applies, I think, to other relationships as well.
There is a psychologist and a researcher named John Gottman. Not a pastor, not a theologian—I don’t even think he’s a Christian—but he wrote a book called The Seven Principles That Make Marriage Work. I think it’s one of the best books on marriage out there. I’ve actually used it in counseling with people before. John Gottman for decades studied marriage. He studied married people. He did so through long-term observational research at the University of Washington, in what he called the Love Lab.
Essentially, he set up a living room. It was a very realistic scenario. He set it up like a living room, and he would put couples together in this room and would try to encourage them to have a normal conversation. And he would record their conversation as they were discussing their lives together and often their areas of conflict.
And the researchers studied these couples—I mean, thousands of couples who went through this—for years. Okay, this is a years-long…I think 20-year research project. And the researchers measured things like this: facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, physiological responses like heart rate, stress levels, and so on. And Gottman got to the point where he could predict within five minutes, with something like 90 percent accuracy, whether the couple would be divorced or stay married within five years. Ninety percent accuracy! And here was the thing: if there was contempt expressed in the relationship, he said the marriage would not last.
Jesus knows this. Jesus knows this! So he says we have to deal with contempt in our hearts. You don’t even say something like, “You’re such a blockhead. You’re such an idiot.” You don’t talk like this to one another. This is so, so important in our relationships.
Listen, it’s not limited to marriage, but if this is an area in your marriage that has brought breakdown, then of course this is something to seek help with. I would encourage you to seek counseling and start working through those issues and rid your marriage of contempt.
But this also shows up in schools, where disagreements turn into ridicule. It shows up online, where, so quickly, our disagreements about politics or culture or whatever turns into outrage. It shows up at work, where resentment may simmer under the surface of professional politeness, but really we’re harboring hatred and anger in our hearts.
Friends, Jesus calls us to something that is radically different and much, much better. He calls us to urgent reconciliation that is rooted and modeled in the gospel and that is empowered by the Spirit. Okay, so now let’s do the wide-angle lens and let’s see what Jesus is saying here in light of the fullness of the gospel, which we’ve already seen is all about Jesus coming to fulfill the law, for us in his death on the cross and in us by the power of the Spirit. That was last week’s sermon.
What I want to do is just take you to one more passage of Scripture and show you how this gets worked out practically in light of the gospel. So one more passage, Ephesians 4:26-27 and 29-32. This is Paul writing. He says, “Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.”
Okay, there it is. There’s the urgency. “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” That means you need to make an attempt to repair the relationship before the day ends with a spouse or with a child or with a fellow believer or with a coworker. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.
“Give no opportunity to the devil.” Satan gets a foothold in our lives when we let anger brew and we don’t deal with resentment.
Then look at verse 29. “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths.” Again, he’s addressing the problem of contempt. This is language, these are words that express contempt and disregard for others. “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” Why? Because it’s through the Spirit that we have the power to live in this new kind of way. Don’t grieve the Spirit. Don’t wound the Spirit or hurt the Spirit who empowers you to live in a different kind of way.
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” Those words cover the whole gamut of anger, all the varied expressions of it.
Then finally, verse 32, here’s the gospel motivation. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
Friends, Jesus did not merely expose the roots of our anger and show us the heart of sin and the reality of judgment. Jesus came to bear that judgment for us on the cross. He fulfilled the law we had broken; he absorbed our violence, our contempt, our hostility into himself on the cross; and after his resurrection, he gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit, this great new covenant gift, the Spirit who writes the law on our hearts so that we can be reshaped, reformed, renewed, and begin to live in the way God has called us to live.
This means because we have been forgiven, we can forgive others. Because we have been reconciled, we can pursue reconciliation. Because God has refused to leave us in our sins, we can refuse to dehumanize other people in our sin.
As one of the great hymns puts it,
“My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!—
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more;
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”
If God has dealt so fully with our sins, how can we refuse to show love and kindness to others? How can we harbor anger and resentment instead?
This is a kind of life that the gospel calls us to. It’s the kind of life that Jesus calls us to in the kingdom of God, and it invites heart work for us today. So, I want to end by spending a few moments together in prayer. I want to encourage you to seek the Lord in prayer as we approach the table this morning. And it may even be that you need to make a little repair attempt to the person you’re sitting next to this morning and apologize for something that happened yesterday or happened this morning or happened last week. It may be that there’s a need to begin the process of reconciliation. There’s an urgency to it. Let’s hear Jesus’ words and let’s respond with the repentance he calls us to.
Let’s pray together.
Lord, we come before you this morning and we thank you for your word, though your word is so searching to our hearts and to our lives. But it is teaching that holds out hope for us that there is a better way to live. We thank you this morning for the grace of the gospel that gives us confidence that our sins can be forgiven through what Christ has done for us on the cross and for the hope of the gospel, that we are not only forgiven but transformed by the power of your Holy Spirit.
Lord, as believers, as disciples of Jesus this morning, we desire to live in that power and to therefore deal with the sins of anger and contempt and malice that plague our own hearts and our relationships. And Lord, we ask you for grace to do that right now. We pray that you would search our hearts, that you would show us where anything is amiss. Show us, Lord, where a relationship is broken and where reconciliation is needed. And Lord, would you give us the grace and the humility and the love to make those attempts at repair and to do what is in our power to be at peace with one another?
Father, I want to pray for marriages in this room this morning especially. I know how easily our marriage relationships can be fractured by words and by attitudes that harm. So, Lord, where there has been brokenness there, I pray for reconciliation. I pray that you would give couples the grace to seek out the help they need and to pursue reconciliation with one another and that you would restore love and harmony in those relationships. Lord, for all of us today, would you show us where, maybe in other spheres of life, we need repentance and we need change.
As we come to the table this morning, we pray that you would help us to come with hearts of both faith and repentance—faith as we trust in what Christ has done to fulfill the law in our place, to bear our judgment, to forgive us of our sins; and repentance as we turn once again to the way of Jesus and to live in the way that he has called us.
So Lord, may that be our resolve this morning as we receive the elements. We pray that you would draw near to us in these moments, that you would empower us by your grace and Spirit, and that you would be glorified in our lives and in our relationships as we seek to follow you. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
