A Useful Antithesis - Reflections on Matthew 5:21-37, Transfiguration Sunday, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Wednesday, November 26, 2025
I am flummoxed concerning the Lectionary’s choice for this particular text on Transfiguration Sunday. Why not Mt.17:1-9, the actual account of Jesus’s transfiguration? I note that the second Sunday in Lent offers the preacher Matthew 17 as a second choice, after a passage from John, but why then? For those of you who follow the lectionary assiduously, and rarely deviate from it, I frankly would suggest that you think carefully about your choice for this day. The Hebrew Bible text of Ex.24 is clearly a good Transfiguration choice, but Mt.5? Quite odd to me.
Nevertheless, I will comment on that set passage, since I am duty-bound to help the lectionary preacher.
We are still in the heart of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, that crucial 3-chapter collection that comprises some of Jesus’s most familiar and challenging words. Mt.5:21-37 is no different. In fact, the six antitheses that are found in the text, through vs.48, remain the source of enormous commentary among those who take scripture with real seriousness. In a brief essay, I hardly have time to address all of these powerful words, so I elect to choose only one of the passages that begin, “you have heard it said,” and end “but I say.” Here, we find Jesus confronting long-held, often scripturally based, beliefs and calling them into serious question. I will address the very first of these antitheses, the one that deals with killing, since it is one with rather immediate application in our world, a world seemingly consumed with killing in countless wars, street violence, and even in our own current administration that thinks it can willy-nilly bomb unknown boats, manned by unknown people, in international waters, because they guess that they
might be carrying drugs. It appears to be a very slim reed of evidence, to say the least, to kill suspected drug-carriers without a shred of legal justification. What does Jesus say about such killing?
“You have heard that it was said to the ancients,” the clause begins. The “ancients” apparently refers to Moses and the generation of Sinai, those who were remembered as having received from the hand of YHWH “the ten words,” those stone commands that we know as The Ten Commandments. The sixth of those (or the sixth by certain counts) is “you must not kill” (Ex.20:13; Deut.5:17). I have argued elsewhere (see my 2002 The Ten Commandments, pp.75-85) that the particular Hebrew verb used here will not sustain the translation “murder.” The verb suggests “a passionate urging to avoid the act of killing, seemingly at all costs” (Holbert, The Ten, p.75.). To translate “murder” is, to quote Willimon and Hauerwas, an attempt to “weasal out of this command” (see Willimon and Hauerwas, The Truth About God, 1999, p.80). The sentence in Matthew goes on to say, “whoever does kill will be liable to judgment.” This stipulation does not accompany the original commandment, but may be based on passages such as Ex.21:12; Lev.24:17; Num.35:16. The commandment may be said to refer to killing which is the unjust taking of another’s life.
Arguments concerning the full meaning and rich implications of this straightforward two-word command have filled many volumes over the centuries. Which killing is in fact proscribed here? All killing? What about war? What about capital punishment? What exceptions might there be? I have argued that there are finally no exceptions, and that only God has mastery over life and death, and never can be in the power of any human beings, but others have thought differently.
Jesus is one who has thought quite differently about this commandment, as Mt.22 makes plain. “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with a brother (or sister) will be liable to judgment. Whover says, Raca, to a brother (or sister) will be liable to the Sanhedrin” (the religious Jewish council of the day) [Mt.5:22]. “Raca,” the literal Greek, is some obscure term of abuse, but it is abusive enough to demand a trip for the abuser to the council of the Sanhedrin for adjudication. And futhermore, says Jesus, “Whoever says “fool” will be liable to Gehenna, that place of fire” (Mt.5:22). Gehenna is that imagined place of torment, based on the Hebrew for the “valley of Hinnom,” west and south of Jerusalem, where the trash of the city was dumped, causing a stinking mess and an inevitable, smoldering fire. Gehenna became in the New Testament that place of final punishment for the wicked. Saying “raca” to anyone is bad enough, says Jesus, but calling anyone “fool” is fully worthy of eternal punishment!
How far we are from punishment for killing. Even anger and bad name-calling can lead one to a fiery, eternal damnation! Of course, what seems to be afoot here for Jesus is the basis for any act of killing—it is rooted in anger and abusive language, and its results are nothing short of horrifying for the angry abuser. The current president of the US is a master of abusive language, calling women “pigs,” ( a phrase just yesterday hurled at a female reporter on Air Force One), threatening “hanging” for six elected congress people for reminding military persons that they do not need to follow illegal orders from any authority, including the current president, and never failing to shout vile nicknames at those who do not agree with him. Such obvious anger lies at the base of killing, warns Jesus, and he is in this claim surely correct. The nasty and abusive tone of Donald Trump has without doubt fouled the waters of our discourse, and may have laid the eggs for possible acts of violence, hatched particularly during Jan.6th’s terrible assault on our capital building. Gehenna, warns, Jesus, is the end result of such appalling and disgusting language. For Jesus, then, according to Matthew, killing in and of itself is rooted in the horrors of anger and abusive language. I find these reflections wise words indeed, words that we need to pay careful attention to in our own day.