Anger, the Altar, and the Last Penny Text: Matthew 5:21-26
Introduction: The Righteousness That Exceeds
We are in the midst of the greatest sermon ever preached, by the greatest preacher who ever lived. And in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus begins to take up the law of God, the Ten Commandments, and press them upon the consciences of His hearers. He does this in order to dismantle the flimsy, self-constructed righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. Theirs was a righteousness of external compliance. It was a checklist religion. As long as they did not commit the final, physical act of murder, they could preen themselves on their obedience to the sixth commandment, all the while their hearts were seething cauldrons of bitterness, contempt, and hatred.
Our own age has a similar problem, though it arrives from a different direction. We have psychologized sin. Anger, in the modern lexicon, is not a sin to be mortified but a feeling to be managed, an emotion to be validated, or a therapeutic problem to be processed. We are told that our anger is a secondary emotion, masking our real hurt. But Jesus Christ, the great physician of the soul, does not offer us a therapy session. He delivers a verdict from the bench. He is not interested in helping us manage our sin; He is interested in killing it at the root.
Jesus' purpose here is twofold. First, He is restoring the law to its original glory and spiritual depth. He is the Lawgiver, and He is explaining what His law has always meant. The law was never just about external actions; it has always been about the heart, because the Lord has always looked upon the heart. Second, by showing the true, radical, and exacting standard of God's righteousness, He intends to strip us of all our self-congratulatory piety. The law, when rightly preached, is a hammer that shatters our self-righteousness, a mirror that shows us our filth, and a schoolmaster that drives us, undone and desperate, to the cross of Christ. For as He said just before this, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.
The Text
"You have heard that the ancients were told, 'YOU SHALL NOT MURDER' and 'Whoever murders shall be guilty before the court.' But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, 'Raca,' shall be guilty before the Sanhedrin; and whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell. Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering. Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way, so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last quadrans."
(Matthew 5:21-26 LSB)
The External Command and the Rabbinic Gloss (v. 21)
Jesus begins with the common understanding of the law.
"You have heard that the ancients were told, 'YOU SHALL NOT MURDER' and 'Whoever murders shall be guilty before the court.'" (Matthew 5:21)
Notice the formula: "You have heard..." Jesus is not setting Himself against the Old Testament. He is not saying, "Moses said, but I say." He is setting Himself against the traditional, rabbinic interpretation that had encrusted the law and domesticated it. The Pharisees had taken the profound sixth commandment, "You shall not murder," and reduced it to a simple, civic prohibition. In their minds, if you had not physically taken a human life, you were in the clear. You could check that box. The only consequence they concerned themselves with was the judgment of the local court, the human tribunal.
This is the essence of all legalism. It externalizes God's commands. It creates a system where a man can be full of hatred, envy, and malice, yet still consider himself a righteous man because his hands are technically clean. It allows a man to be a murderer in his heart while being a pillar of the community in public. This is the righteousness of the Pharisees, and Jesus is here to demolish it completely.
The Internal Reality and the Divine Court (v. 22)
Now Jesus, the King, gives the true interpretation of His own law.
"But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, 'Raca,' shall be guilty before the Sanhedrin; and whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell." (Matthew 5:22)
With the phrase "But I say to you," Jesus asserts His divine authority. This is not the word of a new prophet; this is the word of God Himself. He traces the act of murder back to its source in the heart: unjustified anger. The word for anger here points to a settled, simmering resentment. This is not a fleeting flash of irritation, but a harbored bitterness. Jesus says this heart-sin alone makes you guilty before God's court.
Then He gives a progression. The sin of anger, when it is allowed to fester, will eventually come out of the mouth. First, as contempt. "Whoever says to his brother, 'Raca,'..." Raca was an Aramaic term of utter contempt, something like "empty-head" or "numbskull." It is to look at another man, made in the image of God, and dismiss him as a worthless idiot. For this sin of contemptuous speech, Jesus says you are liable to the Sanhedrin, the highest court in the land.
But it gets worse. "Whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell." The Greek word is moros, from which we get our word moron. But in its biblical context, a "fool" is not someone of low intelligence. The fool is the one who says in his heart, "There is no God" (Psalm 14:1). A fool is a moral and spiritual rebel, an apostate. To call a brother "fool" in this sense is to pass ultimate judgment on his soul, to write him off as damned. It is to usurp the throne of God. And for the sin of usurping God's judgment, you become liable to God's ultimate judgment: the fires of Gehenna, the valley outside Jerusalem where trash was burned, a vivid picture of hell.
Jesus is teaching that murder is not just a crime of the hands, but a sin of the heart that progresses to the tongue. It begins with anger, moves to contempt, and culminates in condemnation. And all of it is subject to the judgment of God.
Worship Interrupted by Duty (vv. 23-24)
Having established the radical standard, Jesus now gives a radical application that strikes at the very heart of religious hypocrisy.
"Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering." (Matthew 5:23-24)
This is a staggering command. Imagine a man who has traveled for days to come to the Temple in Jerusalem. He has purchased his sacrifice. He is standing in line, about to place his gift on the altar to worship God. And at that very moment, the Holy Spirit brings to his mind a broken relationship, a brother he has wronged. Jesus says, "Stop. Leave the gift. Turn around and go."
This teaches us a crucial truth: God will not accept worship from a heart that is not right with its brother. Our horizontal relationships are inextricably linked to our vertical relationship with God. You cannot claim to love God whom you have not seen if you hate your brother whom you have seen. God is more interested in the integrity of the covenant community than He is in the performance of our religious rituals. Reconciliation takes precedence over sacrifice.
And notice the specific condition: "if you... remember that your brother has something against you." This is not about you nursing a grudge. This is about you realizing that someone else has a legitimate grievance against you. The responsibility is on you, the offender, to initiate the reconciliation. You cannot say, "Well, if he has a problem, he can come to me." No, Jesus says you are to go. You are to drop everything, even the highest act of worship, and pursue peace.
The Urgency of Reconciliation (vv. 25-26)
Jesus concludes with a short parable, a piece of practical wisdom that carries a severe eternal warning.
"Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way, so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last quadrans." (Matthew 5:25-26)
The scenario is simple enough. If you are on your way to court and you know you are in the wrong, you would be a fool not to settle with your accuser out of court. If you let it go before the judge, the law will take its full, inexorable course. You will be found guilty, handed over to the bailiff, and thrown into debtors' prison.
The spiritual meaning is bone-chilling. We are all on the way to the courtroom of the final judgment. Our adversary is not just our brother, but the law of God itself, which we have broken. The judge is God Almighty. If we arrive in that court with our sins unforgiven, with our accounts unsettled, there will be no mercy. We will be cast into the prison of hell.
And what about the sentence? "You will not come out of there until you have paid up the last quadrans." A quadrans was the smallest Roman coin, worth a fraction of a penny. The point is that the debt must be paid in full. But the debt of our sin against an infinite God is an infinite debt. We can never pay it. This means the prison sentence is eternal. This verse, far from teaching purgatory as some have tried to argue, teaches the opposite: the utter hopelessness of trying to pay for our own sin. The prison door is locked from the outside, and we do not have the key.
The Gospel for Murderers
So what is the point of all this? Is it to make us try harder to be nice? Is it to give us a new list of rules for anger management? Not at all. If you have listened to the words of Christ, you should be undone. You should see that by His standard, we are all murderers. Our hearts have harbored anger. Our tongues have spoken contempt. We stand guilty before the Judge, on our way to a prison from which we cannot escape.
This is precisely where the law is meant to take us. It is meant to crush our pride and show us our desperate need for a Savior. The law reveals the disease, but it cannot provide the cure.
The good news is this: there is one who has paid the last quadrans for us. Jesus Christ, the only truly innocent man, went before the Judge on our behalf. On the cross, He absorbed the full, unmitigated wrath of God that our heart-murder deserved. He paid the infinite debt we could never pay. God "made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Because Christ has reconciled us to God, we are now free and empowered by His Spirit to be reconciled to one another. We leave our gift at the altar and go to our brother not in order to be saved, but because we have been saved. We make peace quickly not out of fear of prison, but out of gratitude for our pardon. The gospel does not abolish the law's demand; it fulfills it in Christ and enables us, by grace, to begin to live out that righteousness from a new heart, a heart of flesh that has replaced our murderous heart of stone.