Summary
"But I Say to You…": The Spirit of the Law in the Sermon on the Mount
In the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeats a striking pattern: "You have heard that it was said… but I say to you." Five times in Matthew 5 (verses 21, 27, 33, 38, and 43), He sets a familiar teaching alongside His own authoritative word. This is not a contradiction of the Old Testament. Just a few verses earlier Jesus declares, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" Matthew 5:17. What He confronts is the rabbinic handling of the Law—the Pharisees' and scribes' preoccupation with the external letter while ignoring the deeper, searching demand of God's command.
The first example shows the pattern clearly. "You shall not murder" was kept, in the Pharisees' reckoning, by anyone whose hands were clean of blood. But Jesus presses further: "If you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment. And if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council. And if you say, 'You fool!' you will be liable to the hell of fire" Matthew 5:22. Jesus names three escalating forms of the same sin. The "anger" here is the brooding, simmering, grudge-nursing kind that refuses to reconcile. Raca—rendered "insult"—has no neat English equivalent; it captures slander and derision. And moros, the Greek behind "fool" (the root of our word moron), was used not only to call someone dull or stupid but also to brand them godless.
This raises an apparent puzzle, since Jesus Himself calls the scribes and Pharisees "blind fools" in Matthew 23:17, and Psalm 53:1 declares, "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" The hard saying is not finally about whether a particular word is good or bad. It is about the heart behind the word. Jesus is exposing the spirit of the Law, not merely its letter. We can murder with a held grudge, with a cutting remark, with an ugly assessment whispered in private. As 1 John 3:15 puts it bluntly, "All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them."
That is why the “But I Say to You…” of Jesus cuts every hearer down to size. Like the Pharisees, we are tempted to be content with the outward appearance—to be seen as a "good person" while the inside tells another story. Jesus' verdict on that posture is severe: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth" Matthew 23:27–28. Measured by the spirit of the Law, none of us walks away innocent. We are all murderers in some form.
This is precisely where the Gospel meets us. The Law is good, but since the fall its holiness can only condemn; it has no power to justify. The sweetness of God's grace appears in Jesus Christ, who bears every sin—including our murdering sins of anger, slander, and contempt—on the cross. "Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God" 1 Peter 3:18. He rises, He absolves, He claims us in the waters of Baptism, and He continues to meet us with forgiveness when we fall short.
So the hard saying does its proper work. It strips away the comfort of mere outward respectability and drives us to Christ. The Law remains good, exposing both letter and spirit of our sin; but the grace of Jesus covers the whole debt. Each day in Him is genuinely new, and in His good word of forgiveness the baptized live.
Video citations
- “But I Say to You…” 4-21-24 — Would you open your Bible's please with me to the fifth chapter of the gospel of Matthew. If you're using a Pew edition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find that page 4 in the New Testament.…