Sunday 15 February 2026 | The Rev’d Clare Barrie
Sermon based on:
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 119:1-8
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.
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We are still eavesdropping on the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus has already called ‘blessed’ whole swathes of society who would not usually have understood themselves as included in God’s blessing. Last week we heard Jesus make his disciples and other listeners a promise about their very being, their identity.… ‘You are the salt of the earth you are the light of the world.’ This is about promise and gift, not judgment.
But I think we feel a little more confronted by Jesus’ words today.
“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’… But I say to you that if you are angry with or insult a brother or sister, ….you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Mt 5:21-22)
…And on he goes.
We’re left squirming – these words sound like judgment, sharp and pointed. It would be easy to try and dismiss them, tell ourselves that such words are a product of Jesus’ time and culture, minimise their impact.
But… let’s notice our discomfort, let it sit to one side for a bit, and dig a bit deeper.
We know that Jesus was a rabbi, steeped in the rabbinic tradition of seeking wisdom through public debate, public conversation that speaks and listens to different views. And these debates were always grounded in the texts of what we often call the Old Testament – perhaps especially the Torah, the first five books of our Bible. But these were not Jesus’ ‘Old Testament’ – they were their only Testament, the only guide to life they had – their guide to living as God’s people.
Jesus and his fellow rabbis would often have debated the fuller meanings of such passages from the Hebrew scriptures as “Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” (Prov 18:21a), and Which of you desires life…? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit” (Psalm 34:12-13). And it was part of rabbinic practice to re-interpret texts for their contemporary audience as part of their debating and teaching, and we can hear Jesus doing that in this passage from Matthew.
Remember back, for a moment, to the giving of the ten commandments – to the Israelites in the desert. These were given by God to guide the lives and identity of a straggling, struggling band of recently escaped slaves – and in those commandments, God was offering a counter to the worst of human behaviour. But when we reflect on those words at any depth, we realise that God is also offering in them a vision of what the best of humanity can attain.
Today we’ve heard Jesus quoting the sixth commandment (Ex 20:13), ‘You shall not murder.’ And then he goes on to unfold the depth of that commandment and the height and breadth of God’s hope for us… ‘You know how it is said, you shall not murder… well I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement.’ Jesus isn’t trying to replace the 6th commandment – he’s rather offering a powerful insight into all that God desires for and from us: that we refrain not only from killing, but also from nursing the anger that breeds violence. It is not simply our actions but our hearts that are being called to transformation.
Jesus understands the human heart… he understands that to nurse anger is to kill divine love. To kill love is to kill our human capacity to love. While anger of itself isn’t wrong, when our hearts remain clenched in anger, they are shut tight against love. And – here’s the thing. We only have one heart… so a clenched heart is also clenched against God and the healing God can provide. We each only have one heart….
Jesus shows a deep and abiding respect for the capacity of the human spirit to attain goodness and evil, when he goes on to give an example of anger that kills. “If you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable…” When we insult another and call another names, we not only nurse our own anger; we help birth a soul-killing anger in the person we verbally abuse. Jesus’ teaching here is consistent with Genesis 1 (the story of creation) and John 1 in claiming that words have power, the power to create and the power to destroy. We can understand Jesus to be saying, ‘Words kill!’
We know this now perhaps more viscerally than any other generation. Our words travel instantly. They linger online. They harden into echo chambers and algorithms that feed outrage back to us. We have learnt that contempt and anger can be organised, monetised and weaponsed – and Jesus names it at its root.
So what do we do? What does Jesus suggest to his listeners? How can we fight the murderous power of angry words? Before we come to God in worship, before we offer any praise or prayer, we are to consider going to anyone who might have something against us, and seeking reconciliation. Is there anything harder than deliberately seeking out someone with whom we’ve had a conflict? (This is hard, hard work….!)
And sometimes that conflict is not only personal but communal – it is woven into our histories of harm, into strained relationships between peoples, into debates about justice and belonging to this land. Jesus call to reconcilation is not naive. It doesn’t deny injustice. But it does insist that estrangment cannot be where we finally settle.
Why does Jesus ask so much of us? It is because we each have only one heart – one precious heart.
If our whole heart has not been offered to God – if we keep some part of it back, so that we can hold onto our bitter anger, then God isn’t concerned with our sacrificial service or our hymns of praise. It’s no use my offering to increase my pledge or do more things on the roster or preach better sermons, so that I can hold onto my anger, my bitterness, and my unwillingness to journey towards forgiveness. God isn’t to be distracted or bargained with.
Nor is God impressed by elaborate religious language or performative declarations or righteousness. In an age where truth itself often feels fragile, Jesus calls his disciples to something incredibly simple: let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’.
The greater context for the Sermon on the Mount – and the greater context for the Ten Commandments and so many other teachings about ‘how to live’ in the Old Testament – the Hebrew Scriptures – is that our God is the God of reconciliation. Jesus is calling us to attend not just to what we do but how we relate to others around us.
Whether he speaks about anger, about fidelity in intimate relationships, or about the integrity of our speech, Jesus is pressing beneath behaviour to the condition of the heart.
The good news of the gospel is that God has given us, in Christ, God’s whole heart first.
In Christ, we can see that God’s heart is not ever clenched against us. The willingness to begin to accept and forgive and journey towards others that Jesus asks of us has already been offered to us by the one who is speaking.
So, if you can, for a moment, think of that brother or sister in Christ with whom you have been at odds, whether for something trivial or profound. Consider what Jesus is saying – he is asking that we allow our one heart to unclench towards that person, lest we remain clenched towards God.
Perhaps today, we can only manage this for a moment. Let it be so, and let God’s love into that moment of struggle so that it becomes a moment of grace. Tomorrow, we can try again. Day by day, by day, our hearts will slowly grow stronger and softer and more flexible and open to loving and being loved, by the God of all love and grace, the God who loves each of us whole-heartedly, the God who will never turn away.
Amen.