“You have heard that it was said to those of old time,”
This is the first ‘you have heard that it was said' of the five occurring in the chapter. These deal with violence (Matthew 5:21), marital relationships (Matthew 5:27), honesty (Matthew 5:33), desire for vengeance (Matthew 5:38) and partiality (Matthew 5:43), things which go to the very root of people's lives. This statement will in each case then be compared with what should be. Together they cover all the basic relationships which lay between human beings. The Rabbis also used comparative techniques, raising theoretical possibilities based on words from Scripture, only to reject them, but none had done it in quite the same authoritative way as this. They postulated solutions, but they did not declare them to have divine authority. So Jesus was not speaking as a Rabbi putting forward guidance. He was speaking as the Messiah.
‘Those of old time.' In this case this refers to the verdict of the elders of the past on murder, based on the Law of Moses, possibly even going back to the wilderness community itself. He is not criticising them for that as such. But His point is that their religious Leaders and Teachers should not have been satisfied with simply dealing with murder, and satisfying themselves by solemnly declaring a judgment on it. They should have taken much more trouble over dealing with the root causes of murder, including dealing with ‘lesser' methods of ‘doing violence' to people which could lead to murder.
‘You shall not kill, and whoever will kill will be in danger of the judgment,'
Jesus implied criticism of this statement was not that it passed judgment on murder. He would have agreed that no crime was worse than murder, for it takes away a person's life. It is a crime from which there is no recovery for the victim. It was therefore right also that it should result in the murderer being brought to judgment, as the Law had in fact laid down. But His point was that by adding on that reference to judgment to the ‘all embracing' commandment they had taken away the wide ranging nature of the commandment. They had virtually made the commandment concentrate on only one thing, the actual act of murder itself. They had as it were sealed it within itself. But they should not have done that and then assumed that that dealt fully with the commandment. They should rather have considered what led up to murder. Thus they had failed to realise that behind that commandment lay a total prohibition on all the attitudes and behaviour that could lead up to murder. He is saying, ‘We should not just condemn the murderer, we should ask what led up to the murder. (‘What has my brother against me?) We should not just say, that is what the murderer did and we will punish him for it, we should ask, what did we all do that made him do this thing?'
But that is what they had not done. By adding to the word of God the idea of judgment being passed on murder they had given the impression to the common people that once murder was under control, all kinds of violence and maltreatment of people was allowable and was legal (compare Acts 8:3; Acts 9:1; Acts 9:13; Acts 9:21; Acts 26:11), as long as it stopped short of murder, which of course in the end it never would for men would be tried too far. And while we may, after long centuries of failure since the time of Jesus, have learned a few lessons about the need for ‘non-violence' and ‘anger management, (and it took a long time and a sound grounding in Christian ideas before we did learn them), we have certainly not in general learned the lesson of the need for a genuine consideration for the feelings of others, while the fight for our ‘rights', of which we are so proud, is often carried on at the cost of other people's rights. And the truth is that even what we have learned has been largely due to the effects of the teachings of Jesus, a fact which many now conveniently ignore. Thus Jesus now examines examples of what it is that causes murder.