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HECKLING YOURSELF TO HELL

She’s only five-foot-two, and might weigh all of 105 pounds, even when holding one of the twins. But I suspect there are millions of American men who are secretly terrified of a spicy-tongued household mom named Debra Barone. For sure there’s one guy who’s scared right down to his dirty socks, and that’s her husband Raymond. According to CBS, everybody loves Raymond — and really, deep down, his exasperated wife does too — but it’s a regular staple on this popular sitcom that, sometime during the half-hour, she’s going to get out her verbal shears and let him know what a dodo he is. Ray, who is typecast as a well-meaning but inept dad, sometimes says brilliant things like “If it were up to me, [the kids] would be eating cereal for dinner and wearing the boxes.”

A 1998 article by Joyce Millman on “salon.com” characterizes the program as follows:

“This is the way they fight: Debra bombards Ray with smart bombs of withering sarcasm, followed by silent looks of contempt.”

And then Miss Millman goes right to the line we want to use today as the springboard to our Bible study. And if you’re often tuned to CBS on Monday evenings, you already know the one favorite word actress Patricia Heaton likes to use.

“She humors the neurotic Ray to his face,” Millman writes, “then mutters ‘idiot’ when he’s out of earshot.”

It’s really her favorite word. “Idiot.” Sometimes Ray’s older brother, Robert, is the idiot. Many times Frank is one too. But most of the time, she gives Ray, the husband she promised to love, honor, and respect, a look that would curl paint, and then just lets him have it. “Idiot.” In one Internet episode guide, an exhausted Debra snaps at Ray: “You know what? I’m tired. Could you just call yourself an idiot?”

Well, I hope things are more cheerful at your house, and that if your in-laws live right across the street, you have a better time of it than this imaginary family from Long Island. But as we’re here in God’s Word, focusing on some of the hard-to-understand sayings of Jesus, I think Patricia Heaton and her talented staff of writers at Worldwide Pants Productions need to think about something. Because right in the middle of His beloved Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has this to say:

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder,’ and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’” — which is an Aramaic word of abuse or contempt meaning “empty” — “is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

What do you think of that? You call somebody a fool or an idiot, and you might end up on the final-destiny escalator going down instead of up. Back in Bible times, you actually could get kicked out of the synagogue for 30 days if you slandered someone by yelling “slave!” at him. One commentary pointed out that if you called your opponent a certain mean word beginning with “B,” you could get 40 lashes for it.

We could immediately decide that the staffs on 90% of American sitcoms are facing a bleak future on Judgment Day, because cruel, insulting language is pretty much standard fare on TV. But how about in our own lives? Have you called somebody an idiot recently? Or a jerk? Or worse? And of course, this Bible rule refers to behind-the-back insults as well as the in-your-face kind.

We sometimes get a bit of leavening and extra insight by reading a Bible passage in a modern paraphrase. How does the popular Message version give us this sermonette by Jesus? Here it is:

“Anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother ‘idiot!’ and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell ‘stupid!’ at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill.”

Well, that part is certainly true. It’s true on Everybody Loves Raymond, where even devoted fans admit that the “dysfunctional-ness” of the Barone marriage is often rather tiresome. After one particularly brutal barrage, Ray says to her: “I wish I were Einstein ‘cause then I’d invent a time machine and go back to when you were nice.” But how much more true in real life? How often have teenagers, who’ve been called “nerd” or “idiot” just one too many times, picked up a gun and mowed down the nearest ten students in blind retaliation? Words do hurt and kill, and even when we feed our minds with what we think is a harmless situation comedy, is it possible that we’re becoming desensitized to the poisonous sting of our insults?

Our series title for the week is this: JESUS, YOU DON’T REALLY MEAN THAT! And as we continue to read ALL of God’s Word, we wonder if maybe we can delete this part of Matthew 5 out of heaven’s rulebook after all. “Don’t be angry,” Jesus says. “If you’re angry, that’s as bad as murder.” But you can read this advice in both the Old and New Testaments:

“IN your anger, do not sin.”

That’s Psalm 4:4 and also Ephesians 4:26. In fact, the Apostle Paul adds this footnote:
“Do not let the sun go down while you are STILL angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”

So there is a time and a place and a circumstance where it is all right to be angry; however, Paul and Jesus agree that anger CAN give Satan a foothold in your life. And of course, we know that Satan is very interested in having you join him on the escalator going south when the final curtain comes down on all things.

By the way, there’s a little story where Jesus was set up by the scribes and Pharisees, to see if He would heal a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath day. They wanted to accuse Him, the Bible says, and they stood around in a circle, ready to get out the rope and the rocks. And Mark 3:5 has Jesus asking them:

“Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? But they held their peace.” And then Mark adds these hard words: “And when He had looked round about on them WITH ANGER, BEING GRIEVED FOR THE HARDNESS OF THEIR HEARTS, He saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other.”

So Jesus teaches us a principle here. Anger is a dangerous, powerful, explosive emotion. Words like “fool” are combustible. These feelings and these words, unchecked and unsanctified, can put a person on the path to destruction. But there were times when Jesus Himself was angry, and times when He Himself used the word “fool” . . . because OTHER people were on that same road to hell, and He wanted to wake them up. When, after the Resurrection, He was walking along the Emmaus Road with Cleopas and his friend, and they just couldn’t seem to grasp the Gospel or the prophecies at all, Jesus gently but pointedly said to them:

“O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.”

In talking to the Pharisees one day, Jesus said “Woe unto you” not once, but seven times. And in Matthew 23:17 He calls them “blind fools” because with all their ticky-tack rules they were insisting that swearing by the temple was not binding, but swearing by the gold in the temple was. Things like that. He not only called them “fools,” but tacked on “snakes” and “brood of vipers” before He was finished with them.

So what does this mean for us? And we certainly don’t mean here to pick on actress Patricia Heaton, who shares a March 4 birthday with our writer/producer, David Smith! This diminutive but talented actress is actually a very devout and born-again Christian herself, a devoted mom with four boys of her own. In fact, Heaton made her Broadway debut appearing in the gospel production, Don’t Get God Started!, and is a chairperson for the pro-life organization, Feminists For Life. But as we examine our own vocabularies and the hidden hatreds of our hearts, what should we do with this hard saying of Jesus?

In his Tyndale New Testament Commentary for Matthew, Richard France reminds us that people in the time of Christ had a very cut-and-dried view of the Law of God. As long as you didn’t actually pull the trigger yourself and kill a man, you were a good person. If you didn’t take a woman to a motel room and commit physical adultery, you could read all the men’s magazines you wanted, watch pay-per-view, and indulge in a million X-rated fantasies.

“[The] practical outworking [of this sermon,]” he writes, “is set in explicit contrast with the ethical rules previously accepted: it is in each case MORE demanding, more far-reaching in its application, more at variance with the ethics of man without God; it concerns a man’s MOTIVES and ATTITUDES more than his literal conformity to the rules. In this sense, it is radical.”

Friend, I guess the gospel of Jesus really is. Radical, that is. And what a kinder, gentler dinner table we — and the Barones — would have if we lived by it. Let’s say grace, and then please pass the cannolis, Marie.