You may remember this little ditty: “Sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you.”
My folks repeated that saying to me whenever I was called names. As catchy as it is, I didn’t find much comfort in it. Sometimes names and words can hit you in the heart. They can stick in one’s memory, too. I still remember the day my brother called me “bowlegged,” and that was in the first grade!
Christ Jesus thought words were important. He firmly rejected calling people by names that, today, we might not consider so bad, but to him they were pretty offensive. One word was raca, an Aramaic term of mild contempt meaning “good-for-nothing” (Cruden’s Complete Concordance, p. 626). He declared that to call someone a fool was even worse (see Matthew 5:22).
