What does the Bible say about scorn?

• 2 Chronicles 36:16, mocking the messengers of God
• Psalm 35:15-16, "At my stumbling they gathered in glee. . ."
• Psalm 44:13-16, "You have made us the taunt of our neighbors, the derision and scorn of those around us."
• Habbakuk 1:10, "At kings they scoff, and of rulers they make sport."

In Wisdom Literature

Scorn and scoffing show up regularly in the Bible's wisdom literature (see the proverbs above) as examples of folly. People who scorn and scoff a lot are fools: Their scoffing makes them poor learners. They don't listen. They can't profit from rebuke or even suggestion. Moreover, a moment's thought uncovers another disadvantage of being a scoffer. If your instinct is regularly to dismiss or revile, you abort some of life's greatest gifts — reverence, awe, love of beauty. A scoffer is not inclined to pause and wonder. And the scoffer closes himself off from intimacy and therefore from real friendship.

• Proverbs 3:33-34, "The Lord's curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous."
• Proverbs 13:1, "A wise child loves discipline, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke."
• Proverbs 24:9, "The devising of folly is sin, and the scoffer is an abomination to all."
• Proverbs 29:8-9, "Scoffers set a city aflame, but the wise turn away wrath. If the wise go to law with fools, there is ranting and ridicule without relief.

Jesus condemns scorn

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus strongly condemns scorn. He does so with the use of an Aramaic term that all his listeners would have understood: Raca. In Matthew 5:22 Jesus says this: "I say to you that 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." The Greek is this: "If you say "Raca" to a brother or sister . . .". "Raca" may have come from the sound you make in your throat when you hawk up phlegm before spitting. (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 151) So Jesus is condemning a scorn that is contemptuous enough to spit on somebody.

Understanding this makes Jesus' own suffering and death all the more poignant. In chapter 27 of his gospel, Matthew tells us of Jesus's suffering at the hands of the Romans. Here Jesus is, ringed by hooting soldiers, draped with somebody's moth-eaten bathrobe, adorned with a sick joke of a crown, his beard matted with other men's spit. Here is the king of heaven, somebody's boot in his back, lurching around a drill ground while soldiers kneel and giggle. Here in the depths of St. Matthew's Passion is the Son of God made to look absurd.

He was bearing our grief and carrying our sorrow. He was suffering not only for human sin, but also from it — from one of the vilest forms of it. Scorn and mockery are mortifying. They make you want to die. And in this case the Roman soldiers may have been working from an old rule of human sin: We human beings not only hurt people we hate; we also hate people we have hurt. If we hurt them badly enough, they eventually look so ragged and bloody and awful that even they feel as if they'd be better off dead. So we kill them.

• Matthew 5:22, if you insult someone else, you are liable
• Matthew 12:36-37, you will be justified by your words
• Matthew 27:27-31, soldiers mock Jesus
• Matthew 27:39-40, Jesus mocked on the cross

Sermon ideas about scorn

"Intense dislike and rejection of anyone or anything thought to be worthless, offensive, or despicable" might be righteous. A Christian will not scorn persons because wholesale rejection of them is inconsistent with the love that Jesus requires of us even toward enemies. But nothing stops a Christian from righteously scorning political corruption or advertising fraud or phony preaching. These things and other evils ought to be disliked and rejected.

But scorn and scoffing are so regularly motivated by sinful pride that the Bible almost always treats them negatively. Scoffers may be cynics, for example, who never look at a good deed simply. They think good deeds must have hidden and malign motives, else why would anybody do them? Good people must have an angle of some kind, they think, else why would anybody be good?

Scorners scoff at kindness as a weakness. They think compassion is too soft. To scoffers, honest daily work is for fogies. Mobster Henry Hill in the 1989 film Goodfellas explains his contempt for ordinary folk who live straight, ordinary lives: "To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks, who took the subway to work every day and worried about their bills, were dead. They were suckers. They had no guts. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice, they got hit so bad they never complained again. It was routine. You didn't even think about it." (Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, draft screenplay of Goodfellas, 1989, https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/goodfellas.html

And, of course, the scorner harms not only him- or herself. Scorn typically resides deep within racism, sexism, tribalism, and other forms of bigotry. To bigots, certain "others" are unworthy, maybe contemptible. They lack the weightiness and dignity of human beings created in the image of God. If others presumptuously think they possess dignity, the scoffer assails it. His mission is to shred the dignity of anybody who is not like himself.

Christians who try to avoid being exposed to unrighteous scorn and scoffing will have to be nimble. They're everywhere. Social media are full of scorn and mockery. Certain TV talk and "news" shows package scorn and scoffing as entertainment. Televised sports include celebrations that verge on taunting. Even booing is a form of scoffing.

As this last example suggests, scoffing may be audible and has a wide vocabulary: jerk, dork, dunce, dumbass, fool, idiot, imbecile, cretin, moron, etc. Or it may be visual: raising your middle finger, circling your ear with your index finger, thumbing your nose, imitating and exaggerating the movements of a person with a disability.

Scorn leads not only to scoffing, hissing, jeering, mockery, and taunting, but also to physical assault, murder, and war. In 1930s Germany, Aryan pride was coupled with a lethal Aryan scorn. Germany's war propaganda would have been juiceless without it.

Where scorn and mockery are concerned, crucifixion is just a way of finishing someone off.