to rebuke: to speak sharply and with authority to correct, warn, or bring someone or something under control
This is a word of authority spoken from a higher position to a lower one. At its plainest it means to scold, sharply warn, or correct: a parent to a child, a teacher to a student, a leader to a crowd. That everyday courtroom-and-marketplace meaning is what the word carried in ordinary Greek long before the New Testament, and the New Testament keeps using it that way, from the crowd hushing a blind beggar to Paul telling Timothy to rebuke wrong teaching.
But the same word took on a second life in Jewish writings. When the Greek Old Testament needed a word for the moment God speaks and the sea flees, the enemy scatters, or Satan is silenced, it reached for this verb. So alongside the plain meaning, the word can carry the weight of a commanding word that actually forces the thing it addresses into submission.
The Gospels use both kinds of force, sometimes side by side. The very same word describes Jesus silencing a demon, calming a storm, healing a fever, correcting Peter, and shushing the disciples. What ties every use together is a single idea: an authoritative voice that expects to be obeyed. The context decides how much force is in view, from a mild reproof to a word that drives out evil.
Scholars debate whether the stronger sense is built into the word itself or is simply what the surrounding story supplies. Because the plainest uses and the most charged uses sit in the same books, most take it as one flexible word whose force rises and falls with its setting, rather than a set of separate meanings.