I don’t know about you, but I find it depressing that honesty is so hard to come by today.
Let me give a few examples.
We’ve just come to the end of the annual party conference season, when it often seems that the leaders in all the political parties just say what they think we want to hear, and a large part of the conference is them justifying why they haven’t done something they said they would do just one year earlier.
This Monday, Amanda Knox was cleared on appeal for the murder of her Meredith Kercher in 2007. One national newspaper did not know which way the appeal would go, so they wrote two stories in advance – one to publish if she was cleared, and the other to publish if she was sent back to prison. The hearing finished, and they published the story on their website, only it was a few moments before they realised they’d put the wrong one up. Complete with quotations from various court officials giving their reactions to the result.
And then there’s that favourite of insurance companies the world over: Terms and Conditions Apply. Terms and Conditions that so often turn out to mean we weren’t covered for the very thing we thought we were covered for.
Can we take what anybody says at face value? It’s depressing, isn’t it, to find honesty so hard to come by? And we long for better. We long for a society where people are basically truthful.
Context
Well, Jesus would agree. He came to create a new society, and one of the hallmarks of his new society is that people tell the truth.
Now, of course Jesus wasn’t doing something brand new. The words that we just heard were taken from the famous Sermon on the Mount. You may recall that in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is looking at the laws in the Old Testament. He tells us that he did not come to throw them away; he came to fulfil them. And so he takes some of the well-known ten commandments and he takes us to the heart of them. What does it look like to keep those commandments from our hearts?
In the previous few verses, he’s taken us to the heart of the commandment not to murder, and he’s taken us to the heart of the commandment not to commit adultery. Now it’s time for the ninth commandment: You shall not bear false witness. The commandment to be truthful. What does that commandment look like when you get to the heart of it? What does it look like to keep that commandment from our hearts?
And then Jesus invites us to join him in a society where truthful is who we are, not just what we do. He came to create the new society the Old Testament hoped for, in which truthfulness is the standard of the day, and he’d like us to join him there. So if, like me, you long for a world in which people’s words can be trusted, then let’s follow Jesus.
Jesus develops this vision in two stages. First he unpacks the problem with oaths, and then he takes us to the answer.
The Problem of Oaths
Let’s start with the problem of oaths.
Jesus says this that this kind of truthful, honest society that he came to create has its seedbed in the Old Testament. So let’s see how the Old Testament develops this vision of truthfulness.
What it does, it put flesh on the bones by giving some more laws that set up a system of vows. The idea was quite simple really. If you wanted to show how serious you were when you made a promise you could add an oath: “By the living God, I swear that I will do…”. We have a similar system today, don’t we? Some people today make a promise, and want to show how serious they are. So they go to a solicitor or a commissioner for oaths, who can witness what is said. The Old Testament said: If you want to show just how serious you are, why don’t you call God as your witness. He hears every word of your promise, and he will keep you to it.
It’s a nice way to make God’s standard of truthfulness work. So what’s the problem with that, you ask?
Well the Pharisees noticed that God required you to keep your word when you made an oath, and that God was the witness. So they invented a series of escape clauses. If you manage to make an oath and not actually mention God by name, your promise is somehow less binding than it would have been. And so they would swear an oath by heaven, or by the earth, or by Jerusalem, or by the hairs on your head.
Jesus just says that it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. It’s God’s world we live in, so everything is related to God in some way or other. You can swear by heaven, but that’s God’s throne-room. You could swear by the earth, but that’s where he puts his feet. And so on. Try as you may, find any object to swear your oath on, and you can’t say it had nothing to do with God.
But the other reason why this kind of ducking and diving just doesn’t work is that it ignores the whole point of the Old Testament’s system of oaths. The Old Testament wanted to say that we should be honest and truthful. Oaths just give you a way to underline that you really mean it. But honesty is the colour running right the way through. So you can’t take a system that is designed to let you show how honest you are, and turn it into a system that allows you to break your word by manipulating the exact words you use. That’s just perverse.
And so, as Jesus unpacks his vision for a society where his people are basically truthful, he first of all shows us the problem with oaths. Oaths were designed to demonstrate your honesty. But they had been turned into a system to get away with dishonesty. That’s the problem with oaths.
Before we move onto Jesus’ answer to that, we need to pause to pick up one way in which Jesus is misunderstood, because it may have bothered a few of you if you’ve ever hard to do jury service. You’ll be aware that some religious groups, such as the Quakers, take Jesus’ words here to mean that we should not make an oath in a court of law. It would be wrong, they say, to place our hand on a Bible and to say “I swear by almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.” Or, if you’re in the witness box, “I swear by almighty God that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
And if you are aware that some people take Jesus’ words in this way, if you find yourself on jury service you may wonder whether you ought to ask to make a solemn declaration instead.
The answer is, I believe you’re fine to make the oath. I say that for two reasons. Firstly, Jesus himself gave testimony under oath at his own trial, so he cannot have intended to forbid that. And second, the whole point of Jesus’ teaching here is that we should be utterly truthful. Making an oath in a court gives us the chance to demonstrate that. We’re not making an oath because otherwise we would be untruthful, but because we sadly live in a society where many others are untruthful.
We make the oath because we are honest people; we aren’t honest only because we have to be now we’ve taken our oath.
Answer: Transparent Truthfulness
Well if that’s the problem with oaths, what’s Jesus answer? And it’s very simple. Transparent truthfulness. Just tell the truth.
You see, if the precise formula of a promise, or a vow, or an oath, makes no difference at all to how truthful we are, then having no promise, or vow, or oath, doesn’t make a difference either. So don’t swear at all, says Jesus. You don’t need to.
As he puts it, simply let your “yes” be “yes”, and your “no” mean “no”. If you say something really simple, like “yes”, then what you mean by that is, simply, “yes”. It’s as straight forward as that.
We mean what we say. We say what we mean. We keep our speech as simple as possible, and as clear as possible, because we want to be understood without any ambiguity, so that people know exactly what we mean.
Application
Now, if we want to be truthful in the way that Jesus outlines – from the heart – then we need to ask ourselves whether we ever erode our truthfulness, ever so subtly, like the Pharisees were doing.
I’ve tried to think how we might fall for the same trap today, and I’ve got a few suggestions for us. Please don’t think this is exhaustive. I’m sure there are other ways for us to fudge on the truth. Wouldn’t it be ironic if someone thought that it’s OK to be economical with the truth as long as the way it was done wasn’t on the vicar’s list! This is just a few thoughts to start us off.
One favourite, I think, is when we’re asked to do something for someone. Aren’t we tempted, sometimes, to say we’ll speak to this person, we’ll make that phone call, we’ll pop around, when actually we have no intention of doing any such thing? Or if someone rings us up to ask where that cheque has gone, to say that we’ve posted it when what we mean is that we’d forgotten and we’ll take it to the post-box this afternoon.
There’s another one that sounds childish, but I do hear it from time to time, and that is to distinguish between just saying something and making a promise. Sometimes I hear someone saying that they did break their word, but it’s not very serious because they never actually promised and so they haven’t broken a promise. I know – it sounds so childish it seems hard to believe a grown-up would hold such a distinction, but from the frequency I hear that it does seem to be quite common.
And then one last way that we sometimes try and dodge out of our commitments is to appeal to the small-print. I know that we have to have terms and conditions – that’s part of making ourselves clear when we promise something. But then, say, you have a simple written agreement with a music teacher, or a pupil, or a cleaner, or a gardener, or your contract at work, or something like that. But then the time comes when we need to pay up for something that we don’t really want to pay. The clear overall thrust of the agreement is that we need to pay it. But instead we go hunting for some little loop hole that might be spuriously interpreted to mean we don’t really have to.
There are a few suggestions as to how we might try and duck and dive out of keeping our word.
Conclusion
I’m sure there are people here besides me who, from time to time, long for a better society. Long for a society in which basic honesty thrives, and in which people can be trusted.
There’s a reason why there’s so much deceit around. Jesus called the devil a liar and the father of lies, and his influence permeates through everything.
But totally unlike him is God our heavenly father. He is perfect. He speaks the truth. He only speaks the truth. Indeed, as Paul’s letter to Titus says, he cannot lie. He is incapable of doing so.
Wonderfully, this God sent his only Son, his living word, the one who said “I am the truth”. Jesus came into this world, and called into being a new society in which we resemble our perfect heavenly father. In which we can be people who are perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.
And this Jesus calls us to be transparently truthful. To be very simple with our words. If we say “yes”, what we mean is “yes”. If we say “no”, what we mean is “no”. And that’s that.
So if you, like me, long for a better society, we need to do two things. We need to follow Jesus, to join his people. And then we need to live by the standard of truthfulness to which he calls us.