I’ve been wracking my brains trying to find a lead-in to this week’s commandment without talking about things like political correctness and hate speech, fake news and cancel culture. Things like misinformation, disinformation and media bias. But the subject keeps popping up. Things like the difference between sex and gender or equity and equality and other abuses of language. But I can’t get away from it. What we’re seeing going on - on a more than usually grand scale - is a sort of giant illustrated classic course on the Ninth Commandment:
“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
And it all has to do with the relationship between justice and speech. It is all about on which side of truth God’s great gift of language is being used: to reveal truth, or to conceal truth. Is language being used to support decency and order, justice and righteousness, or to corrupt it?
Ancient Israel didn’t have tapes or videos or photocopies or email or bank records. Moses’ tent didn’t keep visitors’ logs. They didn’t have fingerprints or DNA analysis or lie detector tests. All they had was the usual circumstantial evidence - for instance, a knife with the accused initials carved on the handle - the smoking gun, as it were. And, of course, the word of eyewitnesses.
In any capital case, all it took was the word of two eyewitnesses to condemn someone. The power of life and death resided in the tongues of the accusers. We don’t know, as we do not have written records of court cases from the time, whether or not people actually stood up before the tribal elders and swore an oath on some sacred object, but it seems probable given the customs in the area that have come down to us over the millennia.
So a lot of people interpret this commandment narrowly. In a court of law, after having been sworn, you may not accuse someone of something they have not done.
That gives us a whole lot of leeway the rest of the time, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t say anything about lying under oath when it doesn’t hurt anyone else, does it? I mean, if it’s not against your neighbor, it’s not covered, right?
Wrong.
It’s wrong first of all because to swear falsely in God’s name is already a violation of the third commandment - remember, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” It is wrong to appropriate God’s reputation for truth under false pretenses; stealing God’s name, so to speak, to get ourselves privileges, trust, we don’t deserve. It is a primary sign of corruption in our relationship to God.
But lying under oath also corrupts our relationships with other people. Because our ability to live together in ordered society depends on our ability to trust the system of justice, that it will be based on truth.
You see, every time that someone gets away with wrongdoing by lying about his or her own behavior, even if they haven’t accused someone else, he or she has harmed the whole fabric of society by eroding confidence that justice will be done. And then two things happen. First, people start believing that they can get away with things if only they’re clever and ruthless enough, and second, some start feeling the need to take justice into their own hands.
So lying in a court of law, under oath, is an offense against your neighbor EVEN WHEN it does not involve a direct accusation.
So - okay - Don’t lie in a court of law (or, incidentally, to Congress) under oath about anything. Perjury is out, even if it’s relatively trivial. Got it.
Does that cover it? Are we clear as long as we haven’t placed our hand on that Bible or sworn on our sainted mother’s grave?
Well, no.
Formal oaths and court cases are really covered by the third commandment, as I’ve just illustrated. The ninth commandment focuses less on our relationship with God than on our relationships with one another. Bearing false witness is, at its most basic level, about accusing someone of something they haven’t done. It may not even be a public act. Passing on a rumor about shoddy workmanship or infidelity can be just as damaging as a public charge, if not more so, because it’s so hard to defend against. And in today’s social and other media environment it is almost impossible. One of the most common slurs nowadays is to accuse someone of sexual harassment or racism or homophobia – or any of the other “phobes” - if they don’t agree with you on policy issues. “Where do I go,” ask people who have experienced such slurs, “to get my reputation back?”
But we damage our neighbors with words in much more insidious ways than by direct attacks. Because to lie is to misrepresent reality. And we do that when reality is uncomfortable, or time-consuming, or in our way.
The easiest and most comfortable lie is the compassionate lie. That’s when you tell someone a fib to keep from hurting their feelings. And sometimes, I gotta confess, that feels like the right way to go. I mean, telling Aunt Ethel that the dress she bought for your graduation makes her look like a school bus is probably not called for. But telling her how nice she looks is just as unnecessary. Wouldn’t it be better to find a positive comment that is also true? Mention the cheerful color, or how nice one feels in new clothes. And getting Dad out on the golf course for that much-needed exercise is certainly a reason to pretend to love the game yourself – but think of a better way. Please.
Because the compassionate lie is usually just an excuse for ducking a difficult responsibility. And these false-hoods do harm your neighbor. Think of the old practice of withholding a fatal diagnosis from a dying patient. Thank God this is no longer common practice. Wouldn’t you rather have time to make plans? or peace with God? or family? Another example is to promote a child from one grade to the next whether or not she has mastered the material. We are hurting her far more by doing that than if we faced the fact squarely and fixed the problem before it is too late for her to acquire the skills and self-discipline she will need later in life. The theory is that it’s more important to feel good than to teach kids to cope with reality. Really?
Withholding unpleasant truths from people out of a misplaced sense of compasssion is disrespectful, because it implies they can’t handle it, and dis-empowering, because it prevents them from taking steps to change, or to prepare.
Equally common is the self-protective lie. We’re all wired to avoid danger. Sometimes it’s simply a reflex; we rarely do it by attacking others directly. It’s a kind of protective covering. We lie to avoid embarrassment or punishment or responsibility. Or maybe just to save time, because the real explanation would just take too blamed long. That’s a kind of lying that I suppose we could call reactive. And some of it is just silly.
Several years ago when my then young godchildren were visiting me, I went down to the church to take care of some things before we left town. By the time I got back, someone had put the chain bolt on the door, so their mother had to come down and let me in. Just out of curiosity, I asked who had done it. Well, it turned out that 7-year-old Philip had, but it took an hour to get him to ‘fess up. And it turned out that he lied - with an almost reflexive “not me!” - because he thought I’d be mad. Of course I wasn’t, or only a little, but it wasn’t a big deal until he lied about it. And then he was stuck, and it grew to “Emma did it!” And then of course it did matter.
Farther up the scale of deception - or down, depending on how you’re counting - is what I suppose you could call proactive lying. That’s when you lie in order to get something of value. And here’s where we move into concrete neighbor-damage. Because this category includes cheating on exams, or falsifying your resume. If you cheat on an exam, and alter the curve, those who have not cheated are put at a disadvantage; if you falsify your resume, not only are you cheating your employer, you are also doing the truly qualified candidate out of a fair chance at the position. But it might be better to classify that one under “thou shalt not steal.”
Did you know that cheating is now endemic on college campuses? Not only do over 65% of college under-graduates admit to having cheated on a test or a paper, a substantial proportion don’t see anything wrong with it. Because what has become important is class standing rather than a fair assessment of the student’s ability. Students push for higher grades in order to keep financial aid or scholarships, to get into grad school, to pad their resume. Students who cheat have, on the average, GPA’s a full point higher than students who do not. And the faculty and admin are less concerned than the general public.
And finally, one of the most important and least well understood forms of lying, is a more subtle abuse of language. There is a linguistic theory called deconstructionism, which in its simplest form means “The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.” [Noam Chomsky] This belief encourages people to change or substitute or invent words in an attempt to alter uncomfortable or inconvenient reality. Political correctness is a subset of this practice, as if changing the word eliminated the condition. It is both an attempt to avoid thinking clearly about the nature of reality oneself as well as to keep others from being able to do so.
So there are multiple forms of deception, or false testimony. From compassion to self-protection, slander to redefinition, all of them hurt other people. As my sister once said, “life is confusing enough without falsifying the data.” So all deception falls under the prohibition of the ninth commandment. Think about it. Jesus calls Satan “the father of lies.” [Jn 8:44b] Consider that God uses words to create, to construct. Who benefits from deconstruction?
So you see, God’s interest isn’t limited to whether or not you are swearing falsely. God’s interest is in whether or not you are speaking falsely.
And the reason God found it necessary to give this commandment is that speaking falsely is endemic to the human condition. As I’ve spent the last ten minutes showing, we can hardly open our mouths without subverting the truth in one way or another.
That’s why oaths were invented, after all. For important events like treaties and trials people needed some kind of assurance that more than the average level of truth would apply. So oaths were invented, which supposedly would bind the oath-taker by the power of the god sworn by. You were, in effect, inviting God to monitor your compliance. To my mind, the very presence of an oath in a non-formal setting is a clue that there might be something to watch out for. I have a pastor friend who if I recall the story correctly was looking through some old sermons and found a marginal note that said, “Point weak. Talk loudly.” People tend to swear more, I think, the weaker their stories are.
And that is what Jesus is talking about when he says, “Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil.” Be the kind of person who never needs to add anything to their story to be believed.
That’s harder than you might think, because, as I said, lying comes naturally to us all. As I’m coming to the end of this series on the Ten Commandments, and look back, the theme that I was dimly aware of in the beginning has gotten stronger every week.
And that theme is brokenness, alienation or separation.
The first three commandments deal directly with our separation, our alienation from God. Our relationship with God has been broken; these laws attempt to put that right.
The fourth commandment, on keeping the Sabbath, also touches on our estrangement from God, but addresses our separation from creation as well, including our fellow created beings.
The fifth commandment, “honor your father and mother,” deals with breaking the connection between generations, showing how breaking faith with the past can destroy the future.
The sixth one, “you shall not murder,” zeroes in on the most drastic manifestation of broken relationships between individuals.
The seventh deals directly with broken promises, but we have also seen that breaking the promise of marriage breaks the soul and body apart as well, damaging the integrity of the individual person as well as of the couple.
The eighth commandment, “thou shalt not steal,” shows the need to respect the connection between one’s self and one’s creative or productive capacity.
Now here we are with the ninth commandment. And like commandments six, seven, and eight, it too addresses relationships. But the integrity of the mind is at the root. We cannot communicate without language. We cannot even think without language. We are only able to think about things insofar as we have words for them. Human beings are so made that if there is something out there without a name that we are trying to grapple with, we will give it a name. Our minds are absolutely dependent on speech.
Language is our way of assigning meaning to the reality around us.
And when we lie, we separate language from that underlying reality. When our speech is divorced from reality, our minds, filled with falsehood, lose their connection to our bodies and souls. Our bodies don’t lie, you know. They can’t. And I’m inclined to think that our souls can’t, either, although I can’t prove it. So falsehood disintegrates people, breaks down something fundamental, whole, central to the self.
Language is an imperfect reflection of reality, of course, because we are imperfect, and language is a human construction. But it is an attempt to come to grips with what does exist, so that we can be meaningfully connected to the past, the present, the future, our neighbors, and our surroundings. Whenever we compromise the integrity of our speech, by using it in a way that does not correspond with reality at least insofar as we are able to understand it, we erode our ability to live with integrity in the world, and with ourselves, and with God. Because God is truth. God cannot lie. What proceeds from God’s mouth is ultimate reality.
So telling the truth is not a game, with points awarded for how close you can come to the edge without actually crossing the line. Telling the truth is about living in the reality of God.
