I want you to imagine for just a moment that you attend an elementary school, and that you have been called to the principal’s office. Do not worry, you have done nothing wrong, but you were a witness to something that happened at recess. By the swings, you witnessed a normally calm and quiet classmate (who had little to wear but old jeans with holes) punch the class bully in the face. A fight ensued that ended in bruises for both, but the principal wants to know who started it all. “Who took the first swing?” he asks pointing directly at you. “Whoever started it will be punished.”
This should be an easy answer, obviously the quiet kid, down on his luck, took the first swing. But, it is not that easy because you are quite certain that the bully taunted him relentlessly until the fists were forced to come out. You know, because the bully has done the same to you! Surely, if someone deserved punishment, it was the bully and not this poor kid who normally would not hurt a fly.
So, you could answer that the bully took the first swing and make him pay for all the times that he indeed started the fight but was never caught or punished. That would be a lie, of course, but it would have the effect of delivering the justice that the bully rightfully deserved. How should you answer? Should you lie?
The commandment reads, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” In other words, you shall not tell lies about someone else, especially if there is great consequence for doing so.
Notice that this commandment is not simply, “Do not tell lies,” though some of our Sunday School teachers taught us the commandment in that way. God, as portrayed in the Bible, does not appear to be against all forms of lying. Remember the midwives in the beginning of the book of Exodus who refused to kill the first born boys of the Israelite people as commanded by Pharaoh? If you recall, they lied to Pharaoh when they did not kill the babies as expect, saying that the Israelite women were just too fast at giving birth. The Bible says that these women were commended by God and rewarded with blessings because of their lies. Their lies saved lives, and God thought it was the right thing to do.
But, notice that the women did not bear false witness against a neighbor. They did not lie about someone with the intention to cause them harm. They were saving little babies!
Those who do lie about other people in order to cause them harm, tend to spread pain and suffering to others rather than causing them to be saved. There is an intentionality to cause harm, or at least ambivalence toward whether or not harm is caused that drips off heavily from this commandment about telling lies about others.
When a child lies about stealing some candy and says that it was their brother or sister who did the stealing, that is bearing false witness. That is intentionally lying and harming someone else so that they do not get in trouble themselves; it is for personal gain.
When a political candidate takes a small sound bite of their opponent saying, “I like to kill children,” and plasters it all over the TV when their opponent really said, “I like to kill children’s most feared policies, such as cuts to their nutrition,” that is bearing false witness. That is intentionally lying about what someone else said, trying to damage their credibility, for personal gain.
When you share what you heard, “That Phil the dairy farmer had to sell all of his cows!” without first finding out if Phil actually had to sell all his cows (which he did not), that is bearing false witness. It is a complete ambivalence about telling the truth just so that you can share a juicy bit of news. Your attitude of not really caring about the truth harms someone else.
God cares a lot about telling the truth about other people. And God cares a lot about us caring whether or not we are telling the truth about our neighbors. Lying about our neighbors starts to cause division as those who trust us line up to support us and those who care about the neighbor line up behind them. This is how family feuds start. This is how wars start. This is how nations and peoples become divided. When we care more about our side “winning” than we do about telling the truth and holding to the truth, all the work that God has done to bring us together can fast crumble apart.
There is a philosophy that says: “The ends justify the means.” In other words, if your side wins, it does not matter what you did to win. If you are good and the result is good, then the evil you commit to get to the top or to stay on top does not matter. The lies you tell do not matter. The truth that you squash does not matter. The people who you hurt along the way do not matter. They were either evil, or they, unfortunately, just got in the way. The damage done, in the end, does not matter as long as you got the outcome you desired.
But, it matters to God.
The damage that we do to the people that God shaped and molded out of love with God’s very hands matters a lot to God. Not telling lies about your God created neighbor, and not harming them in word and deed matters a lot to God. It is almost as if God desires more than anything that we love our neighbors as ourselves.
Luke 10:27 says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Mark
12:31 says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Matthew
22:39 says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Galatians
5:14 says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
James
2:8 says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Leviticus
19:18 says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
I
could continue.
It kind of makes me wonder if God wants us to love our neighbors as ourselves?
Here is the thing: Jesus died on a cross to save us. He gave his life so that we might live. He did everything in his power to benefit us. He did this all out of love for us. He loved his neighbor as himself. What a waste that sacrifice is if we take that love shown us on the cross and trample on it just so that we can haphazardly tromp over the dignity of those he gave his life to save. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Instead, you shall love your neighbor just as Jesus has loved you.
In fact, Jesus wants us to take it one step further. Jesus desires that we not only know God’s laws, but that we would also be wise. So, one step further than not lying about our neighbors is not judging them in the first place. After-all, is not judgment against someone at the root of speaking poorly about them?
Do you want to know what foolish people do? They speak poorly of other people’s character when their own character is quite poor. They judge when there is plenty about which they themselves could be judged. Jesus says that they are like a blind person leading a blind person. They both fall into a pit. They both bump into everything around them and cause destruction.
Do you want to know what a wise person would do? They would take the log that is stuck within their own eye out first so that they could see the speck that is causing their neighbor to be blind. That way their actions would be caring and loving rather than destructive.
But, that sort of love and help of both self and neighbor would defeat the whole point of bearing false witness against the neighbor. We bear false witness against our neighbors because we want them to be hurt, we want them to be pushed down or knocked out of the way. We want to see them in the worst possible light. We want to see them with a hue of green and rot. We want to see them as evil. We want to point to them and say, “Look at them, they are bad. Look at us, we are great and good!” We want to judge them based on superficial factors such as age, gender, or race because we have been told by the world that the only way to succeed in life is to ensure that everyone else fails.
But, we are not children of this world sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ. We are children of the light. We are children of the truth. We are children of love. We are children of the Most High, our Almighty God and Father, and God’s Son, Jesus Christ! We desire that everyone might have the light of God’s love and goodness shown on them. We desire this because we know that every single person on this good earth has the right to point up to the heavens and declare with the Psalmist, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made! Wonderful are your works [O God]!” (Psalm 139:14).
So, we care about lying about our neighbors. We are careful about bearing false witness against them. Instead, we strive to see our neighbors and everything they do in the best possible light. We do not spread lies about them. We do not speak in ways that would cast darkness upon them. We do not assume they are evil. We do not assume their intentions are evil.
Instead, we speak in ways that show love. We walk in the ways of Jesus who seeks, even to this day, to draw us closer to one another.
“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
No comments:
Post a Comment