(Leviticus 19:11-12; Matthew 5:33-37, Matthew 23:16-22)
Let me begin by clarifying a couple things. First, the statements in the Law to which Jesus refers—we read one of them this morning, there are others—deal with two different but related subjects, oaths and vows, but Jesus goes on to talk only about oaths. Vows are solemn promises which are made ultimately to God, though often to other people as well; marriage vows, for instance. Oaths are invocations of God or of some object which is sacred, or at least very important to us, for the purpose of assuring others that we’re telling the truth or that we’re going to keep a promise; I swear by my Aunt Priscilla’s grave, that’s how it happened. (Since I don’t have an Aunt Priscilla, this should not reassure you.) In court oaths and oaths of office, we see these combined, as vows are taken with one hand on the Bible, thus invoking the Bible to affirm the vows.
Second, Jesus is not declaring a new law in Matthew 5. The Mennonites have historically interpreted his words as forbidding Christians to take oaths under any circumstances, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses agree; for that reason, they refuse even to swear an oath in court. This is not what Jesus is saying here. The Old Testament law required oaths in certain circumstances; if he had intended to set that aside, he would have had to do so explicitly: “Even when the Law commands you to take an oath, you may not do so.” That’s not his concern, because that’s a matter of legal requirement—it’s not about what we as his disciples choose to do or not to do.
If the law says we have to swear an oath, that’s to serve the law’s own purposes. If I choose to swear an oath, that’s to serve my purpose—it’s because I want to convince someone to believe what I’m telling them. It’s a response to mistrust. That mistrust may be justified, or it may not, but either way, it puts a wall between us; an oath is like piling stones and furniture at the bottom of the wall, hoping we can build the pile high enough to enable us to climb over. If we can’t prove we’re telling the truth, maybe we can convince the other person that we wouldn’t dare lie, and they’ll believe us for that reason. That’s what oaths are for.
The thing is, though, that if we use oaths to convince others that we’re telling the truth, it’s easy for us to tell ourselves that when we don’t swear an oath, it’s okay if we lie; after all, since we didn’t swear to it, we weren’t really committed to tell the truth. Oaths, then, don’t make us more honest, but less—and they distract us from what really matters. They tell us that we only have to tell the truth when we swear that we are; and in calling God to witness for this one thing, they imply that God isn’t paying attention to anything else we say. This is disastrously untrue. As the German pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Disciples of Jesus should not swear, because there is no such thing as speech not spoken before God. All of their words should be nothing but truth, so that nothing requires verification by oath.”
There is no such thing as speech not spoken before God. Whenever we speak, God is standing right behind us listening to every word. Oaths are unnecessary, because they’re redundant: God is already witness to everything we say, and he already holds us to account for all of it. Part of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees is that they take the truth, and oaths, and the things by which they swear, far too lightly. Indeed, they take God far too lightly. For all their commitment to holiness and righteousness (as they understand it), we see no awe in their religion; the Scriptures told them that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but they do not appear to have taken that to heart. They had no real conception that they served a God who would dare upset all their expectations and careful schemes, much less that they should expect him to.
Jesus says, “Just speak the truth, as simply and plainly as you can; anything you clutter it up with only makes it easier for you to lie.” We resist that, because we sense that the truth is dangerous; and we’re right. The truth is dangerous. Honesty is dangerous. God is dangerous. As Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk,
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
God is dangerous because God is alive, and the source of all life; only death is safe, because the worst has already happened. If we want his life, we have to accept the danger of the truth, plainly spoken, with no crossed fingers and no loopholes. As Bonhoeffer put it, “There is no following Jesus without living in the truth unveiled before God and other people.” God is true, so if we are his people, we must also strive to be true, in our relationship with him and our relationships with others. We must be committed to speak the truth to him, to each other, and to ourselves, and to live according to the truth we speak.