Let your Yea be Yea
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Above all, my brothers and
sisters, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything
else. All you need to say is a simple “Yes” or “No.”
Otherwise you will be condemned. (James 5:12)
Imagine this. In a country far away,
the language is such that every utterance includes a syllable at the
end that signals whether it’s true or not true. In that country, if
the judge asks the accused, “Did you steal Jacob’s cow-truth?”
The answer might be, “No, I did
not-lie.”
“Since you have lied and said you
did not steal the cow, then the truth must me that you did steal
Jacob’s cow-truth. Next case-truth.”
Every observant parent knows that we
have a rudimentary system like this; when we suspect that a child is
fibbing, we order the child to repeat it while looking directly at
us, and there in their eyes is the signal that what’s claimed is
true . . . or not.” The guilty/honest look.
(The principal is the same as that
behind lie-detectors; lying may introduce an increased stress level,
the pupils of our eyes dilate under stress; galvanic skin response
increases under stress and the lie-detector needle jumps.
Understanding the principle alerts us to the possibility that our
readings of lying/truthing may produce any number of false positives:
stress can obviously be initiated by many factors other than lying.)
We live in an age where social media
and our penchant for browsing quickly through reams of “information”
has made it more and more difficult to do lie-detection/truth
detection. The informal media are full of what’s now being called
“fake news,” stories and articles that look polished and reliable
but might well be
concocted by young pranksters in a basement in Macedonia.
(Hillary
Clinton running a child prostitution business out of a pizza
restaurant, for instance.) The tragedy is that although we want
to know what’s really
happening, we have very little to go on most of the time; we are so
bombarded with rumour and unsubstantiated or fake information that
separating the truth from falsehood really takes a great deal of
effort.
Heaven
help us when partisan forces in our world legitimize lying as a
strategy to sway our behaviour, the most cynical application of “the
end justifies the means” philosophy. Figure out what
people are willing to hear, then say it over and over. Undermine
their confidence in their democratic institutions and replace
knowledge with conspiracy theories. Paint every perceived hardship as
a consequence of the actions of real or concocted enemies acting in
secret. Power can be gained
through the lying approach; witness the last US presidential
election.
What
does all this mean to Christians who take seriously James’
admonition to be honest? To those who ponder his meaning when he
says, “Above all . . . don’t swear an oath?” Not only is James
quoting
Jesus in this regard, he clearly recognizes that in the very
swearing of oaths, we admit to the possibility of lying. If
truthfulness is confidently assumed, what purpose, after all, would
an oath serve?
James
is obviously writing to the community of believers; his admonition
places them as a community in contrast to the Roman Empire-governed
environment in which they are seeking to prosper and grow. His “Above
all . . .” clearly signals that if we forego the assumption of
honesty among us, . . . “[we] will be condemned.”
“You are the salt of the earth.
But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and
trampled underfoot.” (Matthew 5:13)
None of this helps us very much as
Christians trying to sort out the truth/untruth of the
information/misinformation jungle that is our daily fare. We are in
danger, though, of allowing our personal opinions to be shaped by
choosing one stream of information as our only source (conventional
mainstream news, alternative news sources, conservative websites,
progressive websites, bloggers we like/don’t like, etc., etc.) At
the very least, our Jamesian marriage to truth ought to alert us to
the folly of embracing uncritically a particular viewpoint, say, on
environmental issues—as an example.
Maybe our insistence on good
scholarship, the telling of truth can at least add some saltiness to
the mashed . . . whatever that our whole world is being encouraged to
feed on these days.
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