Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
This past week we rented a Steve Martin film called “Novocain.” In it Martin portrays a dentist who lets himself be seduced by a beautiful young patient whose real aim is to steal drugs from his office. As he finds himself giving in to the attraction, he finds it necessary to lie to his fiancé. After telling the lie, in a voice-over, with dental x-rays of rotting teeth on screen, Martin in his dentist persona reflects on lying. I can’t remember the exact words but the gist of what he said was “Lying begins like tooth decay. A bit of food lodges against a crack in the enamel and slowly works its way deeper and deeper until the whole tooth is rotten.” Thus does falsehood work its way into our lives until we rot from the inside out.
I’ve taught my Confirmation class and all of you now to remember the Ninth Commandment via the mnemonic device of picturing the number nine as an inverted “L” which stands for “lying.” This suggests that this commandment, like the previous three, is a simple two-word prohibition, “no murder,” “no adultery,” “no stealing,” and now, “no lying.” But that’s not entirely accurate.
Strictly speaking, this commandment is against false witness. It has a court scene in mind and forbids a lie wrongly stating that your neighbor committed a crime. It does not specifically condemn all untruth, but only false accusation. All other lies appear untouched by this particular command.
However, if lying in court were the whole focus of the Ninth Commandment, it would be unnecessary, redundant. The Third Commandment, which prohibits taking a false oath in God’s name, would cover most legal cases. At least in a traditional courtroom, where one swears to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” false testimony is already forbidden by the command not to take God’s name in vain. But Jews and Christians have never understood the command against false witness so narrowly.
The Bible is full of condemnations against lying in general. At the end of Proverbs chapter 6 is a list of seven things which God hates. “A false witness” is one item, but “a lying tongue” also is another and separate thing which God hates. Psalm 101:7 condemns those who practice deceit and speak falsely. Colossians 3:9 says simply, “Do not lie to each other.” At the end of the Bible, when Revelation 21:8 counts off those who will land in hell, the last group named is “all liars.”
If those Scriptures are not enough to convince you that God’s commandment is not just against lying in court but against lying in general, turn to Acts chapter 5 and read the disturbing story of Ananias and Sapphira, husband and wife members of the first church. They told a lie about their offering, making it out to be a greater sacrifice than it actually was. God struck them both dead right there in church. We might take the Ninth Commandment a little more seriously if we took account of the real possibility that some of us could keel over as we sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”
Despite the fact that God is so plainly against it, dishonesty pervades our lives. The fundamental structure of commercial advertising is to communicate small lies attractively. Only occasionally is a business required to adhere to a minimum of truth. A few years ago Walmart’s advertising slogan was “Always the lowest prices. Always.” When consumer advocates began to complain that Walmart did not always have the lowest price on many items, the slogan was quietly changed to “Always low prices.” “Low” is a term much more subject to interpretation than “lowest,” and so it passes the minimal standards to which we are accustomed for truth in advertising.
Through advertising, you and I are inundated with messages which we condition ourselves not to believe. We simply assume that the smiling, beautiful face on the screen is lying to us as she talks about why her pain killer or vacuum cleaner is the best. Of course no one believes politicians are honest. And unfortunately, recent events in the Catholic church have generated much the same lack of trust in clergy. The result is that we find ourselves counting on hardly anyone to tell us the truth.
You would imagine the lack of honesty would bother us more. Yet people keep on shopping and voting and going to church, without too much worry about the truth behind it all. That lack of concern stems in part from a general disinterest in truth itself. The postmodern culture we live in places less and less value on substance and reality and more on appearance and practicality. If a product or a politician looks good and produces what we want, what do we care if there is any truth behind the hype? And why not approach faith with the same attitude? Focus on looking good and offering practical solutions to life’s problems and your church will thrive, according to all the latest wisdom on church growth in a postmodern world.
The problem with living that way as a Christian and as a church is that it is essentially cynical. The history of the term “cynic” shows us that doubts about truth and honesty are nothing new. The original Cynics were a school of Greek philosophers who believed that conventional morality was to be challenged and publicly defied. The most famous of them was Diogenes, who claimed to be searching for an honest man by carrying around a lantern in the daytime. His point was that such a search is absurd. Honesty is not to be found. Not that his own standards were high – he himself was run out of town for counterfeiting coins.
Our cynicism about business, politics and religion shows that we have a sense that things are not what they were meant to be. We wear our cynicism as protection against the pain we feel when our trust is betrayed. It will be a long time before many Catholics will be able to place any confidence in a priest. Being cynical about them all feels safer.
Yet cynicism about honesty implies that there is a frustrated desire for truthfulness that remains unfulfilled. We may be skeptical about finding them, but we all would still like to believe there are some honest men and women. Despite cynicism generated by a President Clinton lying on the witness stand, and Enron accountants publishing false financial reports, a spark of hope remains that the next politician or bookkeeper we encounter will be truthful.
The Ninth Commandment addresses our need for honesty. God is not cynical about it. God is concerned with truth. He cares whether we tell the truth. Lies will destroy us and He wants us to live. As our Gospel lesson said, His Spirit is the Spirit of truth. It is that honest, truthful Spirit which He wishes to live in you and me, for our own good.
God knows that truth will catch up with us even if we don’t believe in it. Beth and I remember our friends Bill and Diane (not their real names). To all appearances things were well. Bill was a go-getter and a fine husband and father. But we hadn’t heard from them in awhile when Diane called and said she was passing through town. She sat in her living room and told us an amazing story. A few months before, Bill disappeared while on a business trip. As her anxiety increased, she began to receive phone calls from creditors. Bill had always handled the money and she discovered their bills hadn’t been paid in months. When she called his office she learned that he hadn’t been employed in months. He had been living an elaborate charade, getting up every morning and supposedly going to work but really just driving around, going to movies and hanging out wherever he could. In the end, he snapped and just ran from his home.
For most of us, our deceptions and the lies we believe are not so dramatic, but truth still catches up with us in the end. Appearance and results may be fine for awhile. Even though it might seem like we don’t have to be concerned with truth to have what we want, ignoring truth will in the end ruin us. That is why God fulfilled the Commandment Himself by sending into the world that Man for whom Diogenes pretended to look. God answered our need for truthfulness by sending Jesus Christ to live and be the Truth for us.
The Commandment forbids false witness. Jesus died on the Cross and rose again to make us true witnesses. His Cross is shaped like a “T.” For us that letter can stand for two truths we witness in our Savior’s death. The first and horrible truth is our guilt. We are so bad that God’s own Son had to die for us. In our hearts, if not in our actions, we are murderers, adulterers, thieves and, on top of it, liars about it all. The Cross is our condemnation because on it hung condemned the one honest man who ever lived. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne told of a woman condemned to wear a red “A” as the symbol of her sin. When we dare to wear the Cross as jewelry or on a T-shirt, we must remember that it is an even more potent symbol of the truth of our guilt.
But thanks be to God! Condemnation is not the only truth we learn from the Cross. At the very same time it stands there as a true witness to our sin, it also witnesses to us of God’s love and mercy. The “T”-shaped bars stand for the truth of our guilt, but they also declare the truth of grace. Guilt is not the whole truth about you and me. The complete truth is that we belong to a God who loves us enough to offer us grace through the greatest sacrifice He could make. Guilt and grace are the two truths of the Cross.
Recently I’ve witnessed a young man learn to tell the truth by facing those two truths. He struggled hard to tell the first truth, the truth of guilt. He did some shameful things. It was all but impossible for him to admit it. He lied because he hated the truth about himself. All he could grasp at first was the truth that his failure condemned him and he was horribly afraid to face it. Even confronted with the evidence, he could barely speak the truth of his guilt.
But then the young man was confronted with something else – love which did not give up on him, Christian love. And slowly but surely, he came to grasp the other truth. He discovered that he was loved no matter what he had done. The truth of guilt does not erase or eliminate that truth of God’s grace. Grace is the greater truth.
And living by grace this young man has gradually learned to speak the truth. When he makes a mistake now, he can admit it out loud. He can own up to his guilt because he is confident that grace is also his through Christ. God has transformed him from a false witness about himself to a true witness for the love of Jesus. He can tell the truth because, as Jesus promised, the Truth has set him free.
Guilt and grace are the truths of the Cross, then. They are the two truths about us. As Martin Luther said in Latin, a Christian is simul justus et peccator, simultaneously a saint and a sinner, condemned by guilt but justified by grace. That is why we want to be people who tell the truth. God knows the sordid truth about us and has spoken a greater Truth over it all. Now we are called to bear true witness to His grace.
We’ve focused on the broad scope of the Ninth Commandment, the call to tell the truth in all ways. Yet before we are done we must remember how the Commandment focuses particularly on false witness against our neighbor. It is concerned not so much with how lying affects our own selves, but with how we injure each other by our lies. In saving us by grace from our own guilt, our Lord asks us to extend that grace and love to others. We cannot, in the end, be true witnesses for Jesus and at the same time bear false witness against another for whom Jesus died.
As we come to His table we praise Jesus for the truth He tells us about ourselves. We enter into communion with Him, remembering both our guilt and His grace. But it is also a communion with each other, a communion that depends on each of us by grace to become honest with one another. We must learn to tell the truth in our daily interactions with each other so that Jesus Christ may truly live in us.
Telling the truth to each other is what Paul calls “speaking the truth in love” in Ephesians 4:15. That qualifier “in love” is crucial. Speaking truth in love is not the spiteful, vengeful saying of things that should never be spoken under the guise of “just being honest.” Such hurtful “honesty” only conveys the more fundamental lie that one actually cares about truth when the real desire is to wound and hurt. No, real truth speaking admits one’s own failings at the very same time it may voice the shortcomings of another. It is not facts hurled like stones at each other’s heads. It is truth spoken to encourage, build up and heal one another, through the love and grace and truth of Christ.
So I ask you today to come to the table prepared and preparing to be honest. Let the broken bread once again speak the truth that the body of Jesus was broken because you and I are dishonest sinners. Let the cup tell the truth that His blood was shed because of our lies, evasions and false living. And let them then be to us pictures of the Truth that in Christ we may be truly honest, both with God and with each other.
Then let us go out from here prepared for honesty. If we have told lies, let us go to those we deceived and speak the truth. If we have concealed the facts, let us open them up to revealing and healing grace. If we have wounded another either by falsehood or in the name of truth, let us seek forgiveness and make amends in more genuine truthfulness. Then we will be honest witnesses to Christ the living Truth, who lives in us by His Holy Spirit of Truth, sent by the Father of all Truth.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj