The 1990 Movie ‘Crazy People’ is billed as ‘a comedy about
truth in advertising’ its premise is that you’ve got to be crazy to want to be
honest in the advertising business. It tells the story an advertising executive
burns out and checks into a mental hospital to recover and as he is under
pressure to still work invites his fellow inmates to come up with ad’s for
various consumer items. Unrestrained by slick thought processes they come up
with ad’s based on truth.
The one that was most remembered from the film was for Volvo’s going against the trend of using
sex to sell cars it simply says “Buy Volvo’s…they’re boxy… but they’re good.”
Another one was for a cigarette brand and said “cancer probably, but taste
definitely.” Despite initial resistance
of course they take off and it becomes a phenomenon. Sadly of course that’s Hollywood
right, we know that people will embellish things and stretch the truth… to sell
us things. In fact we need to be
protected against false advertising and there are very strict legal guidelines
over what is and isn’t false advertising…. And in my humble opinion the
boundaries are pushed all the time
We also live in a world at a personal level where people
struggle with truth telling, being honest… and like in Jesus day they will
resort to employing all sorts of oaths and flowery language and yes even
religious language to sound like they can be trusted. In Jesus teaching on the
Sermon on the Mount he says that people in the kingdom of God are to live a
different way… They are to be honest and trustworthy… those of us who follow
Jesus are to live with our ‘hearts in our mouth’ not because they are nervous
but because we have a courageous integrity in a world of hype and insincerity. It's part of a series of case studies where Jesus explores how we are to live as Salt and Light. Showing how he has come to fulfill the law.
3 “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’
Jesus
isn’t referring to one statute in the Mosaic Law but is covering a series of
sections in the law of Moses to do with making vows and swearing oaths. Honesty
and integrity, constancy between our words and our actions, is at the heart of
the Mosaic Law. Israel’s God is faithful and keeps his covenant and his word can be trusted, as God’s people they
and we should reflect this. The fourth commandment is thou shall not bearing false
witness against a neighbour. A community
cannot live and function if it not based on honesty. There is no community
without the ability to trust one another. The second commandment is also
important here, ‘do not take the Lord’s name in vain’… I don’t know about you
but I’ve always grown up with this being mainly about using God’s name as an
expletive, and there is an element to this… but in Israel it was also very much
that if you invoked the Lord’s name when making a vow and didn’t keep it that
you were using the Lord’s name in vain.
The
religious people of Jesus day in an attempt to make these commandments
observable had changed the focus from personal integrity to focus on what is a
binding formula and what isn’t. They
were more interested in the fine print and loop holes than in fine intent. They
focused on the structure of the words used not the state of the heart behind
them. They were firm that if you made a false vow, in the Lord’s name that that
was wrong. But if it didn’t relate to God’s name it wasn’t binding, this is where Jesus begins to
challenge what they were doing.
Jesus shows that this
splitting of hairs over what is and isn’t binding is futile. He says it’s not
just God’s name that you need to worry about because whatever you swear by can
be taken back to relate to God. In Isaiah 66V1 the prophet talks of heaven
being God’s throne and the earth his foot stool. Jerusalem was the City that
was set aside for the worship of God. In fact Jerusalem is a good example of
how far the scribes and Pharisees had got in their discussion of what was
binding, as some argued it was not binding if you swore by Jerusalem only if
you turned to Jerusalem and swore towards it then it mattered. I don’t want to
get down to the childish level of the old pinky swear and figures crossed
behind your back, but it was getting that way.
And if it was even by
your own head or your own life, what good is that says Jesus because let’s face
it, we have no control over what colour our hair is, despite what the ad’s tell
us even the best hair dyes grow out…right? Our lives and times are ultimately in God’s hands. It’s ridiculous says Jesus
because when you think about it, it all relates back to God. In the list of
woes against the Pharisees and scribes in Matthew 23 Jesus picks up this theme again and looks at some of
the other knit picking over what was and wasn’t a binding oath and says Guy’s
you’ve missed the point its about a heart attitude.
37 All you need to say is simply
‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
Like with the other case studies we’ve been
looking at in Matthew 5 Jesus now turns to look at what is at the heart of the
matter. Just like anger was the problem behind murder and we needed to be bridge builders rather thangrave diggers, and lust was the problem behind adultery and Jesus followers
were to have an adulterated passion in a sex saturated society, treating each
other primarily as objects of God’s love and subjects of God’s Kingdom rather as mere objects subjected to sexual desire. Now Jesus says it’s not about the words you say but the
heart attitude behind it. It’s about having an honesty and integrity that comes
from the heart. That comes from a transformed life.
Be the kind of people says Jesus who when you
say yes people know you mean yes and when you say no they know you mean no. We
might be more used to the saying ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say’… You
can have all sorts of language to try and make you sound honest and
trustworthy, but unless you are its window dressing. It’s like a flash exterior
over a rotting framework… And says Jesus lies come from the evil one.
Historically one of the outworking’s of this passage has
been that various Christian groups mainly Anabaptist and Quakers have seen it
as a prohibition against swearing any kind of public oath. So they have refused
public office and refused to swear in in court cases or make affidavits. While
you can admire their desire to be obedient to Jesus teaching, it’s not the
thrust of the passage. In Genesis 9 we find God actually makes a vow, not to
flood the world again and he makes that vow on his own name. Not to show us he
is trustworthy but to help our own unbelief. At Jesus trial before the
Sanhedrin Jesus is put on oath to say whether or not he is the messiah, Jesus
answers truthfully. Again the passage points to the underlying
attitude we should have that we should be peoples who word can be trusted.
The other area it has historically had an impact is in
Christian liturgy. It is why churches do not have oaths as part of their
services. At Baptisms and weddings people are simply invited to respond ‘I do’
to the vows they are being asked to make. As N T Wright points out Jesus teaching on qoaths here is significant as follows on from his teaching on divorce, where Jesus says we need to value marraige in a throw away society. In one place in the baptismal liturgy
when Parents are asked if they will bring up their children with all the
benefits of a Christian house or home the response is we will with God as our
helper’, not because it is an oath but rather with the acknowledgement that we
need God’s help in bringing up a child and only God has our future in his hands.
At work there is the challenge of being
people whose word can be trusted. A friend of mine tells the story of the
impact he was able to have at work simply by keeping confidences, and not
participating in the office gossip that was riff in his work place. He said
that people would come to him when they needed help because they knew he could
be trusted. Another friend talked to me of always checking his bosses billing
so that people were not over charged when he worked on their cars. I guess
there are real challenges for people in sales to be both loyal to their
products but also truthful about their capabilities as well. For Students there
is the challenge of honesty as well particularly with the pressure to do well. At University
a couple of years ago to have to hand in my assignments electronically through
a program called ‘turnitin’ that searches the script of what is written to
check for plagiarism. I was also relieved when the programme didn’t pick up
anything in my assignments, all the hours of scrupulously attributing ideas and
quotes paid off.
I think it’s important to note that in Jesus Sermon here we
can say ‘No’. Can I say that that is quite liberating. In Christian circles
there are people who feel they always have to say yes to requests for help and
doing things.
The reality is we
don’t if we are asked to do something in the church it is a welcome mat to
ministry not a invitation to simply be a door mat. In the Kingdom of God we are about
servanthood, we value service, it’s not about servitude that devalues people’s
ministry and gifts of time and work and turns them into duty and drudgery. In keeping with Jesus teaching of over
spiritualising our language, we can do that with our ‘no’s as well. Someone from another church came to see how
we ran a Community Christmas dinner at St John’s in Rotorua. She spent the time
checking out what was going on and when she asked if there was anything she
could do to help, was invited to help do the dishes, to which she replied… no
thanks, that’s not my gifting.
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