LENTEN
SERIES 5 – 28 March 2004 – Bishop Owen Dowling
‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour’
is the commandment before us. Don’t lie; don’t distort; tell it how it is.
There are various ways in which we sin against our neighbour
under the heading of this commandment. It happens at the petty, domestic level
and at the large corporate level. People gossip at the street cafes or in the
pub or over the phone or on talk back radio. This all seems a harmless enough
part of life and our airing of our opinions about one another.
We’re almost kept alive by other people’s doings and
stories and what happens to them. But the danger is that we will enjoy the
negative bits and the juicy morsels! We can relish these. Perhaps it makes us
feel better when we hear of other people not doing so well – like the school
student feels glad when he hears of others doing badly in a test. My mark
mightn’t look so bad then!
So there is a tendency to blacken others’ characters to
make us feel better about our own – a tendency, too, to elaborate stories as
we tell them, and a tendency not to keep things to ourselves when we should do.
To tell stories at others’ expense (preferably the ones not present) is after
all how to be the life of the party and have everyone listening and laughing.
The trouble is that gossip and story telling about others may
well be a form of bearing false witness against our neighbour through the
distortions that happen and the part truths that get passed on as full truth.
Churches are often gossipy. We love to pass on stories about
other churches or church members who may differ from us in churchmanship,
theology or denominational allegiance. I got something of a surprise when I went
to theological college and found that it was quite a gossip shop – stories
about this priest, or that bishop some of which were coloured up along the way
or in the telling. I was once being considered for a particular appointment, and
discovered that things were being said about me which didn’t happen to be
true. When it comes to church appointments there’s a lot that people glean
from ‘the grapevine’ as it is called. Probably it happens with appointments
in business, at universities or in the Public Service. The danger is in the
unverified tittle-tattle, the rumour, the innuendo.
Once people make up their minds negatively about someone
it’s hard to shift the prejudice. My son told me that in his place of work,
most believed that Archbishop Peter Hollingworth was a child abuser, or at least
condoned it when it was right under his nose – whereas that is not the truth
by quite a long way.
We have a right to be concerned about standards of journalism
and reporting. The mass media has a tremendous and far reaching power for better
or for worse. It is a mark of a free society that we are told the truth about
what people, especially our appointed leaders, are doing or have done. Certainly
we need to be properly protected from corruption, nepotism and the manipulation
of public office for any selfish end. But we have to trust the journalists and
the editors and the media owners too, to have a love and respect for the truth.
They are important people in today’s world.
Jesus had quite a lot to say about truth. He said to Pilate, who sought to understand who this man was – who was brought before him as a trouble maker – ‘For this I was born,’ said Jesus, ‘and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
You probably know what Pilate’s next comment was. He
shrugged his shoulders and said cynically ‘What is truth?’ This is a
dramatic picture of how we can dodge the truth, when it suits us. I suspect this
is something of what Jesus meant when he talked about ‘the pure in heart’
– ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ though many
might think purity of heart refers to sexual purity and not thinking naughty
thoughts, it would be closer to Jesus’ meaning, I believe, to think of
personal integrity and willingness to face the truth and all its implications.
Quite unlike Pontius Pilate. Quite unlike the way we often are.
When Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit, that inner influence of
God that presses on our spirit, that pushes us towards seeking the truth, even
when it’s uncomfortable for us, he called that Spirit, ‘the Spirit of
truth.’ That Spirit, he said, ‘will lead you into all truth.’
Jesus’ promise to the Christian believer is that the Holy
Spirit will remind us of all that Jesus said to us and taught us, and will cause
us to remember and apply God’s word and wisdom to our lives. He spoke of the
Spirit convicting us of sin, of righteousness and of judgment. In common
parlance we could say that our conscience and our hunger for the truth about the
world, ourselves and ultimate meaning is a sign of the stirring of God’s
Spirit within us. We are made in God’s image and likeness, the bible tells
us, and that is why our spirit and God’s Spirit are able to connect. To go
against God’s Spirit in us – the Spirit of truth – and our conscience
causes deep distress and unhappiness in us. To go with the promptings of our
conscience and the Spirit within us helps to bring us peace of mind and release
of inner tension. Of course one must admit that if we ignore our conscience
enough, or don’t seek to feed it with the light of truth and sensitivity to
the hurt we may be causing others, then the conscience can become hardened, and
the voice within us silenced because we never listen, or pay attention.
In a world where we bow to majority opinion and are often
told by means of opinion polls that people think this or are saying that, we
have to be careful not to follow a multitude to do evil or to speak evil of
others. A kind of verbal lynching can take place. We need wisdom and strength
sometimes to stand against the flow – especially when there’s a quickness to
judge or condemn. We may be joining the multitude in bearing false witness. That
apparently happened in the case of Lindy Chamberlain and others who have been
subjected to trial by media and mass popular opinion. Bearing false witness can
be a corporate, communal sin as well as an individual’s sin. The law of
charity and the Christian’s desire for the truth should warn us to sometimes
reserve our judgment; no, often to reserve our judgment.
So this commandment about truth and lies, living in the truth
and confronting distortions and misrepresentations is a big challenge to us and
to our society. As long as life endures this commandment will stand as an
essential guide to wholeness in our relationship with one another.
Perhaps we should let Paul the Apostle writing some nineteen hundred and fifty or so years ago have the final word to us today: ‘So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another.’ (Ephesians 4:25). That word and the ninth commandment haven’t really gone out of date!