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Don't Swear!

             “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.’  But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne;  or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.  And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one. (Matthew 5:33-37)

 

            Swearing has gotten a bad reputation but not for the reason Jesus speaks against it here. Now, “swearing” refers to any use of foul language from cursing through the less polite references to biological functions, to what Jesus referred to as swearing.  That’s not to say that cursing or impolite biological references aren’t bad. They’re just not really swearing – and we don’t take swearing as seriously as we take some of the others.  

            One of the phrases that recurs in the Old Testament is some version of “May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if…” It occurs once in Ruth, and eleven more times in I & II Samuel and I & II Kings. Sometimes, it is a tender oath spoken to someone beloved, but more often, it’s part of a declaration of someone’s angry determination to do something. That’s a little wordy. Eventually, such sentiments were shortened to “By God,” “For Christ’s sake,” or “For Heaven’s sake” or even “For Pete’s sake,” and “By all that’s holy…”  And let’s not forget the “With God as my witness…”

            This is the sort of thing Jesus is teaching that we shouldn’t use, and I wonder why. The first reason that leaps to mind is that when we swear by someone or something, we’re trying to manipulate the person of thing we’ve sworn by. It’s not about having faith. We’re effectively playing God and telling others and God that He is going to back us in whatever. We’re also manipulating the person we’re speaking to. If we swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us , God – that doesn’t mean we plan to tell the truth, but we expect the people who hear us to believe that what we say must be the truth because otherwise we’re risking God striking us with lightning for swearing falsely. A third possible reason is that if we fail to do what we have sworn by God to do, we or the people who see our failure are likely to blame God for the failure even though He had nothing to do with it. 

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