Revisiting The Ninth Commandment

Our many failures across the country this past summer to reason together about matters of social importance surely reached their nadir with a Congressman’s not easily forgotten “You lie!” shout to the President of the United States. Under the circumstances, the President’s response seemed appropriate enough --- “that’s not true” --- but also a little lame. Perhaps we can help him out --- the President, that is; the Congressman and his supporters seem beyond help --- with some reflection about the Bible’s own take on name-calling.

The sweet-spirited teacher of my unruly third grade Sunday School class somehow managed, in spite of all our efforts to thwart her, to get three ideas across to us about the Ten Commandments. The first was that God expects things of us. The second was that God tells us what he expects very clearly. And the third was that doing what God expects makes things better for everybody. These ideas still carry a lot of weight with me. To be sure, there are details about the handing down of the Ten Commandments that I still find irksome. For one, Moses' God was too jealously self-protective for my liking. And he seemed to be quite unrealistic about the whole business of coveting. Surely the feeling is understandable, even if the behavior is not. But about honoring our oaths and our parents, not killing people, being faithful to our spouses, not grabbing for what does not belong to us --- who could find fault? Or with not bearing false witness against our neighbors?

With most people who take this latter commandment seriously, I have paid relatively little attention to its earliest context, ancient Israel's legal procedure and its rules for giving testimony in courts of elders. Instead, I have broadened its context to encompass everyday relationships in general. The ninth commandment is not only a prohibition against lying for the purpose of bringing harm to others in a judicial proceeding. It is a mandate to attribute to people, on every occasion, only those things that we know to be true about them. The corollary is that there is no justification for deliberately saying something about another, whether thinkingly or unthinkingly, that we know or should know to be false, harmful, or both.

Elsewhere in the Bible, though, there is a somewhat troubling variant on this commandment. In a collection of teachings that Matthew made into a sermon on or at the foot of a mountain, Jesus says that whoever calls another a "fool" deserves hell-fire. (Matthew 5:22) It is embarrassing to have to admit that I have called people a lot worse things than this. But I have long thought the price for doing it would be relatively low. Basically, it takes the form of others' verbal pay-backs, tit for tat, absorbed without a lot of griping. In these admittedly not so nice games, we usually get about as much as we give, and it has not occurred to me very often that the price for my own defamations might and should be steeper.

But then again, Jesus sometimes seems to be doing with malice of forethought the very thing that he is supposed to have warned everyone else not to do. In these particular verses, the scribes and the Pharisees have irritated him (again), and the Master flat-out decks them. He calls them "blind guides," "whitewashed tombs," "vipers," and yes, even "blind fools.” Here, I think, Exodus and Deuteronomy have it all over Matthew 23: when it is a question of name-calling, sticking with the ninth commandment is the better way to fight the temptation to engage in verbal assault.

If we are to believe another of Matthew's characterizations of Jesus, that he came to make no changes in the Law at all, the real issue for Jesus could not have been just name-calling. It had to have been the refusal of people to obey the spirit more than the letter of the commandment by justifying their verbal aggression with evidence and reasons that are open to others' scrutiny. One way to look at all of the Gospels is precisely for the evidence that Jesus supplied in abundance for the claims he made against the religious establishment of his day.

It does not seem likely, therefore, that there are eternal consequences awaiting someone merely for calling our President a liar, or for calling another among God’s people a fool. But if we are going to continue to mouth off without taking the right kind of responsibility for our verbal leavings, then there may be at least an earthly variety hell to pay, from Someone who has better evidence for just about everything he requires of us than any of us will ever come up with for not doing it.

Sin, Health, And The Sin Of Not Reforming Health Care

As serious as were the consequences of “original” sin --- toilsome work for Adam, painful childbirth for Eve, and eventually, death for both (but not on “the very day” they sinned) --- one thing that apparently neither of our First Parents had to suffer as punishment for it was bad health. It did not take long, however, for the idea to get going among their descendents that everybody else’s diseases, infirmities, and foreshortened lives (threescore years and ten does not begin to match the patriarchs’ longevity) were in some way God’s retaliation for their own sins. No matter that particular ailments were hard to match up with particular sins; it was the general theory that counted.

One would think that by now, for Christians at least, connecting ill health with sin would have no credibility whatever. Jesus himself roundly repudiated doing it. (See, for instance, John 9:1-2) Part of what went into his repudiation still makes good sense. Many saintly people get one ailment after another, while many rotten people seem never to lose a day’s dishonest work. Further, if by divine decree sin impedes health, its forgiveness should make people physically well immediately, and the refusal to honor God as a forgiving God should make evil-doers as sick as they can get without becoming downright dead.

Jesus’s refusal to look upon ill health as a by-product of sin is not without difficulties, however. The passage cited above goes on to make a theological point that, with all due respect to the Johannine school of the first century, squares all too well with at least one part of the message that it is the aim of its whole Gospel to communicate. In this particular case, of a man who was born blind, Jesus is quoted as saying that his blindness had nothing to do with his parents’ sinning, but rather with a decision on the part of God to demonstrate His power by curing him. There is more than just this one text in the New Testament supporting the notion that God must have his reasons for making people sick or infirm, but this one may be the most offensively stated of them all. John the Baptist seems to have been content to proclaim his own decrease that Jesus might increase, but no one else should entertain even the possibility that a God of love would ever inflict an infirmity on one of his creatures in order to aggrandize His own need to be a Curegiver. We can leave that kind of thinking to charlatan faith-healers.

It is important to disconnect our ideas about illness from our ideas about sin and divine purposing. By doing so, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible medical science, whose proper aim is to attack illness on the purely physical grounds upon which it should be attacked. And also, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible Christian witnessing to sin’s forgiveness more than to its ubiquity. God does indeed work in mysterious ways, but not by sticking it to one person whose sins happen to tick him off more than does another’s, and not by making the infliction of misery an essential component of the abundant life His Son has promised us.

And now, the point of all this for health care reform. The only credible explanation for this country’s dilly-dallying a half century and more over getting this done has to be that deep-down, there must still be lingering the notion that people who get sick deserve it and that alleviating their distress somehow would disrupt the divine economy of salvation. Still clinging to this lingering notion is the perfectly awful idea --- its Calvinist roots notwithstanding --- that it is meet and right for wealthier people to have easier access to health care because their worldly success is itself a sign of divine election.

People who suffer from this demented thinking also see the very real connection between poverty and ill health as even more evidence of God’s coming down on the side of the more successful among us. “The least of these” should get what they deserve. And if they are “illegals” besides, they should just be made to go away. In more down home theological language, the outlook here is that God clearly wants a few people more than he wants others to have all of life’s goodies, and that as a consequence and by his grace he enables his chosen to secure their benefits without any more than token struggles, while everybody else grabs, usually unsuccessfully, for whatever little may be left. It is sad to contemplate that this kind of a God is even more petty than we are.