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.