Christian Art | Do Not Swear At All | Sermon On The Mount
Matthew 5: 33-37 – Week 10 Ordinary Time, Saturday (King James Audio Bible KJV, Spoken Word)
33 ¶ Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths:
34 But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne:
35 Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.
36 Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.
37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
In Jesus’ time, the swearing of oaths was common, and the casuistry surrounding such oaths was intricate. There were what we would now term loopholes – ‘perfectly’ legal ways of doing wrong. The letter of the Law, rather than the spirit, had proliferated – the whole of the Sermon on the Mount concerns this subject – and thereby our knowledge of the will of God had been deliberately obscured.
Jesus, therefore, takes the Law of Moses concerning oaths (cf. Exodus 20:7, Numbers 30: 3, Deuteronomy 23: 22) and develops it, in order to strip away such accretions, to purify the Law, such that we may live according to God’s intentions.
Rather than mock God, by swearing in his name with regards to what might be relatively trivial matters, and then perhaps calling upon our inner lawyer to deny that we ever swore any such thing, Jesus tells us not to swear at all. This constitutes one more stripping away of the divisions between ourselves and God. The swearing of oaths was an easy lie; through the removal of such verbiage, we discover ourselves, more fully exposed, and open, to God.
It is now that we have honesty. Jesus has told us not to be so pretentious as to swear oaths. Jesus has also insisted we consider again just what we were swearing by: heaven and earth, the throne and the footstool of God. Rather than seek to appropriate God’s creation for our own callow ends, we are taught to respect God.
Jesus seems to suggest that we cannot swear by things over which we have absolutely no control. Heaven and earth are completely beyond us, and then so too are the hairs on our head! Jesus seems to say that to swear by something is to appropriate it, to claim what is not ours as property. To swear is, therefore, to lie.
Rather than do thusly, we are called by Jesus, when we are tempted to swear an oath, instead to pause and take a moment to think of ourselves and to think of God – to remember God. When we do this, we are recalled to a compelling relationship with truth and justice. Now there is no need to ‘protest too much’. We are with God, we are with Jesus, and absolute honesty flows thereby. Rather than swear, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will suffice.
‘Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.’ Jeremiah 6: 16.
Concluding Prayer
Let us praise you, Lord,
with voice and mind and deed:
and since life itself is your gift,
may all we have and are be yours.
We make our prayer through our Lord.
King James Audio Bible | Endnotes
Do Not Swear At All
Jesus gives a commandment to his followers: ‘Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.’
This passage is often interpreted as a commandment against making oaths.
Is Jesus actually forbidding all forms of swearing? The commandment not to swear at all is a radical departure from traditional Jewish law, which allowed for oaths in certain circumstances. In fact, the use of oaths had become so common in Jewish society that people were using them frivolously, often without any intention of keeping them. An interpretation is that Jesus’ commandment is meant to reorient the disciples’ priorities and to emphasize the importance of truth-telling.
One of the reasons why Jesus commands his followers not to swear is because of the power of words. Words have the power to create reality, and the act of swearing can create an obligation that may not have existed before. Swearing also carries with it the implication that the speaker’s normal word cannot be trusted, and that an oath is needed to guarantee the truth of what is being said. By contrast, Jesus wants his followers to be known for their integrity and honesty, and to speak truthfully in all circumstances.
The Catholic Church has traditionally interpreted Jesus’ commandment as a call to avoid all forms of falsehood and deception, including lying and perjury. Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that swearing was only necessary in certain situations, such as when giving testimony in court, and that even then it should only be used sparingly. He wrote: ‘It is always wrong to swear to what is false, and it is a sin to swear to what is true unnecessarily.’ (Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 89, A. 1) Saint Augustine wrote in his work On Lying that ‘It is one thing to swear in order to put an end to strife, and another to swear to maintain falsehood’ (Ch. 19).
Protestant theologians have grappled with the meaning of Jesus’ commandment. Some, like John Calvin, have argued that Jesus was not prohibiting all forms of swearing, but was instead targeting the misuse of oaths. Calvin believed that Jesus was concerned with the common practice of taking oaths lightly and without any intention of keeping them. Other Protestant theologians, like Karl Barth, have emphasized the radical nature of Jesus’ commandment. Barth argued that Jesus was calling his followers to a higher standard of honesty and integrity than had ever been seen before. He wrote: ‘The commandment not to swear at all is a clear and unequivocal statement of the fact that in the kingdom of God there is no longer any place for human assertions or guarantees.’ (The Epistle To The Romans, p. 349)
In contemporary Christian thought, some Christians argue that Jesus’ words are only applicable to specific cultural and historical contexts, and that oaths are not inherently sinful. Others see Jesus’ commandment as a call to live a life of honesty and transparency regardless of the cultural or historical context. This means being truthful in all situations, and avoiding any kind of deception, whether it involves making oaths or not.
One challenge in interpreting Jesus’ commandment not to swear is the fact that the Bible itself contains many examples of people making oaths. In the Old Testament, for example, God often makes oaths to his people, and Abraham and Jacob both swear oaths with God. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul frequently uses oaths in his letters.
We may understand that the commandment not to swear at all is a call to live a life of radical honesty and integrity. It challenges Christians to speak truthfully in all circumstances, and to avoid any kind of deception or falsehood. This is not always easy, especially in a world where dishonesty and deception are often rewarded.
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We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]
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