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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‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
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