Matthew 5:33 - 37

"'Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.' But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 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 one hair white or black. Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one"



I belong to a denomination that regards this passage as a call to integrity not a prohibition on making oaths when asked to do so in a court of law or for other legal purposes. I actually have a great deal of symapthy for those Christians who refuse to swear oaths and feel uncomfortable at having to do so as part of taking up office in Anglican set-up. This passage is the main driver of my discomfort.



I do recognise that the main point here is about honesty, reliabilty and integrity since it is just as possible to be 'legally' correct and simply affirm something in a legal or other setting but still be dishonest and unreliable. I think that it is right that the better way to interpret this is to take it as an example Jesus is giving of how integrity and honesty looks: a person who habitually exhibits these qualities -these virtues- will not need or feel the need to swear oaths.



I think that the Quakers and others like them are right to extend the principle into the idea of plain-speaking. By that I don't understand them to mean what a lot of Yorkshire folk seem to mean: honesty that is downright rude in its execution [I've lived in Yorkshire for 18 years up until recently and all my kids are Yorkshire born and bred of a Yorkshire woman, tha' knows]. RAther I take it to mean like it syas here: msaying waht we mean and meaning what we say. I found Richard Foster in 'Freedom of Simplicity' both challenging and helpful about this kind of thing. It is particularly challenging when faced with those situations where to tell the absolute truth could be brutalising to a relationship eg "You don't think I'm being silly, do you?" -"Well, actually: yes; I think that you have got it out of all proportion". In that case learning skills of avoidance or deflection may be the best way forward [or am I kidding myself here?]. So it may mean throwing the question back: "Why do you think you might be being silly?", "What has happened to make you think that?" -such answers can provide the way to engage with the issues more constructively than the brutal answer: affirming the person whilst not necessarily colluding with their assesments. The trick is to learn the habits of such 'redirection' so that a hesitation doesn't do the damage!



At one stage I was cahllenged when I began to notice that I was relating some things in such a way as to include my conjectures about situations without making it clear that I was doing so. I felt that this was not plain speaking, and so I have been learning to make sure that I recognise it and then make clearer what I am doing as a speak. This passage is a call for us to examine how we speak to others and whether we are striving to be truthful or content to bend things -usually to make ourselves, or things we believe in, look better. Spin doctoring carries the danger of being less than plain -though it is also, in some cases, about not allowing the false or insufficiently accurate implications of others' communications to pass unchallenged and that's fair enough.



Speech is based in ambiguity: It has to since it is impossible to specify everything that can, for example, be seen without a laborious and long description. So we pick out certain things and those are what we speak about. When we talk about the woman with the black hair we are not also saying that she is brown-skinned and has curly hair and a large nose. We may need to add such details to disambiguate if there turn out to be two black-haired women that we need to discuss or who are in the room. What this means is that will inevitably be a borderland between speaking plainly and speaking ambiguously or even hiding some things in the way we speak.



As a clear example, for me, of needing sometimes not to speak too plainly: if I have to keep confidentiality because I have dealt with a parishioner in confidence, then I need also to speak in such a way, sometimes, that hides certain details to protect that confidence. This isn't plain speaking but it is loving speech. Often we have to ask ourselves what does the person we are speaking to need to know. We serve plain-speaking when we do them the honour of making sure that we communicate succintly and effectively what they need to know. Sometimes we have to learn to cut out superflous detail, sometimes we need to add in details to make sure proper understanding is reached. All of that requires of us an assessment and an assumption of what they may already know or not know and how much they may be capable of grasping and need to grasp.



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