This is a Great Reading, I Promise! (Oaths, Swears, and Honesty)
[33] “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ [34] But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, [35] or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. [36] And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. [37] Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.
Matthew 5:33–37 ESV
This is a statement by Jesus in the famous Sermon on the Mount section in Matthew. If you read it in your Bible, this whole section is broken up into tiny bits with headings like Lust, Divorce, Oaths, Retaliation, Love Your Enemies etc. The thing about this whole section is that it is a commentary on the Law of Moses that brings all of the things that people were doing to an internal level.
Jesus doesn’t just address the blood on our hands of murder, but the hate in our hearts for someone God made. He doesn’t just address the sexual act of adultery, but the rebellion of covetousness, the breaking of something that is supposed to reflect God, and the judgment of Hell.
Jesus gets pretty serious.
And here in the middle of all of that intensity of sex and violence, there is this business about taking oaths. In heated arguments and in moments of desperation, people tend to throw out that phrase “I swear to God!” Other times it’s only a phrase, meaningless, like Whatever or Seriously. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in a time in history where the clear rules of what Christians should do was as confusing as ever. He was a spy, a pastor, an assassin, and a seminary teacher. In the midst of being that person, he said this:
”The very existence of oaths is a proof that there are such things as lies. If lying were unknown, there would be no need for oaths.”
With that, he strived for the utmost sincerity and honesty among the men that he trained to be pastors in secret places as they hid from the Third Reich in Germany during World War II.
Jesus took discipleship seriously and understood the times in which He lived. He raised the stakes of what it was to be a follower of God for the people that were striving so hard, and He lowered the bar for those that had given up and were failing at the whole righteousness thing. Through it all, though, the people who have followed Christ and taken His teachings seriously have come out on the best sides of history (and eternity!).
Let us be radicals. Let us be extremists. Let us take things way too seriously. But all of the right things. Jesus talks here about honesty because the life that He teaches about next would be unbelievable unless you trusted that the person was telling the truth.