Forms of Lying
A few moments ago, we read the Ten Commandments together. Did you notice that some commandments are a different length than others? “You shall not kill” conveys everything it needs to convey in just four syllables. “You shall not steal” is another marvel of brevity.
But the next commandment is not so concise. It seems more wordy than it needs to be: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Why doesn’t it just say “You shall not lie”? To use a phrase that has become popular on the internet, it is “oddly specific”: bear false witness against your neighbor – or in the New International Version, “you shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” It sounds so legalistic, and if we look at it from a legal point of view, it contains many loopholes—it leaves out many forms of lying I can think of. If you were accused of bearing false witness against a neighbor, think of all the ways you could justify it: “I was not acting as a witness.” “I didn’t sayanything false.” “I was doing it for their own good, so it wasn’t against them.” “They aren’t my neighbor.”
But the Lord says everyone is your neighbor, so that last one is a weak excuse. And if we look at all the different forms that lying can take, I think you could interpret them all as forms of bearing false witness, and they can all harm the neighbor. What are those forms of lying? The most obvious is stating facts that are not true. But you can also talk about things that are not so clearly factual, such as your emotional state. Someone asks “How are you doing?” and you instinctively reply “Fine,” even though you are not. You pretend to like a gift that you actually don’t like. You deny being jealous. Then there are lies of omission, where you create a false impression by leaving out some crucial information. This is a harder one to draw boundaries around, because it’s hard to say what is “crucial.” Imagine a witness taking the oath that says “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and they say, “The whole truth? What is the whole truth? Well, in order not to leave anything, I’ll start at the very beginning. I was born in a hospital in Hutchinson in 1953, and I grew up….”
Lies of omission also include being selective in what you say: you support a politician, so you make the case that they are a great leader – leaving out all their mistakes and flaws – or you argue that a leader is bad, so you leave out all the good things they accomplished. You can create a false impression by saying totally truthful things that people are likely to misinterpret (something advertisers are very skilled at). As a college teacher, one form of lying that I am prone to is talking about things I don’t really know much about. And you can lie in the future tense as well: making a promise that you won’t end up keeping. Perhaps when you made the promise you did have the intention of following through, but something came up and you didn’t end up doing it, so your promise ends up being a lie later.
Add to that one more wrinkle, which is the fact that we can lie without saying anything: false facial expressions, a deceiving appearance. Even animals can do that: nature is full of deceptive creatures, from birds that pretend to have a broken wings to lure a predator away from chicks, to insects that disguise themselves as twigs.
So, it may seem that bearing false witness against your neighbor is oddly specific and you rarely do it, but if you think about it long enough, you realize that it is so all-encompassing that you may violate it every day. And there is one more factor that makes the ninth commandment more challenging than other commandments: it is so easy to do. Murder is difficult; adultery requires a partner – but you can lie any time you want. And probably get away with it.
I say that because of decades of research on people’s ability to detect lying, and despite the folk theories about how you can spot a liar from eye contact or fidgety hands or verbal hesitations, the research shows that none of those clues are very reliable, and people are very poor lie detectors. And by the way, the machines we call “lie detector” (really called polygraph machines) don’t work either – they should be called “anxiety detectors,” and they are all based on the assumption that lying makes people anxious. The trouble is false positives and false negatives: some truth-tellers get so anxious they would fail a lie detector test, and some liars are so calm that they pass. In other words, the human ability to lie far outpaces the human ability to detect lying.
You could ask yourself, if lying is such a bad thing, why did the Lord give us the ability to do it so easily? As we read in the passage from Swedenborg, humans did not always have this ability, and in heaven we don’t have it at all. So why have it now? Why did God give us an ability that He will later take away, an ability that causes so much trouble for others? Clearly the answer is that it serves a purpose in our spiritual development: it is something that we need to make choices about, and if we did not have that freedom, we would not be able to make that choice. Things need to be concealed until we have made a certain amount of progress on our spiritual journey. That concealment serves a purpose.
Why We Lie
So what is that purpose? We can look in two places to get answers as to why we lie: the Bible, and our own childhood. The Bible begins with the creation story, and then the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, and when God asks them about it, their first instinct is to lie to keep themselves out of trouble. When Cain killed Abel, God asks, “Where is your brother?” and Cain lies to avoid God’s anger. And that was probably the same reason you told your first lie.
Children can also lie to achieve certain goals. They want to stay home from school, so they pretend to be sick. In the Bible, Rebecca wanted her son Jacob to receive Isaac’s blessing instead of Esau, so she hatches a plan to deceive Isaac to accomplish that goal. In the Christmas story, King Herod tells the Wise Men that he wants to know where the baby Jesus is so he can go and worship him. Sometimes children lie to protect their dignity. One of my children got in the habit of making obvious lies, such as claiming that they had seen a movie that doesn’t exist (such as a sequel to a Disney movie), and when the other children would call them on this lie, they would dig in and just insist even more strongly that it was true. Why did they do this? Just because they felt inadequate and insecure, and wanted to have something that other children didn’t. Some people don’t stop telling that kind of lie when they become adults.
People lie to conceal addictions, knowing that if the truth came out, they would have to finally do something about that addiction. I’ve even heard it say that you can tell something is an addiction if you feel compelled to lie about it – even if it’s something as harmless as eating chocolate or playing too many video games.
People also lie to protect others, not just themselves. There was a 2019 movie called “The Farewell,” based on a true story that happened to Lulu Wang about her Chinese grandmother. The situation is that her grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer, but her family decided to not tell her about it so that she could enjoy her last months on earth instead of worrying about death. It turns into a huge conspiracy involving a fake wedding and forged documents. The granddaughter is very close to her grandmother, and travels all the way to China to see her, but her family insists that it would be very selfish to tell the grandmother why she came. And again: it’s a true story – it really happened. So: lying to a dying person so that they enjoy their remaining time: is that selfishness or selflessness? There are many arguments in the movie about that very question.
The reason I am exploring all these motives is because it gets at the question of the spiritual challenges we need to overcome in order not to violate this commandment. To truly avoid bearing false witness against your neighbor, all you have to do is to give up any desire to protect yourself, to abandon all goals that are not pure, to no longer care about dignity and reputation, to be free of all addictions, and to be utterly selfless.
That seems overwhelming. If it were phrased that way, I’m sure we would all have the same question: “Where to begin?” How can we hope to chip away at the evils of self-protection, ambition, selfishness, addiction and pride?
The way to begin is by “telling it like it is.” Report it like you see it. What if it makes other people unhappy, and they attack you? Do it anyway. What if it leads to people persecuting and reviling you? As Eric pointed out in his January 2 sermon, that means you are blessed. That is the lesson from the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.
A Role Model
This leads me to one of my favorite unnamed characters in the Bible, the one just referred to in John 9 as “a man born blind.” We know very little about this man, but from what we do hear about him, he is easy to love. And even though he is not given a name, the entire chapter is about him.
First, he is used by the Pharisees as a pawn, a way to entrap Jesus. The Pharisees assume that blindness is a result of sin, so they ask: “Who sinned? This man or his parents?” And Jesus says “neither.” But he goes on to say that he was born blind “so that the works of God should be revealed in him.” The obvious interpretation is that this blind man is a way to show the Lord’s healing power, but I also like to think that it’s an opportunity to show how to bear true witness; how to obey this commandment.
Jesus heals his blindness and tells the man to go and wash, which the man obeys. But that man also finds himself the center of an argument. He’s a walking testimony of Jesus’ power, which is a problem for them, so they ask, “Is that really the man who was blind, or just someone who looks like him?” He says “I am he,” they have to give up on that tactic and move on to asking him how it happened.
Here the man could fall into the trap of explaining things he doesn’t understand, (the form of lying that I am most prone to), but this man doesn’t fall for it. He just says “All I know is, I was blind and now I see.” So he is dragged over to the Pharisees, who want to use him as a pawn in their political fight. This makes me think of so many trials I have heard about recently, with people wanting certain outcomes for their own reasons. It must be very difficult to withstand that kind of pressure – no matter what you say, some people will cheer, and others will hate you. The man keeps it simple, just repeating what happened – but that doesn’t suit the Pharisees’ agenda, so they keep pestering him. Think of how many times in modern life you see someone essentially saying, “This fact does not support my worldview, so I will attack the source.”
So the Pharisees drag his parents into the fight. They ask the parents three questions: Is this your son? Was he born blind? How did this happen – how does he now see? The first two are simple, but when it comes to the third question, they are scared to answer so they just say, “He is of age; ask him.” So it goes back to the man again, and this time the Pharisees prompt him on what the correct answer should be: “Give God the glory! We know that this Man is a sinner.” Please revise your testimony to suit our goals. But his reply is again a model of how to be credible: “Whether he is a sinner or not I do not know. One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see.”
But of course, the Pharisees won’t listen. That is a lesson many people are still learning to this day: when you bear true witness and people don’t like it, they won’t listen to you.
On a side note, another observation I have about our modern world is that attention is everything: being ignored is the worst outcome, and it seems that people will say anything to get that attention. Being loud and brash and outrageous does get people a lot of attention, and I can think of many people who have built their careers on it – and truth is the first sacrifice. It seems that the calm and the rational voices get ignored in our media environment. Meanwhile the outrageous do not seem to care whether what they say is true or not, as long as they get the ratings or the votes or the people in the pews. This may be a way to have a successful career on earth, but it is not the path to heaven.
Back to the man from John 9, though: he finally starts to engage in the argument, and sounds a little frustrated. After pointing out that they aren’t listening, he asks the Pharisees “Do you also want to become His disciples?” No, of course not, so they revile him, reminding me of the ninth Beautitude: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.”
The story ends with Jesus asking the man if he believes in Jesus as the Son of God. At first he is reluctant to answer, but Jesus essentially says “You are your own witness: believe your own experience.” And the man does. Did the man exhibit ambition? Self-protection? Selfishness? Addiction? Pride? No, he just told the world about his experience. That is what the commandment teaches.
In modern life, sometimes I find myself digging into one side or another on some debate, wanting something to be true and being selective with what I report. I am prone to the temptations to bear false witness. It is nice to fantasize about how this church could grow to become a megachurch, and I think I know the way: make many false promises, pander to people’s lower desires and selfishness, be a false prophet.
But then I think about heaven. What would it be like to live in a society where no one bears false witness? Where, if someone says something, you know that it is true. You know that every smile is genuine, and every promise is kept. Would you like to live in a world without deception? If your answer is yes, then you will like heaven.
READINGS
Genesis 4:8-12
Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”
John 7:18
Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.
Reading from Emanuel Swedenborg’s Other Planets #54
I have been told by angels that on every planet the very first form of speech has been facial, using the two basic means of the lips and the eyes. The reason this kind of speech comes first is that the face has been formed to reflect what we think and what we want. It is also because honesty was a characteristic of the earliest or primal times. People did not have thoughts, and did not want to have thoughts, that they were unwilling to show in their faces. This allowed the feelings of their minds and their consequent thoughts to be vividly and fully presented in their faces.
For as long as honesty and straightforwardness prevailed among people, this kind of communication continued; but as soon as the mind began to think one thing and say another (which happened when we began to love ourselves and not our neighbor) verbal speech began to gain ground, and the face became either silent or deceptive.
Things are different in the other life, though. There we are not allowed to say one thing and think another. Any inconsistency is in fact perceived with utmost clarity in every word; and when it is perceived, spirits guilty of the inconsistency are ejected from the interaction and punished. Thereafter they are compelled by various means to speak in alignment with their thinking and to think in alignment with their willing until eventually they have a unified mind and not a divided one. If they are good, then, they intend what is good and think and say the truth that stems from that goodness; if they are evil they intend what is evil and think and say the falsity that stems from that evil.