Sermon on the Mount

by Scot McKnight

  What Jesus points out from this teaching of Moses is that Israelites were obligated to keep their oaths, but it is “oathing” that grabs Jesus’ attention because oaths assume a world in which honesty must be promised—implying that honesty is not always present.

  Jesus’ Total Prohibition

  The problem was that honesty was being fiddled with because some rendered words less than honest by scaling oaths (and vows) and by multiplying occasions for which oaths were to be used. Philo complains about this: “There are some who … have an evil habit of swearing incessantly and thoughtlessly about ordinary matters” (Decalogue 92). To counter this multiplication and scaling, Jesus registers a total and unequivocal prohibition. The finality of Jesus’ words deserves emphasis because Matthew’s word that precedes his sketch of how they were scaling oaths is holōs: “do not swear an oath at all.”

  Luther is but one example of someone who thought “at all” meant only in one’s private world.6 Any reading of the text, though, reveals that oaths were fundamentally a legal, courtroom, public issue and not just a private matter. Jesus’ total prohibition is stronger than anything found in the Jewish world of his day, and this fits into what we are calling the Ethic from Beyond. What Jesus reveals is God’s will, but it stretches us beyond what we think we can accomplish.

  Most of the early Christians, including James (Jas 5:12) took this saying literally and abided by it. The major shift in how to live out this word of Jesus occurred with Constantine, making oaths to Christian emperors a common practice.7 The exceptions from the Middle Ages on were few: the Cathari, Waldensians, and the various forms of Anabaptists.

  Banning Oaths

  Jesus here mentions four kinds of scaled oaths: those “by heaven,” those “by the earth,” those “by Jerusalem,” and those “by your head.” In light of 23:16–22, oaths became the opportunity to scale one’s obligations to what one said. A good example of how scaling worked is found in the Mishnah Šebuʿot 4:13. The words in italics are the source of one’s oath, but this text begins with exemptions from one’s words. Yet once an oath is given, the person becomes more accountable:8

  [If] he had sent through his slave [to impose the oath on the witnesses],

  or if the defendant had said to them, “I impose an oath on you, that if you know testimony concerning him, you come and give evidence concerning him,”

  they are exempt.

  Next comes the ramping of accountability once an oath is stated:

  unless they hear [the oath] from the mouth of the plaintiff,

  “I impose an oath on you,” (2) “I command you,” (3) “I bind you,”—lo, these are liable.

  Now we get the explicit sources of the oath:

  “By heaven and earth,” lo, these are exempt.

  (1) “By [the name of] Alef-dalet [Adonai]” or (2) “Yud-he [Yahweh],” (3) “By the Almighty,” (4) “By Hosts,” (5) “By him who is merciful and gracious,” (6) “By him who is long-suffering and abundant in mercy,” or by any other euphemism—

  lo, these are liable.

  But some rabbis would later call into question this approach to oaths and vows, and Mishnah Nedarim 1:1 makes the case Jesus himself makes by saying we are obligated to our commitments: “All substitutes for [language used to express] (1) vows are equivalent to vows, and for (2) bans (herem) are equivalent to bans, and for (3) oaths are equivalent to oaths, and for (4) Nazirite vows are equivalent to Nazirite vows.” And Philo, a near contemporary to Jesus, makes it clear that all oath-taking implicated a person before God: “For an oath is an appeal to God as a witness on matters in dispute, and to call Him as a witness to a lie is the height of profanity” (Decalogue 86). The Essenes were rigorous about avoiding oaths. One who claimed to know them, Josephus, offers a wonderful complement to the integrity of their words: “Any word of theirs has more force than an oath; swearing they avoid, regarding it as worse than perjury, for they say that one who is not believed without an appeal to God stands condemned already” (Jewish War 2.135).9

  Any oath-taking (or swearing) in God’s name put an Israelite in jeopardy of taking the name of God in vain. So as not to infringe on that possibility, what developed was called kinnuyim, substitutionary words for God, that protected a person from profaning the name. Jesus deals in theology: since God is omnipresent, none of these substitutions—heaven, throne, etc.—escapes direct connection with God. An oath is an oath (demanding keeping it), and an oath isn’t an oath if God is not involved (implying that God is at work regardless of how the oath itself is framed). Swearing by “heaven” is not less than swearing by God because heaven “is God’s throne.” Swearing by “earth” is not lower than heaven because “it is [God’s] footstool.” Swearing by Jerusalem is not less than either heaven or earth because “it is the city of the Great King.” And swearing by one’s head, well, “you cannot make one hair white or black”—and God can, so he’s in charge even of your head! You might think that Jesus is speaking here of omniscience, but it is wiser to see an appeal here both to God’s omnipresence. God is King over all; any oath that touches anything under God makes a person accountable for the words used.

  Kingdom Honesty

  The Bible permitted oaths, but Jesus calls the whole thing to a final stop. Why? In a world where oaths were seen as disconnected from God or where they permitted one to scale one’s obligation to what one promised, Jesus (Messianic Ethic) steps in to say kingdom people (Ethic from Beyond) are so honest there is no need for any oaths. They always tell the truth because they indwell the kingdom now.

  The legitimacy of oaths is thus challenged by Jesus with these words: “All you need to say is simply ‘Yes,’ or ‘No.’ ” While 5:33 merely instructed Israelites always to perform their oaths, Jesus goes beyond that instruction. His language is designed to push into the deepest levels of verbal communications: one is to be invariably honest, and when everyone is invariably honest, we will have a kingdom world wherein oaths will not be needed. This is exactly how James uses these words of Jesus at James 5:12.10 His people do not need any buttressing words or any oaths that scale human words from lower to higher levels of obligation. They will be known as truth-tellers, like the Essenes.

  Jesus concludes with nothing less than an insult: “Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” James will later say it slightly differently: “Otherwise you will be condemned” (Jas 5:12). Jesus could be appealing to the devious nature of the serpent’s words in the garden of Eden, or he could be appealing to the general Jewish belief that the evil one is a liar, or he could be thinking more abstractly (“from evil”). It is impossible to know with confidence which of these options Jesus intended; what does matter is that kingdom people tell the truth.

  LIVE the Story

  The questions that come to my attention on a routine basis when teaching or listening to students are these: What would you do if someone came to your door and asked if Anne Frank was in your home? Or, what if a follower of Jesus were in your basement in hiding and a persecutor looking for that person asked you if you were hiding that person? Or, was Bonhoeffer right in pushing the boundaries of honesty in the conspiracy against Hitler?

  Truth in Relation to Ultimate Realities

  In November and December 1943, while in Tegel prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had himself participated in deception in the conspiracy, composed an essay called, “What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth?”11 He creates a scenario: a child whose teacher asks him (or her) if his (or her) father is a drunk. Bonhoeffer believes the teacher has inappropriately invaded morally private territory. Truth, he contends, is relational and connected to the ultimate truth of God’s revelation in Christ. It would be wrong for the Christian to tell a truth for the sake of mapping words solely on a scale of correspondence to experienced realities. Instead, the appropriate words are to be found for that particular setting and should be measured by the gospel of Christ.

  This approach Bonhoeffer calls “living truth,” and it requires “attentive dis
cernment of the relevant contents and limits that the real itself specifies for one’s utterance in order to make it a truthful one.” The child, by saying no to the teacher, “contains more truth … than if the child had revealed the father’s weakness before the class.” Therefore, for Bonhoeffer there can be a “necessary deception of the enemy in war.” So his theory of when our word becomes true works out to three lines:

  by recognizing who calls on me to speak and what authorizes me to speak

  by recognizing the place in which I stand

  by putting the subject I am speaking about into this context

  We ask: Even if we recognize the unbearable difference between our theoretical discussion of truth-telling and Bonhoeffer’s staring abominable evils in the face, does Bonhoeffer’s proposal of discerning truth on the basis of relations and realities contradict the words of Jesus? We are also required to ask if Jesus’ words are adequate for such a situation. We are asking if Jesus’ Ethic from Beyond is to succumb to an Ethic from Below in light of the crushing fallenness of creation.

  Ambiguities and Clarity

  Ulrich Luz puts into words the wake that has remained turbulent since the day Jesus uttered his total prohibition of oaths and the reduction of his followers’ words to utter simple honesty: “As is the case with other categorical demands of Jesus, there is also something unrealistic about this one. Jesus gives no more thought to what kind of problematic consequences would result from his absolute prohibition of oaths than he does with his demand to reject violence or with his prohibition of divorce.”12 Hagner follows this line of thinking in these words: “It is a mistake, however, to take a biblicistic approach to this passage that would disallow Christians from taking an oath, say in a court of justice. The issue is nothing less than and nothing more than truthfulness.”13

  Such words have a way of being both pragmatically realistic and at the same time tone down what Jesus said. The irony is obvious: it was precisely public oaths that got Jesus’ concern going, and it was precisely public oaths that Jesus flat-out forbade for his followers. Any kind of “application” of this antithesis that permits legal oaths undoes the very point Jesus is making. The rhetoric of Jesus envisions a world where oaths are not needed, and he summons his followers to live in that kind of world (an Ethic from Beyond). The Ethic from Below being used in Jesus’ day had dissolved the need for honesty, so Jesus ramps up the demand to kingdom proportions.

  Let’s be clear here: Jesus is talking about legal oaths and Jesus is against legal oaths. This passage isn’t simply a clever way of asking, “We should all be honest, shouldn’t we?” As if he is saying, “The world would be a better place if we all told the truth.” But to make this point, he chose a narrow slice of life, namely, a legal oath. No, our zeal to “apply” fails us here. Jesus is talking about oaths, legally binding oaths. That’s what he quoted from Moses, that’s what he ridicules in his four kinds of oaths, and that’s what he prohibits at the end of the passage.

  But he is not talking just about legal oaths. Jesus wants utter honesty from his followers, and he illustrates a world where utter honesty has been compromised by speaking about oaths. So the way to read this passage is this: because he values honesty so much, he uses a concrete example of a world that establishes dishonesty. Jesus wants a world of utter honesty, and that would mean, among other things, nonparticipation in the use of oaths. We live this text into our world when we live with utter honesty and work against systems where dishonesty has become systemic.

  Those Who Use Oaths, Including God

  But perhaps it’s not that simple. So we need to ponder the ideas that come to mind if we want to live this passage anew in our world. Behind Christian nervousness about making this antithesis of Jesus a new rule for Christian living, as is seen in those who refuse to take legal oaths, is the ambiguity of the Bible itself on this issue. We can begin with the folly of oaths in the gospel of Matthew: Herod (14:7, 9) and Peter (26:74) reveal the problem. Oaths put one into foolish situations. But God makes oaths (Gen 22:16–18; Exod 6:8; Isa 45:23; Luke 1:73; Acts 2:30), and Abraham makes an oath (Gen 14:22). Perhaps we can push these aside because they are pre-Jesus’ words here. But Paul appeals to God as his witness (Rom 1:9; 2 Cor 1:23; Gal 1:20; Phil 1:8), which is exactly what an oath was, often enough that one would have to say he has at some level gone against what appears to be the intent of our antithesis, and an angel from God seems to do the same (Rev 10:6).

  But let’s come back to Jesus. When he was charged under oath to identify himself, he refused to speak (Matt 26:62–64). Was this because of kingdom honesty? I think so. What Jesus is teaching here is not the absolute prohibition of all oaths, for then he’d be against God’s ways of dealing with our redemption, but against legal oaths that reflect distancing God from what we do in scaling our obligations. He calls his followers into kingdom realities.

  Not in Court

  Luther overtly mismanaged this text when he turned it into its exact opposite. That is, Luther said it is okay to use oaths in public (legal courts) but not permissible for Christians in their private world. His two-kingdom ethical theory thus played itself out in a way that undid exactly what Jesus was doing. Jesus is here reforming public life because one’s private world is properly ordered. Nor will it do, as so many try to make it do, to say that Jesus is hyperbolically contending for overall honesty but a little oath is simply unimportant. What Jesus is doing in this saying is extending kingdom ethics from the private life of the disciple into the legal world into which they enter. As they seek reconciliation in legal situations (cf. 5:25–26), so they form honest habits that extend into legal situations (5:33–37).

  Nor, as Allison suggests, is this simply an ideal toward which we are to strive, though I agree that an ideal is at work here. Rather, this is nothing less than Jesus’ kingdom subversion of a legal code that encoded subtle distancing from God as well as scales of obligation to one’s words. Jesus’ is against such things, and so he flatly prohibits his followers from using oaths (which are by nature legal, public performative utterances). God is with us in everything we do, so we are to be honest in all we do.

  A Permission Now Taken Back

  What Jesus is saying, then, is that oaths, like divorce, were a permission because of the corruption of humans. Jesus is against the permission because he has come to transform humans into kingdom people. For Jesus, participation in the oath system of Judaism (or today) is to become complicit in systemic distancing from God’s omnipresence and in the scaling of obligation to one’s words. Since kingdom people are honest, they do not need to participate in oaths or scaling of one’s obligations.

  Probing Our Complicities

  We live this text out when we begin to see how complicit we are in legal systems that encode ethics out of sync with the kingdom ethic of Jesus. We live this text out when we learn the simplicity of honesty, when we learn that our yes really does mean yes and our no really does mean no, and when we learn that our yes obligates us and that our no obligates us. I would argue, then, that followers of Jesus are to tell a judge who requests an oath that they are bound by Jesus not to use oaths because their words are honest.

  Notice the order: it is because the kingdom is a world of utter honesty, hence an Ethic from Beyond, that followers of Jesus choose not to participate in a system, like oaths, where dishonesty becomes systemic. Again, he is sketching a world in which utter honesty rules. The text teaches, then, that eschatological honesty should rule in the words of his followers in the now.

  Simple Honesty

  But, yes, the last verse of our passage permits us to widen the scope of the passage to see that followers of Jesus are called to live with utter honesty. Simple honesty emerges in concrete ordinary events and not just when we are asked to swear on a Bible in a courtroom (“Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” “I swear.”). I was for more than a decade a codirector with Jim Panther of a summer baseball camp, which created the daily wonder of th
e sort of weather we might have. Jim was a marvel of simple honesty when it came to camp times and work habits, and what I saw was that he worked against systems that didn’t always value “money paid for work done.”

  We wrote on our camp brochure that camp ended at 3:00 p.m. Some days it was so hot that ending fifteen minutes early seemed almost unstoppable—but not Jim, and so not with me or our kids. The kids could go hide in a dugout or leave, but we kept teaching and pitching and hitting and instructing until 3:00 p.m.—every day, every week, for more than a decade. I can’t remember that we ever quit early, and the reason why is that camp ended at 3:00 p.m.

  A second reason was this: parents paid for a week in our camp. The first year a parent decided to take his son out of camp after three days (it was scorching hot that week), and came to us after camp that day and said, “I don’t think Ben will be at camp the rest of the week; the heat has just been too much.” Jim immediately said, “We’ll refund your money for the two days Ben misses.” Jim that night wrote out a check to Ben’s parents, and we mailed it to the parents the next day. That note of simple honesty pervaded our camp for the next decade. I remember mailing a check to a mother because her son missed a day of camp. That night she called me and said, “Why? I assumed if my son missed camp, we lost the money for that day.” I said, “You paid for five days, your son played four days, so we will refund your money for the day he missed.” Honestly, she was a bit stunned by our simple honesty, but I think she was stunned because our world’s system far too often works the other way.