Yes!

Matthew 5: 33-37

3 ‘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.” 

To be human is to tell stories. We live by stories it’s how we make sense of ourselves and others. We all have a personal biography; it’s a special story of our public and private persona.  We like others to hold a high value opinion of us and use various forms of credentials to tell others who we are. Credentials can be misleading; an official credential may give authority to a person that in reality they don’t deserve. Oaths are like this; the story goes something like this: ‘if I take a vow based on something I think you value then you will be convinced that I am a person you can value and trust’. Sound to me like something that can be abused very easily indeed. Swear an oath on a holy book and there is no way I’ll be telling lies? Perhaps the transformation that Jesus is teaching here is the transformation of living lives that are true to the heart and pure in the practice of who God created us to be: a community serving each other in the light of the teachings and practices of Jesus. Evidence is required to support our testimony. We therefore need to address the question ‘What evidence is there that we have been transformed by Jesus and His teachings?’ To appeal to anything other than our lived witness of Jesus transforming power is to hide behind a false identity that will eventually be exposed as a lie. Jesus will eventually remind us again that we will be known by the fruit of our lives; let the fruit of our lives be known as the truth. Finally, let’s not reduce this passage to some legalistic rule about taking oaths in a court and so on.  As disciples we are not simply means and rules orientated in our ethical practice: we are means, situation and outcome orientated; situated within the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the: ‘Way the Truth and the Life’; His story is transformative. What words will we live by and have our lives identified with? Surely for you and me as disciples we must say: ‘yes, yes’ to the words of Jesus and ‘no, no’ to any other telling of the story of life.