speaking simply

At the first meeting of the Steering Committee for the Anabaptist Network in South Africa last December, we had a lengthy conversation on the subject of “simplicity”. And though the bulk of our conversation had to do with economic considerations, one of our members suggested another manifestation of the life of simplicity to which Jesus calls his disciples: simplicity in speech.

Simplicity, or “simple living” as I most often heard it described, was indeed a central value in my Mennonite upbringing—and perhaps especially as it related to speech. Somehow, I picked up that boastfulness, that singing one’s own accomplishments, is about as distasteful a characteristic as one can have. I also learned that “taking the Lord’s name in vain” was an offense of the highest order; though my understanding of such “swearing falsely” has grown to include all injustice done in the name of Jesus, it also still includes an avoidance of the flippant use of any of God’s names in everyday speech. Yes indeed, my colleague’s suggestion that Jesus, simplicity, and speech somehow belong together strikes a chord with the Anabaptist faith I heard and welcomed.

It is probably for that reason then—because I carry a simple faith or a faith in the simple—that the most disturbing encounters I have had within the wide world of South African Christianity have in common the element of someone “saying too much or more than one should.”

For the sixteenth century Anabaptists, the issue that exemplified simplicity in speech was the medieval practice of the swearing of oaths, or, in the case of the Anabaptists, the non-swearing of oaths. Taking their lead from the simple commands of Jesus, the Anabaptists refused to “swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King” (Mt 5:34-35). Applied to Reformation-era Europe, obedience to Jesus’ prohibition against oaths was disobedience to the law of a society built upon injustice, for oaths were the seal of an uneven (and unholy) alliance between lords and subjects, masters and servants. By swearing an oath to human masters in the sight of God, peasants agreed to do their masters’ bidding—even to fight their wars. Oath-swearing was thus the ultimate affront to a righteous God, for it placed ultimate power, the power to take life, within the hands of violent men. It was a renunciation of faith for the faithful, for it denied the God in whom they put their trust in favor of human masters.

All this implies, of course, that the swearing of oaths is fundamentally about relationships—to whom does one owe his/her first allegiance? To whom is one ultimately loyal? Who is one’s primary relation?

Though I was unaware as events unfolded, I have had two separate relationships in which—as I see it now—a partner in ministry swore a kind of loyalty, an oath, to me. In one case, one of our brightest students at the Bible School, whom we had singled out for future leadership, declared to me that he would “come to Bethany Bible School until the rapture.” Looking back, I have wondered whether this was not a bit like “swearing by heaven.” In the second case, another pastor declared that our relationship was the one to “take us into the New Jerusalem”—was this “swearing by the city of the great King”? In each case, the wording too closely resembled the places prohibited for swearing on Jesus’ list to escape my notice as an “oath”—and therefore also implied the same limitations inherent to oaths according to Jesus’ words. For just as one who swears “by [his/her] head” has not the power to “make one hair white or black”, so these friends swore to me that which only God can see for their lives (Mt 5:36). In both cases, the one swearing the oath was not prepared to fulfill it.

It seems to me, therefore, that there are only two kinds of “oaths” blessed by God for humans to take. One, the vow of marriage, repeats the basic structure of creation, blessed by God: “God created the human being in God’s image, male and female God created them” (Gen 1:27), the same “man and wife” who share such intimacy so as to be “one flesh” before their God (Gen 2:24). A second, baptism, binds the believer to Christ and his Body, the Church, the “first fruits” of a “new creation” (2 Th 2:13). Yet because the Church is “one body made up of many members” (1 Cor 12:12), the believer’s baptismal vow is to its totality rather than its partiality, to the whole not the part, to the universal rather than the particular. For, while the commitment to the universal can only be lived within the particular, vows must not be made to any one alone; they are made to God—and even then, in the case of baptism, in order to be blown by God’s Spirit to wherever, to whomever, whenever, God chooses (Jn 3:8-9). This is the “vow to the Lord” which we might “swear”—not to say more than we should but “yes, yes” or “no, no” to the Christ who bids us follow him (Mt 5:33, 37).

-Joe