Back in the ’80s, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to address each other’s countries on TV.  After the addresses were over, various media types interviewed people from each country to give their assessment of the speeches.  One of the Soviet citizens interviewed remarked that when Gorbachev (or any Soviet leader) spoke, he always made you feel as though he were speaking to a million people, but when Reagan spoke, he made you feel he was speaking just to you.  They greatly preferred Reagan to Gorby and for a sensible reason: nobody likes feeling like an ingredient in a statistical bloc.  We are persons, not statistics.  That’s why God chooses you — you yourself — and calls you by name out of all the peoples of the earth.

It is significant that when God becomes man, His first word to us is not, “Keep it up!” or “What do you think?” but “Repent!”  Many people are put off by that, as they would be by a total stranger walking up and saying, “Stop it!”  But then, Jesus is not a total stranger.  He knows us better than anybody, which is why His first word is “Repent!”  Not one of us can hear that word with an ounce of reflection and not immediately recognize those things of which we need to repent.  That’s why we reflect so rarely.  The good news is that Jesus did not come merely to depress us with the fact that there’s plenty wrong with us.  He came to deliver us from the sins He called us to see and repent of.  Today, hear the voice of Jesus and repent.  He will surely forgive and deliver you from all sin.

The exiles who returned from Babylon got a bit distracted.  They were delivered from captivity in order to worship their God.  But they got caught up in the work of re-building their houses and farms and businesses and forgot the main thing: rebuilding the Temple of God.  And for all their efforts, it just didn’t seem to be coming together as it should.  They couldn’t figure out why.  Haggai was sent to remind them.  His point was the same as a later Messenger to the people of Israel, “Seek seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33).

One of the dangers of the spiritual life is false humility.  Sometimes, in order to avoid doing the right thing, we can pretend that we are too ignorant of God’s will to know what to do.  But as C.S. Lewis observed, the trouble with trying make yourself stupider than you really are is that you can often succeed.  Today’s verse speaks to that rather silly spiritual condition.  It is often the condition in which our culture finds itself, unable to render elementary justice to outrageous crimes because, after all, “Who are we to judge?”  “Not judging” does not mean abandoning the call to do justice.  It means not usurping the place of God.  Today, do justice, love mercy and walk in true humility before your God.

The “young man” in today’s verse was pretty much any modern person.  When he looked at life, he saw economic forecasts, newspaper headlines, morning cups of coffee, that living room carpet that needed vacuuming, leaky faucets, vague misgivings about his job, dim fritterings about youthful dreams unfulfilled, telephones ringing, and the sense that there was no place for his meaningless life to go.  When he looked back, he saw a wasted life.  When he looked forward, he saw old age and then the lights going out — forever.  He was a living incarnation of Scripture’s teaching that where there is no vision, the people perish.  He was perishing in his soul.  Then God opened his eyes and suddenly his vision was filled, not with hallucination (his whole previous life had been that) but with real vision.  He saw that God was there.  The universe came right side up and he realized that there is nothing ordinary about ordinary life.  The same is true for you, right now.  Sitting in the room with you right now are angelic presences every bit as real as you are.  And there, more real than anything else, is the Blessed Trinity Himself.  Open your eyes.

Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives, and said to them, “Why have you done this, and let the male children live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and are delivered before the midwife comes to them.” (Exodus 1:15-19)

Some rigorist readers of this text are troubled in conscience about this bald faced lie and offer various explanations of why this lie was wrong, but God overlooked it due to the need to get on with the Big Picture, or because he is inscrutable, or whatever. However, the sacred author himself seems to have no such qualms as the modern rigorist. He cheerily continues:

So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God he gave them families. (Exodus 1:20-21)

In other words, God rewarded the midwives, not in spite of their lies, but because of them. That’s the sort of paradox that is all in day’s work for a biblical author and it confronts us, in a backhanded way, with just why the commandment against bearing false witness is needed: telling the truth is hard and sometimes people don’t have a right to full disclosure.

It is a truism to say that truthful speech is the currency of a happy and virtuous human community. A civilization built on lies is doomed. But, as with commands against stealing, murder and adultery, it is also a fact that, sooner or later, we all want to bend the truth, nuance, shade or outright lie about something just like the Hebrew midwives. When the wife asks, “Does this make me look fat?” this is often not the time for a husband to be a Halogen beacon of glaring factuality. When the Nazis come to the door asking if you’ve seen any Jews, you don’t take them to the hideout in the attic out of a slavish commitment to mere factuality.

Nonetheless, the commandment stands, precisely because, as T.S. Eliot remarks, human beings cannot bear too much reality—and generally we are tempted to bear far less than we really can, not to reveal too much.

What I mean is this: There is something about face-to-face contact with another human being that tends to create bonds (in both the good and bad sense of that word). When we get to know somebody at all, we find that we tend to pad our speech in such a way as to cushion the truth and guard their feelings. So, for instance, some time ago a woman I know was confronted with incontrovertible evidence that her dentist of twenty years had performed millions of dollars of unnecessary surgery on her and about a hundred other patients. The evidence was there in his own hand in the charts. But she, being a decent sort, continued trying to find some other explanation for the fraud till it finally sank in: the man she had trusted for twenty years was a crook.

Now that tendency to assume the best of people we have come to know is normal and healthy as far as it goes. It’s the lubricant that makes social relationships possible. But when we let it shade off into sycophantic flattery, denial, and lying in order to protect ourselves or those we care about (or fear) then we start to head into places where it becomes all too easy to bear false witness.

A classic example of this we have just seen in the ongoing disaster of the priest abuse scandal. People seldom get up in the morning saying, “Today I will bear false witness against my neighbor just for the hell of it.” Instead, they start by giving extra weight to what Fr. Beloved Priest says because, well, after all, we know Fr. Beloved Priest. He’s one of us. Meanwhile, the angry mom or the kid with the shocking claim are, you know, them. Indeed, often the bitter words of outrage and denunciation at Fr. Beloved’s betrayal only makes it more easy to shuffle mom and the kid off to the “them” category. “Hey!” we say, “They could be anybody.” Fr. Beloved has a long and distinguished career! He baptized my daughter and tells funny jokes and dried my tears when my mother died. And it would be very convenient if his accuser were just anybody: some riff-raff or gold-digger off the streets. We don’t want to hear it. It’s gotta be tinfoil hat talk.

So we shade the truth, first of all to ourselves, and downplay the complaint. And as the complaints against Fr. Beloved pile up from other sources we have to keep adding to the investment of faith we have in him even as we begin to put extra effort into taking away from the investment of faith others might put into his accusers. Before you know it, you have whole groups of people, both in an organized and in a spontaneous way, laboring to protect the reputation of Fr. Beloved and (mark this) laboring to destroy the reputation of his accusers using more and more tendentious and even false evidence. All this seems to work swimmingly to the bearer of false witness—right up until the DNA samples show conclusively that Fr. Beloved has a daughter or the photos of him with male prostitute hit the front page. At which point everybody starts asking themselves how they could have been so blind. The answer is both simple and hard: “You ignored the commandment against bearing false witness. You gave preference to somebody you know and like over somebody you don’t know who threatened you with the truth.”

Our Lord said, “The truth will set you free.” This is so. But on the way to doing so, the truth will also often make you a weirdo, scare you to death and get you killed. It is because truth is so scary that God reminds us of the gravity of betraying it. Typically for a culture that is dominated by the idea of covenant, the Ten Commandments relates the idea of truthfulness to community. The commandment is not especially against lies in the abstract but specially focuses on bearing false witness against your neighbor. In an ancient semitic culture, the complex ties of tribe and family, as well as the sharply defined class relationships of rich and poor, royal and common, man and woman, kinsman and alien, all provided ample temptations for suckuppery, extortion, false witness and oppression of the weak. This commandment constitutes one of the bedrock defenses of the weak and marginalized from the Lord who, again and again, declares himself the Avenger of the alien, the orphan, and the widow. The one who tells lies in order to oppress and exploit these most disenfranchised people is particularly in view and stands in particular danger of the divine wrath should he ignore the commandment.

That said, we flatter ourselves to the point of absurdity if we think we are any less in danger of grave evil than a bunch of shepherds and Bronze Age types living in the ancient Near East. Our society has mastered the art of Orwellian speech and false witness against neighbor in ways that our ancestors could never dream of. We bear false witness by debasing language every day. Whether it is calling the killing of children “choice” or the torture of prisoners “enhanced interrogation” we are still faced with the temptation to bear false witness against our neighbor. We do so by testifying that our unborn neighbor is “fetal material” and by declaring the neighbor whom we torture to be worthy of torment which the Church says are intrinsically immoral for us to inflict, as well as by presuming his guilt based on the fact that we are torturing him. For, of course, the dirty secret about torture is that you inflict it to find out if the person you are torturing deserves it. When you find out that you were mistaken, you have already committed a sin worthy of hell. And if you do not repent (and bureaucracies that torture dislike having to acknowledge mistakes), you then compound your sin by lying and claiming the innocent person you tortured is guilty.

When we do this sort of thing, then the bad currency of speech begins to drive out the good and, as ever, the sin and the judgment are the same thing. A society which accepts lying language into the core of its way of thinking is a society that is teaching itself to lose touch with reality. The United States discovered this in the 1860s when all the piled up lies about black men and women as “property” finally became insupportable and reality came roaring back with a vengeance. The same principle is now at work as we experience the fruit of our habit of self-delusion with abortion and other crimes of the culture of death. For a lying spirit tends to float. It refuses to stay where we want it to (defending only the lies of the Sexual Revolution and leaving the rest of our wits unclouded). Instead, a lying spirit clouds everything and causes us to pursue folly in every sphere of life. The culture that can delude itself that the newborn baby gasping out its last breath on the table is just a “born alive fetus” or a “botched abortion” is a culture that can convince itself that the way to prosperity and happiness is to go into massive and unpayable debt. The radical folly behind the economic meltdown is the product of a whole culture laboring as one to live in denial of reality.

In short, God is not mocked. As with all sins against natural law, the punishment is simply the natural consequence of our wicked and stupid choices. The way to avoid these consequences is “Don’t make the wicked and stupid choice.” And the way to do that is to ask for the grace of God in Christ to overcome the temptation to bear false witness against your neighbor and, far more, to cultivate a habit of speaking the truth in love. Jesus promise is plain: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). Not least among the blessed fruits of that simple yet powerful act of Christian discipleship is simply being able to sleep better at night. As Mark Twain noted, “Tell the truth. Then you won’t have to remember what you said.”

I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through the belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness of the Creator of Creation.

I arise today through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism, through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial, through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension, through the strength of his descent for the judgment of Doom.

I arise today through the strength of the love of the Cherubim, in obedience of angels, in the service of archangels, in hope of resurrection to meet with reward, in prayers of patriarchs, in predictions of prophets, in preaching of apostles, in faith of confessors, in innocence of holy virgins, in deeds of righteous men.

I arise today through the strength of heaven: light of sun, radiance of moon, splendor of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of wind, depth of sea, stability of earth, firmness of rock.

I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me: God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s host to save me from snares of devils, from temptations of vices, from everyone who shall wish me ill, afar and anear, alone and in multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and those evils, against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul, against incantations of false prophets, against black laws of pagandom against false laws of heretics, against craft of idolatry, against spells of witches and smiths and wizards, against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.

Christ to shield me today against poison, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, so that there may come to me abundance of reward. Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness, of the Creator of Creation.

The biblical view of revelation is refreshingly practical.  One of the many pathologies of modernity is that it is far too absorbed in theory.  The fatal words of so many of the ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries were “according to my calculations…”.  Marx had a shiny, perfect theory which he promised would bring heaven on earth.  It produced the largest pile of corpses in the history of the human race.  And, as it did so, theoreticians kept insisting that “according to their calculations” it was going to work, any day now.  Mao said the same.  So have the apostles of the sexual revolution.  So did Hitler.  So do the present-day theoreticians who say “Morality doesn’t matter so long as the economy is good.”  All these bright boys have a theory and all of them tell us our task as their disciples is to overlook the mounting bodies and social catastrophe and attend to the theory.  In contrast, biblical revelation says to look, not at theory, but at what God has actually done.  He can be trusted because what He says is true and what He does actually works.  He actually set Israel free from slavery.  He actually worked real miracles.  He actually healed broken lives and gave joy.  He actually rose from the dead.  This stuff happened, not in some cloud-cuckoo-land of theory, but in this world.  Today, thank God for His wonderful works and His solid, concrete and practical judgments.

One of the works of God is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  Some people have the notion that the God of the Old Testament was big in the “afflicting the comfortable” department while the God of the New Testament is more of a “comfort the afflicted” kind of God.  But this is, of course, to totally forget that there is only one God and He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  The God of the Old Testament was Israel’s healer.  The God of the New Testament “has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones” (Luke 1:51-52).  In all this, His goal was the same: the salvation of the world.  Ultimately, His desire is “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).  Today, seek the Lord, your healer.

Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.”

A Marvelous thing is longsuffering; it places the soul as in a quiet harbor, fleeing it from tossings and evil spirits. And this everywhere Christ hath taught us, but especially now, when He is judged, and dragged, and led about. For when He was brought to Annas, He answered with great gentleness, and, to the servant who smote Him, said what had power to bring down all his insolence; thence having gone to Caiaphas, then to Pilate, and having spent the whole night in these scenes, He all through exhibiteth His own mildness; and when they said that He was a malefactor, and were not able to prove it, He stood silent; but when He was questioned concerning the Kingdom, then He spake to Pilate, instructing him, and leading him in to higher matters. But why was it that Pilate made the enquiry not in their presence, but apart, having gone into the judgment hall? He suspected something great respecting Him, and wished, without being troubled by the Jews, to learn all accurately. Then when he said, “What hast thou done?” on this point Jesus made no answer; but concerning that of which Pilate most desired to hear, namely, His Kingdom, He answered, saying, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” That is, “I am indeed a King, yet not such an one as thou suspectest, but far more glorious,” declaring by these words and those which follow, that no evil had been done by Him. For one who saith, “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth,” showeth, that no evil hath been done by Him. Then when He saith, “Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice,” He draweth him on by these means, and persuadeth him to become a listener to the words. “For if,” saith He, “any one is true, and desireth these things, he will certainly hear Me.” — St. John Chrysostom, Homily LXXXIV