TELLING THE TRUTH CAN BE FATAL

One of the Ten Commandments admonishes us to never bear false witness. In other words: always tell the truth. Most of the time we have no trouble obeying this command. By nature we are wont to tell the truth at all times and we do. To be sure, there are occasions when we will allow ourselves a little white lie or tell a half-truth, but blatant lies are not part of our usual discourse.

We may not always tell it like it is because sometimes blatant honesty can be very hurtful to another, as when your spouse asks, “Does this outfit make me look fat?” It may also find you sleeping by yourself on the couch for the next week or two.  Sometimes, too, the one asking us a question has no need to know the answer as well as no right to ask the question in the first place. Another person’s personal business is none of my business and vice versa.

Yet there are those times when telling the truth is what is demanded and anything less would be wrong, such as when we are in court and on the witness stand. The truth about telling the truth is twofold: first, we are always on the witness stand, if you will. Our lives are to model what we believe. In fact, they do, no matter what we say about what we believe. We may profess our faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior but our lives may very well witness to the truth that we really do not, as when we say and do that which us rather un-Christ like. 

At times, however, it almost seems as if we have come up against a rock and a hard place, times when telling the truth can be fatal, literally and figuratively. I believe Jesus got killed not because he was a threat to the Roman Empire and not out of political expediency but because he always told the truth about how we are to live and he modeled that truth by his life. He made too many people too uncomfortable. Silencing him, silencing his truth-telling, would make their lives easier. So they did.

We may never find ourselves in such a situation where our life is on the line because we told the truth, but telling the truth can still be fatal. I think of Walter Mondale telling the voting public that he would raise taxes were he elected President. Such truth-telling was fatal to his election. Telling the truth is not about sticking one’s finger in the wind and discerning which way it is blowing and then saying what the people want to hear. It is about saying what must be said in spite of the consequences.

Again, those consequences can mean the death of a career, political or otherwise, or the death of a relationship. Speaking and acting on the hard truth will always give us pause as only a fool blurts out the truth without thinking about how those words will be heard and understood. Truth-telling is always momentous and often dangerous.

In speaking the truth we must measure our words carefully but we must also be certain that our lives support what we are about to say. Speaking with a forked tongue may still be speaking the truth, but we are not going to be heard. Might that not be the reason why we often are reluctant to tell the truth, to say what needs to be said? Just asking.