Christian Faith: The Basics, Part 17

We come now to a consideration of The Eighth Commandment: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

"Besides our own body, our wife or husband, and our temporal property," Martin Luther writes in The Large Catechism, "we have one more treasure which is indispensable to us, namely, our honor and good name, for it is intolerable to live among men in public disgrace and contempt." It's to spare us such disgrace and contempt that God gives this commandment.

There's good reason for this: Persons with positive reputations are more able to live useful, productive lives, which is something that God wants all of us to experience. When we take people's reputations from them, we not only harm them, we obstruct the plans of God for their lives...and our own.

A few months ago, in a forty-installment series on Christian servanthood, I talked about how God calls us to serve others by safeguarding their reputations. I wrote:

In Medieval times, a woman visited a monk. He was a man admired for giving holy, sensible advice. The woman realized, she said, that she had become a terrible gossip, the purveyor of hurtful words. What should she do? The monk told her to go through the village and bag all the goose feathers she found. Then, she should lay a feather at the doorstep of every person about whom she had gossiped. After that, she should return to the monk.

The woman dutifully did what the monk directed her to do and returned to him. The monk said, "That's wonderful. Now go back to each of those doorsteps and collect the goose feathers you left behind. Then, come back here." When the woman returned for yet another visit to the monk, she reported that all the feathers had been blown away by the wind.

"That’s the point, of course," the monk told her. "We can be forgiven the sin of gossiping about others. If you repent for it, God surely will forgive you. Those you have violated may do the same. But no matter whether you are forgiven or not, the damage will have been done. Gossip spreads as though carried aloft by the wind and you can't bring it back."

The eighth commandment tells us, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” In his explanation of it in The Small Catechism, Martin Luther writes, “We are to fear and love God so that we do not betray, slander, or lie about our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain his actions in the kindest way.” Refraining from lying about our neighbor is just the beginning of God’s intentions in this commandment. He intends for us to be guardians of others’ reputations.

Servants of the God we know in Jesus Christ look for ways to build up others’ reputations and to help them be understood and appreciated even when we may disagree with them.

James writes in the New Testament:

If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. [James 3:3-6]

Some of the worst trouble I've experienced in my life and some of the worst damage I've done in this world have stemmed from my words.

I've also seen the damaged reputations caused by others' careless words. Years ago, there was a prominent person in the community where I lived at the time, a leader who struggled to introduce changes and who experienced some successes. Although I agreed with the lion's share of what he tried to do, I also sometimes winced at the pace and recklessness with which he went about his work. He began to experience major opposition and found himself no longer able to lead. Soon thereafter, he resigned his position and went to another community, where happily, he was very successful.

Not long after he left, I was at a ball game and it was halftime. I overheard some people talking about this man. "I heard he took off with a lot of money," one guy said. Not even this man's worst enemies accused him of financial dishonesty. Yet, here was a guy pushing a tale that, with no foundation in fact, nonetheless hurt someone's reputation. I will always regret that I didn't more forcefully defend the maligned man.

Luther summarizes the intent of this command by saying:

No one shall harm his neighbor, whether friend or foe, with his tongue. No one shall speak evil of him, whether truly or falsely, unless it is done with proper authority [judges and preachers are among those Luther claims to have this authority] or for his improvement. A person should use his tongue to speak only good of everyone, to cover his neighbor's sins and infirmities, to overlook them, and to cloak and veil them with his own honor.

God cares about our reputations because God cares about us.