“I swear on my mother, if you don’t back off, I’ll knock your teeth out.” I don’t remember the exact words, but they were something to that effect. They, and quite a few other oaths to the same effect, were shouted at me by an 18-year old gang member one evening while I was at work. He had been placed at the facility where I worked because he had an anger problem and was a drug addict. I watched that kid holler and threaten for about 20 minutes and had a realization. He was all bark and no bite. He didn’t get his way, so he threatened me (and the rest of the staff) as loudly as possible. When that didn’t work, he began to swear every manner of creative oath, trying to get us to believe that he was actually dangerous. He wasn’t. Really dangerous people don’t yell, they act. This guy used words because he wouldn’t act. As he increased the intensity of his words, I recognized that the main reason folks use oaths to prove their honesty is because people don’t believe them. He had to swear to violence to strengthen a reputation that was all sound and fury, but little else. As soon as we recognized that he was all talk, it altered how we interacted with him.
Not long afterward, I witnessed a similar phenomena as I watched a young man in rehab swear to his parents that this time everything would be different. He swore up and down that he would be clean this time. His parents, who had been lied to over and over again, simply didn’t believe him. His word was no good. There was no amount of swearing on the Bible, on his own life, or anything else that was going to make it so that his word was good. Words are cheap, especially when placed in the context of overwhelming evidence. In that rehab program, we would often say: don’t apologize, act different. For the young addict, swearing that everything would change, the only way his parents would believe him was for him to actually change.
Jesus addressed this topic in the sermon on the mount. He talked about the Jewish practice of swearing by the temple, the temple treasury, their own heads, etc. This was a practice that was born of a similar credibility shortage. People who have a good reputation and strong credibility don’t need to swear. Their “yes” means “yes” and their “no” means “no”. The instruction is pretty simple: be the kind of person who is believable. If you say something, make sure it’s the truth. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. Jesus is teaching that his followers should be the kind of people who are believable because they maintain their integrity.
A lot of married couples I’ve spoken with suffer a shortage of trust. The solution to this problem is invariably: be the kind of person who is believable because they do what they say they are going to do and always speak the truth. The difficult part is maintaining this behavior over the long term. A bad reputation takes time to overcome. It’s like having bad credit. You fix your credit by paying your bills on time for years, not by apologizing to your creditors or by swearing you’ll do better in the future.
