Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
One of my ethics professors always walked into class on the first day and said, "Let me sum up the entire semester for you right now: Never Lie."
It seemed like a simple - even simplistic statement - at the beginning of the semester, but by the end of the course, having read a lot of scripture and history and having discussed a lot of issues, we realized how difficult it is to "never lie." There are all kinds of ways we can lie to ourselves, without quite thinking we are doing so. That's where doing ethics gets difficult - is figuring out the ways we lie to ourselves and how we can stop it.
Today's scriptures pinpoint a couple of the difficult points about lies. In James 5:9-12, the author admonishes Christians not to complain about each other, but to persevere. The passage ends with another seemingly simple command: "let your yes mean yes and your no mean no."
It sounds much simpler than it is in practice. As Christians, we believe that part of what it means to be disciples is to live our lives in such a way that Jesus shines through. But exactly because our way of life is so important to us, it is easy to look at others, especially Christians, and think "Oh, they're not living the way a Christian ought to live." They're not loving enough, not generous enough, not hospitable enough, and so forth.
This is why James tells us to persevere. We are so prone to thinking that others aren't doing "the right thing" - and it can be so tempting to want just to dismiss these "other people". We lie to ourselves about our own relative goodness and others' relative lack of goodness. Instead, James asks us to persevere in our relationships. To me, this means constantly believing that others desire goodness and desire to live well. It also means cultivating humility and recognizing that my own sense of goodness might not be right!
When James says, "Let your yes mean yes" the hard part of this is to live that "yes" constantly. Our "yesses" to each other shouldn't mean, "Yes, unless I think you're doing it the wrong way," or "Yes, unless something better (or even more seemingly Christian) comes along". It means, if I make a promise, I keep it. My perseverance means I am committed to others in my life, knowing that they are not perfect, and confronting the fact that I am not perfect either.
Today's gospel (Mark 10:1-12) provides a different example of letting our yesses mean yes. In this passage, the Pharisees who test Jesus as they often do, asking trick questions, which are tricky precisely because if he answers one way, he'd be seen as politically in one camp, and if he answers another way, he'd be in another camp. Either way, half the crowd will hate him - and that, perhaps, is exactly what the Pharisees want as they try to discredit Jesus.
Jesus is always too nimble-minded to fall into those kinds of Q&A traps, however. In today's case, he avoids the trap of saying a simple yes or no to the question about divorce. Instead, he reframes the question entirely, suggesting that divorce was an exception God had once made because of the peoples' hard hearts. The Pharisees (and others) might like what the letter of the law says - that it permits divorce. But Jesus says that if they REALLY want to follow God, they'll be aiming for the spirit of the law.
Practicing the spirit of the law requires humility and recognizing that I'm not as good as I think I am - nor are others necessarily as bad as I want to think they are. Marriage is an institution where we make a promise of "yes" to another person. It is one way of practicing making our yesses mean yes, even though that can be very difficult to do.
Today let us pray for a spirit of humility and perseverance in all our relationships with each other and God.
- Jana M. Bennett