3. We must answer the question—Are all oaths prohibited to the Christian? is it always wrong for a Christian to go into a court of justice and be sworn?Our Lord Himself, we notice, consented to be put on oath by the high priest—“I adjure thee by God,”—and to that adjuration He answered.[50] And on three or four occasions St. Paul takes God to witness, and says, in effect, As God is my witness, this is true. With these precedents, I do not think it is possible to say a Christian may not take an oath in a court of justice, or difficult to explainwhy he may. It is for this reason. When a Christian goes to take an oath in a court of law he should only go to profess openly that motive to truthfulness which rules all his speech. Even so, the need that he should take an oath comes of the habitual neglect of truth in ordinary conversation: in this sense any taking of an oath “is of the evil one.” And a man is quite below the Christian standard who thinks himself bound to truth by his oath, but not by his word in common speech. What are we to say then of the universally attested fact that even perjury, or false swearing, is in the law-courts of our Christian country a quite ordinary occurrence?
CHAPTER V
THE REVISION OF THE OLD LAW (continued)
AFTER dealing thus with three of the Ten Commandments our Lord proceeds to deal with two other prescriptions or ideas of the old covenant. As He had done to the commandments, He deepens and intensifies them till they reach that standard which commends itself to His holy and perfect mind. In both cases our Lord’s treatment of the older moral standard is both profoundly interesting and at the same time the cause of no little difficulty and scruple to Christian consciences.
THE LAW OF REVENGE
“Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go withhim twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”
Our Lord is here dealing with one interesting prescription of the old law. It had definitely allowed revenge up to a certain point, but no further. It might go to the point of exact reciprocity. So the law in Exodus xxi. 24, 25 lays it down: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
1. Here we must remark, first, that the law of the old covenant was in itself a limitation of human instinct. The savage instinct of revenge is to rush blindly in, and do as much harm to an enemy as can be done. The savage satisfies himself to the full; he kills the man that has done him wrong and his wife and family. Now nothing is more striking in the old covenant than that it checks barbarous habits and puts them under restraint. It is so with the habit of animal sacrifice; it is so in the law of revenge. The Mosaic law stands by, as it were, as a policeman, and says, An eye? is that the wrong done? Then an eye may be put out in return; but no more. You must stop there. The point which needs emphasizing is thatthe old law worked by way of gradual limitation, not of sudden abolition. God dealt with men gradually. Their savage passions are restrained under the Old Testament as a preparation for the time when they were to be brought under the perfect discipline of the Son of Man. So now, when the fullness of the time is come, our Lord lays on this passion of revenge a harder and deeper prescription, and says in fact to each of His disciples: A wrong aimed at thee as an individual is, so far as thy feeling goes, simply to be an occasion for showing complete liberty of spirit and superiority to all outrage. The Lord requires not moderation in revenge, but complete self-effacement.
2. Secondly, we may notice that this requirement of self-effacement is of the nature of an ascetic prescription, as when our Lord said “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out; if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” The necessity for this self-mutilation—cutting off a hand, plucking out an eye—lay in the fact that these limbs, or faculties, or functions of our nature had been so utterly misused that before they could be again usedlegitimately they must be put under this stern discipline of effacement.
So with this instinct of revenge. The instinct has in it something that is right: something of the passion of justice. It is a true instinct which makes us feel that for wrong done man should suffer wrong. It is derived from the divine principle of justice. But in our own cases, where our own interests are concerned, this passion of justice has come to be so mixed up with selfishness, and with those excessive demands which spring of selfishness—in a word, it has become so defiled with sin—that our Lord imposes on it an absolute ban; He says “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” He takes away from us, as it were, the right to administer justice in our own case.“The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.”[51] He requires us as individuals to acknowledge the law of self-effacement.