Authenticity and the 9th – Part III

We’ve been talking about the 9th. Commandment that is. The 9th is all about not sharing harmful information concerning our neighbor with others.

Often we break the 9th when we aren’t intending to harm anyone. We may even be attempting to keep people from being hurt. I’d take a guess that we’re more likely to “bear false witness” when we really think we are not.

It can happen in a couple of ways. First, we do it through the art of planting questions in peoples’ minds about a third party. We aren’t saying anything wrong. We aren’t even hinting at something out of order. But we just raise a question or wonder if such and such could really be so. We even plant questions when we don’t speak up for someone, not treating someone’s honor as something we will defend to the last.

The second way is through the art of playful humor. Humor is a gift from God, but like all gifts it can be misused. We joke about something in regard to someone and soon the gentle joke turns cruel or malicious. Maybe it doesn’t even get repeated, but the humor like the hint of a question stirs in people’s minds and impressions are formed.

A key purpose of the Ten Commandments is to ensure a just and functional society where people find methods to work and live together in harmony. What happens when the 9th is abused in the most casual of ways, through a question or a quip that does not automatically assume the best in someone else? The fabric of society starts to tear apart. We have just separated that object of our question or humor from the rest of us – we have turned that person into an object outside of our circle.

A friend of mine tells a story on himself. He laughs about it now, but I wonder how he really felt when it happened. While in college, he took a liking to this particular girl, a fellow student. One day after class he asked her out on a date. Right there she turned him down. I don’t know that she did it poorly. I rather think she just found the best way she could think of to say she wasn’t interested.

A short while later my friend showed up in the school’s administrative offices and a secretary said she’d heard that so-and-so had turned him down for a date. How quickly that news had traveled around the campus! How many other people knew about this story? What was this news causing people to think about my friend. A date nobody wanted? A joke, a loser?

Like a faint breeze that portends a violent thunderstorm, our hints through question and humor can unleash terrible pain in people. The smallest, most off-handed remarks can grow into monsters of destruction.

I’ll admit I’m as guilty as anyone. But just because I am in good company doesn’t excuse my behavior. I do well to heed each of the Ten Commandments, particularly this 9th that can sow pain and misery in my wake if it is ignored.