Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity - ‘Guard your tongue’
There is a children’s rhyme that goes, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, Butwords can never hurt me!’ I can’t recall when I first heard it, but I can remember thinking, even a child, ‘that is obviously not true.’ Now that I am older I can analysewhy this is, noting that the rhyme carries within it its own contradiction. If words really didn’t have the power to harm, then such a reassuring rhyme would never have been composed. Everyone knows that words can wound, sometimes deeply. Words spoken in anger, that cannot be forgotten even if there was a subsequent apology. Words spoken to us in childhood that hurt and have stayed with us; perhaps even shaped our lives.
I say all this, taking my cue from our second reading, in which James writes about the importance of Christian disciples ‘bridling their tongues’ and being ‘quick to listen, slow to speak. Further on in the same letter he has more to say on this theme, observing that we may be able to tame wild animals, but ‘No one can tame the tongue’. For the tongue is a ‘restless evil, full of deadly poison.’ Like the rudder of a ship or the bridle of a horse, the tongue is a relatively small part of our body, but it accomplishes far more than seems possible, given its size.
Most of us, I suspect, would recognize that James is on to something important here. From our personal lives to politics, from the print media to broadcasting to digital and on-line communications, the harmful and distorting effects of language, whether spoken or written, are everywhere to be seen. In recent weeks we have seen how false information, spread online, can spill over into actual violence on our streets. And in America revised charges have been issued against a former president for, amongst other things, claiming without evidence that an election had been ‘stolen’, once again resulting in civil disorder and destruction.
Both are examples of a relatively new phenomenon: the use of words to shape reality without any concern for evidence or facts. One commentator on the letter of James, Richard Bauckham, describes today’s reading as articulating a powerful case for ‘speech ethics’. If such ethics were needed in the ancient world, they are surely needed even more today, but neither Bauckham, nor James himself, tells us what these ethics might be, nor gives us much practical advice.
James’ effective diagnosis of a problem – the destructive power of the tongue – without giving immediate solutions, is explored by Donald Nicholl in the final pages of his short but profound spiritual classic, Holiness. Nicholl, a British historian and theologian, spent the final part of his career as Rector of an Ecumenical Institute in Israel. With characteristic honesty he recalls three occasions when unconsidered words of his threatened the peace of the community there. The only consolation he gained from repenting of these transgressions was to be driven back to the significance of exactly the passages in the letter of James that I’ve been considering, in particular the text: ‘All of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect... How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.’
Nicholl notes both that the practical implications of what James writes are not spelled out in his letter, and also that they have not received the attention they deserve in Christian theology. In fact he found the help he needed, in a classic Jewish work called Guard Your Tongue, by Reb Yisroel Meir. It is a rather fearsome book, fromthe stern portrait of the author on the cover, to the uncompromising nature of the contents, where Reb Yisroel argues that evil speech is worse than idolatry, adultery and murder. If you are in the company of people speaking evil of others, Reb Yisroel writes, you are obliged to rebuke them. And then an even tougher piece of advice that Nicholl found especially significant: you are forbidden to refer to a wrong someone has done you, even if there is no doubt that it was a wrong.
Nicholl discovered by accident some hurtful personal remarks made by two scholars visiting his Institute. During the following months several occasions arose, especially in intellectual discussions, when he might have quite legitimately made these scholars look incompetent. Each time he was tempted to do just this, however, the stern portrait of Reb Yisroel from Guard Your Tongue arose before his eyes, and he kept silent. Soon even the temptation disappeared. And then, towards the end of the academic year, Nicholl tells of a convivial meal, as follows:
‘At dinner one night I felt a wonderfully deep sense of peace and affection and joy flowing from one to another of those sharing the same table. Then suddenly I remembered that my table companions constituted the very group that had spoken harshly of me some months earlier. Yet now they were full of affection and warmth. With a shudder I realised that this wonderful fellowship would have been quite impossible if I had said one such word as I was tempted to say.’
Nicholl reflects that what helped him to hold his tongue, and so keep the peace, was not so much an abstract teaching as an image: the image of the stern face of Reb Yisroel arising in his mind’s eye. This is the way, he concludes, that the Holy Spirit often works in our lives: through the gift of images that help us to live better lives.
Nicholl’s book does not publish a picture of Reb Yisroel, so that is left to the reader’s imagination; but Nicholl also offers the wonderful image of a joyful meal in which past tensions and hurts are not forgotten, but no longer seem important. This is an image that stays in my mind, and has helped me when I have been tempted to take an opportunity to speak harshly. For me it is an image reminiscent of Christ’s teaching about the kingdom of God as a heavenly banquet, a feast to which all people are invited.
I have said that the letter of James does not offer a solution to the problem he diagnoses. If you read on in the letter, however, he does go on to argue that the origin of true wisdom is found in God, and he encourages friendship with God rather than the world. What he urges in his readers is integrity of life, and in chapter four he relates this back to speech: ‘Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters.’ So perhaps the solution to the destructiveness of speech is about more than a code of ‘speech ethics’, for all that our world does need practical advice and guidelines in this area. Ultimately, however, the full remedy is found only in relationship with God, and through the gifts of God.
Today’s Gospel explores a different kind of misuse of speech, in which Jesus quotes from Isaiah about people who honour God with their lips, while the state of their hearts tells a very different story. For from the human heart come all kinds of evil intentions and actions. Failing to observe traditions about ritual washing are as of nothing compares to what really defiles a person: murder, wickedness and deceit are but a quarter of Jesus’s list of human destructive behaviour. And given the damage human beings do to each other, it’s important to qualify the otherwise vital advice of Donald Nicholl and Reb Yisroel – and that is in the area of human exploitation and abuse. It is absolutely wrong that any who have been abused should be encouraged or manipulated into silence.
Having said that, from the human perspective, more than ever today, there are a multitude of ways to speak, and the idea of restraint and keeping one’s counsel is not a popular one. The divine perspective, however, offers the reticence and silence of Jesus at his trial. The human perspective seeks to use words to assert the way we want the world to be, and our own version of reality. The divine perspective offers the gift of the Spirit who leads us into all truth.
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, But words can never hurt me!’ Oh yes they can. And words can harm others too, and engender division and hatred. There is no easy solution to this, but a greater emphasis on ‘guarding your tongue’ would be goodstart! It is also true that this Sung Eucharist offers us a better way; for here we are invited to a joyful meal in which past tensions and hurts are not forgotten, but are put into a new perspective. Here we see, as our reading from James affirms, that human speech can bless as well as curse. Here, at the altar, we share in a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all humankind.
And here, we are invited into a deeper relationship with God in Christ, we find the way to the healing of our hurts and our hearts, for whatever may have been said to us in the past, here are words of love and kindness and compassion. Even the most challenging words of Christ are designed to help us to live better lives, and to come to know the joy and peace to be found in him. AMEN