PLAYING WITH FALSEHOOD AND FORFEITING THE RIGHT TO TRUTH
Dag Hammarskjold was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 until his death in a 1961 plane crash while trying to resolve the Congo Crisis. Hammarskjold is remembered for his efforts to ease tensions between Israelis and Arabs following the establishment of modern Israel in 1948. He also was instrumental in resolving the 1956 Suez Conflict or Second Arab-Israeli War. Hammarskjold was also a deeply spiritual person. He established a “meditation room” in the United Nations headquarters because, he said, the UN was dedicated to peace and therefore “should have one room…. where the doors may be open to the infinite lands of thought and prayer.”
After his death, portions of Hammarskjold’s spiritual journal were published in a book titled Markings. In one of his journal entries, he wrote:
You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.
How we speak, Hammarskjold suggests, is a good barometer of our heart. Jesus likewise concludes that “good persons out of the good treasure of their hearts produce good, and evil persons out of their evil treasure produce evil, for out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths speak.” (Luke 6:45). Words are not neutral; they reflect either good or evil. What we say matters. Civility, respect, and truthfulness are not simply “nice” things to have; and their absence is not something we can simply excuse or ignore. Words and speech reflect character, integrity, and honesty. Or their absence.
Speech that is cruel or knowingly laced with falsehoods and distorted half-truths has negative consequences. It can harm people and societies. A few weeks ago, violent riots broke out in the United Kingdom after social media sources falsely posted disinformation on X/Twitter that blamed an immigrant for the murder of three children in Southport, England. This disinformation sparked attacks on mosques and immigrant centers across the whole country. Yet the attacker, when his identity was finally revealed, was born in Wales and not an immigrant at all. Nonetheless shops and offices were burned, innocent people threatened, and lives turned upside-down.
But it’s not just others or society as a whole who can suffer from someone’s cruel or untrue words. Harm falls also on the one who tongue utters cruel or false or demeaning words. When I was a child, I remember the doctor asking me to stick out my tongue during my annual medical exam. He believed that looking at my tongue would reveal something about my health. Both in contemporary Western and traditional Asian medicine the tongue is an important indicator of what is happening inside our bodies. A bright red tongue suggests possible infection; a pale tongue can indicate poor circulation. If our tongues reveal something about our inner, physical health, then the same relationship might exist between the kind of speech a society encourages or tolerates and its social health. One might conclude that we are an unhealthy society because public figures and social influencers are often very careless about what rolls off their tongues and then finds its way into public discourse. To borrow Hammarskjold’s metaphor, we are a people who want a tidy garden while also being content to reserve a certain plot for weeds. Unfortunately, we forget that weeds have an unpleasant habit of spreading into places where they are not wanted and crowding out more valuable and beautiful plants.
Our tolerance for false, coarse, or cruel speech stands in sharp contrast to the attitude of the earliest Christians. In the Book of James, the author warns that the tongue is an instrument of extraordinary power, out of all proportion to its size. Its most significant connection is to the heart — whether hardened by sin or recreated by grace. “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell.” (James 3:5b-6) Or as the author of Ephesians writes, “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear,” (Ephesians 4:29).
In 1723, a young Jonathan Edwards began his ministry serving the Congregational Church in Windsor CT. He would go on to serve the Congregational Church in Northampton MA and eventually became a significant figure in American church history and theology. As he began his public life as minister in 1723, he drew up a set of “resolutions” to guide his life. One of them reads, “Resolved. Never to say anything at all against anybody, but when it is perfectly agreeable to the highest degree of Christian honor, and of love to [humankind], agreeable to the lowest humility, and sense of my own faults and failings, and agreeable to the golden rule…” Dag Hammarskjold would undoubtedly have approved of Jonathan Edwards’ resolution.
So should we. We are living in a time when our public speech is laced with outright falsehoods and expressions of disdain or cruelty toward others. Gradually we have normalized such speech and the habits of the heart that lie behind it. Having ceased to be shocked by it, we have failed to grasp what consequences for the common good and for our individual well-being such habits can engender. We would all do well to be guided by the wise counsel of figures as diverse as Jonathan Edwards and Dag Hammarskjold, both of whom were deeply shaped by Jesus’ teachings and by the early church’s guidance on the importance of managing our tongues. As the author of Colossians counsels, “let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.” (4:6)
Blessings,
Pastor Thomas