Honesty matters
Drasko Dizdar*
Jesuit Seminar Series 2005
Christian Brothers College, Gregory Terrace, Brisbane
7 March 2005
It’s not all that easy to lie. It takes skill, quite a bit
of effort and stamina, and a certain kind of imagination. Just ask
anyone in public life. But it’s even harder to tell the truth
– just ask yourself. Truth can certainly be more costly; and
more mysterious: it can cost us our jobs, our reputations, our friends,
even our freedoms and our lives; and we don’t know where it
will lead us. “The Spirit,” Jesus so famously says,
“will lead you to the complete truth” (Jn 16:13), and
“the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32). Ah yes, but,
as his Roman interrogator, prosecutor and judge all rolled into
one, perhaps even more famously said, “What is ‘truth’?”
(Jn 18:38). And as for freedom … well: bound, accused, abandoned,
and about to be executed, Jesus said nothing in answer to Pilate’s
enigmatic question. Costly and mysterious, is it worth it? Is freedom
worth our being honest?
Honesty – you will note – not “absolute truth”,
or even “sincerity”, is where we’ve come to. This
evening, as part of the Jesuit Lenten Series, what I would like
to do is explore with you some thoughts on honesty and truth; and
I’d like to do it from an avowedly theological perspective
– which means one that is both limited but also therefore
focused. All that I aim to do tonight is to encourage you
to think with me about honesty from the point of view of faith.
So, let me begin with a basic theological premise: We are not absolute
beings; we are creatures: contingent, incomplete, partial, for the
simple reason that we are still very much in the process
of becoming the image and likeness of our Creator. The only truth
we are capable of incarnating, and therefore the only ultimately
meaningful truth we are capable of telling, is the honest
truth, rather than the absolute truth – and that only with
effort … or should I say “grace”?
Let me clarify my terms, before I go any further. That 2+2=4 is
true; but it has nothing to do with honesty. It is an absolute truth;
but it is hardly “an ultimately meaningful truth”. So,
when I use the term “honest truth” I am not suggesting
that there is such a thing as “dishonest truth” –
only that not all truth has to do with honesty. Some truths are
simply factual; some are sincere; some are absolute; and some are
honest. They can overlap; but they are not identical. So, what’s
an “honest truth” look like? Well, let’s see.
Telling the honest truth certainly doesn’t seem to come to
us naturally or easily. (Indeed, as child psychologists tell us,
lying to protect oneself is a sign of burgeoning intelligence. “Did
you break this?” “Noooo. It wasn’t me” or
better still, “Jimmy did it!”) What makes a truth honest
is its power to reveal what has been hidden, either deliberately
or subconsciously, from others and/or from ourselves.
Openly telling the revealing truth, the honest
truth publicly – or as the scriptures say, “declaring
things hidden since the foundation of the world” – is
not, strictly speaking, a very risky thing to do. There’s
really no “risk”: you can be sure of getting yourself
into deep trouble! The Gospel of Matthew (13:34-35) explains that
the reason Jesus teaches in parables – i.e. puzzling sayings
– is precisely that: to speak what has been muted since the
founding of the world, and to make us think about it. What the “founding
fathers” of patriarchal culture muted and covered up in their
myths, this “only begotten son” reveals; and he reveals
it by incarnating it, by showing us “in the flesh” what
happens to one who tells the truth about the world and its foundations,
about human culture and its deep hidden roots: namely, that our
world is violent and its roots feed off its victims. And how does
he do it? He becomes our victim. “Where two or three are gathered
in my name, there am I in the midst of them”; or as a Christian
Brother I knew once put it, “where two or three are gathered,
a fourth is getting fried”. Actually, it comes to the same
thing. Christ is always in our midst revealing things hidden, in
one of two ways by which we gather: in his name, or by our finding
someone to blame. Let me explain what I mean.
Some of you may be familiar with the work of Rene Girard. For those
who are not, here is a very brief introduction to one of his basic
insights: the scapegoat or single victim mechanism. Girard points
out something so obvious we have largely ignored it: human beings
bestow peace and unity upon their disunited and warring societies
by finding someone to blame. Why? Because, as complex as the myths
we spin can sometimes get, it’s easier than telling the truth
– namely, that we want what others have because we want to
be as good as or better than they are. Or as the scriptures put
it, “the devil’s envy brought death into the
world” (Wisdom 2:24). In other words, the principle
of division (the dia-bolos) generates envy, wanting what
others have; and somehow this envy is at the heart of what poisons
our relationships and our own hearts and minds – “it
brings death into the world”: it divides and pits us against
one another, even to the point of killing. I don’t know if
any of you have seen the film Romero. In it there is a scene where
the young army officer who was instrumental in having Archbishop
Oscar Romero murdered, addresses a political meeting of wealthy
Salvadorans. He says quite simply, and to rapturous applause: “All
we want is what the North Americans have.” And that wanting
is so deep it is prepared to kill those who ask “Why?”
Christ asks why. Indeed his very first words to his disciples in
John’s Gospel go to the heart of the matter: “What do
you want?” (John 1:38)
In that same Gospel he is the first parakletos, literally
the “defender”. Defender of what? Defender of our humanity
against our accuser. The Hebrew word for the accuser is
“satan”: the one who points the accusing finger of blame
at a single victim, the “scapegoat”. John also calls
Jesus “the lamb of God”, the perennial scapegoat. But
notice: it is the lamb of God, not for God: the
lamb that God provides, not demands, that God
gives into our murderous hands – because there is no other
way to break through to us, and enable us to begin to “change
our minds”. God must die before we can realise that God does
not require us to kill; that it is we who want to kill the one on
whom we load all our resentments and rivalries and frustrations.
And the utterly shocking scandal is that we Christians say: that
is precisely where God is revealed: on the cross, in the innocent
victim of human violence.
The gradual unveiling of this scandalous revelation is the actual
context for those more benign-sounding words with which we began
– about the Spirit leading us to the complete truth. Let me
quote the passage in full:
“Because I have said this to you, grief has filled your
hearts. Nevertheless I tell you the truth:
it is for your sake that I must ‘go away’ [to
his death]
for if I do not go, the Defender cannot come to you;
but if I go, I will send him to you.
And when he comes,
he will correct the world about sin
and about righteousness [or “justice”]
and about judgment:
about sin: in that they do not believe in me [or “trust
me”];
about righteousness: in that I go to the Father, and you will
see me no more;
about judgment: in that the prince of this world is judged.
I have yet much to tell you,
but you cannot bear it now.
When he comes
– the Spirit of truth –
he will lead you into all the truth...” (John
16:7-13)
We thought sin was something that divides and separates us from
God; whereas it is in fact, from God’s perspective, only a
failure of nerve on our part in accepting mercy, in trusting Christ,
in recognising that for God sin is “that which can be forgiven”
(James Alison). We thought righteousness, or justice, was something
we had, or did, to justify ourselves and keep God happy; whereas
it is in fact, from God’s point of view, what God does for
us in Christ’s self-giving, thus bringing us into right and
just relationship with God and each other. We thought judgment was
something God imposed from above by way of punishment; only to find
Jesus undoing the abuse of power from within, as our victim, or
as he so startlingly put it, “because the princ(ipl)e of this
world is already judged,” (Jn 16:11) the accusatory, “satanic”,
principle by which this world passes judgement on those it blames
for its own violence and fragmentation in order to bestow upon itself
the peace and the unity that the world gives. You know the kind
of peace I mean: the peace we give ourselves when we gang up against
someone else, be it Saddam Hussein, George Bush, John Howard, the
Pope or the woman next door.
This “revelation” is the honest truth that Christ tells
us even if it does “fill our hearts with grief”, even
if it does feel like “too much to bear”. Why? Because
the honest truth is a discovery, not a possession: it is something
we must be led into as it comes towards us with mercy and compassion,
opening up a space of freedom in which we, too, can learn to become
honest and face the uncomfortable truth about ourselves.
Clearly, that doesn’t mean then that we cease to ask probing
and uncomfortable questions. It simply means that we no longer hide
our accusatory gesture by calling it “critique”. Instead,
we allow ourselves to be critiqued as we find ourselves set free
from blame and the impulse to blame. After all, that is exactly
what Jesus and all the Hebrew prophets did.
The prophets are those who tell us the truth, not about some other
people, but about us – and I don’t just mean individually,
but collectively. Which is why we don’t like them.
Which is why we don’t elect them. And expecting elected leaders
to tell us the truth about ourselves is naïve and self-deceiving.
We don’t want them to. Who’s going to vote
for an Amos or a Jeremiah or even a Micah, much less for someone
like Jesus? “Listen to this, you fat cows of Bashan, living
on the hills of Samaria, exploiting the weak and ill-treating the
poor, saying to your husbands, ‘Give me a drink!’”
(Amos 4:1) Vote ONE for me! Yeah, right! “Alas for
you, you scribes and Pharisees” – you learned and elite,
you politically correct and self-righteous – “you hypocrites:
you build the shrines of the prophets and decorate the monuments
of the upright, saying, ‘We would never have joined in shedding
the blood of the prophets had we lived in the days of our ancestors.’
Indeed! Your own evidence testifies against you! You are the heirs
of those who murdered the prophets! Very well then, come, finish
off the work your ancestors began!” (Matthew 23:29-32)
And while you’re about it, elect me as your next prime minister.
No. If we can’t be honest with ourselves how can we expect
those we elect to public office to be honest with us? We don’t
even want them to be honest. We may want them to be “sincere”;
and we certainly want them to tell us what we want to hear. I’m
quite sure those who lied to us about children over-board are sincere
in their desire to keep our shores “safe” from “undesirables”,
and when they do sneak in, lock them up in concentration camps;
and I’m equally sure they were returned in the last two elections
with an increased majority because that’s what we, as a nation,
want, too.
Honesty is not to be confused with sincerity. When I am sincere
I believe that I am telling the truth. And I feel that I am justified
by this belief. In other words, I become self-righteousness. It’s
what a certain “justification by faith” can look like:
“I believed that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction”;
“that no apology is necessary to the indigenous peoples”;
“that women can’t be priests”; “that
all priests are paedophiles”; “that all paedophiles
are monsters”; etcetera… “Surely our sincerity
is enough? Surely it justified us in our actions?” Is it?
Did it? I don’t think so.
But if sincerity is prone to self-righteousness, dogmatically “holding
fast to the truth” is surely not the answer to it. Holding
fast to objective truths in the face of subjective inability to
live up to them is no closer to the discovery of who we really are,
than are sincerely believed delusions. Let me give you an example
of what I mean. The conventional image of the ideal Roman cleric
was that of “a lion in the pulpit and a lamb in the confessional”:
absolutely rigid in adherence to church teaching on faith and morals
in public, and absolutely merciful and tolerant with those who could
not live up to them in private. Proclaiming loudly “No to
the Pill!” while turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to clerical
“lapses” of all kinds. Those days are over.
Why? Because we, as church, are beginning to discover a new and
rather scary place of freedom opening up before us. Because, we,
as church, are being led into that space which until now was, frankly,
“too much for us to bear”: a place of ambiguity, of
complexity, of paradox. In other words: a place of greater maturity.
We are growing up. No longer children prepared to be told what to
think and how to act and what to be by our “holy fathers”.
I know that our topic tonight is “honesty in public life”.
But, in the end, I don’t really care to stand here and tell
you what a liar this or that politician or clerical hierarch or
fat- cat business tycoon is. Nor do I want to tell you how I think
they should and can clean up their act. I don’t even want
to play the prophet and tell you what self-deceiving liars you are.
The really costly and honest truth is that I’m a liar, and
I’m caught in a complex web of lies, injustice, resentment
and inertia we call our “culture”, our “society”,
what the Gospel of John calls “the world”. When I bank
my salary and buy my petrol and veg-out in front of the idiot box
and watch channel nine news I don’t do it because I want honesty,
I do it because I’m imitating the rest of you – and
so are you.
And yet, here we are tonight. Why? Could it be because, in some
way, to some extent, however small or big, we’re being set
free from that web, from that culture of deceit, from Packer-world
and Murdochville? I want to imitate someone else, someone free,
someone honest. I know it’s difficult. I know it costs. It
cost him everything – not just his job and his reputation,
but his friends and even his life. But not his freedom.
And even though I’m not all that sure who he is or what that
means, I wouldn’t have come here tonight if I were totally
untouched by this other possibility opening up before us, this “freedom”
that he offers us freely. And I see I’m not alone.
At least, I hope I’m not. Am I?
* Dr Drasko Dizdar is a lecturer at the Australian Catholic
University.
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