The Evil in Promising by What We Can't Control

Mat 5:37 But let your word be, Yes, yes; No, no: for anything more than this is evil.

Christ ends his section on swearing oaths by saying that we must just say, "yes, we will," or "no, we won't," and leave it at that. The question is: why is it evil to do more than this? It is foolish, perhaps, but why is it evil? Or, going back to the Greek, why is it ek poneros, "of evil?"

These are the kinds of questions that are the most interesting in studying Christ's words. They get to the heart of his view of the world. As we study them, we find that his thinking wasn't impossible to understand. Even though his statements have multiple good interpretations, all these interpretations together paint a consistent view of the nature of reality that we find nowhere else in literature.

One interpretation of this line is that we make oaths because we are motivated to take oaths by our own doubts about our ability to fulfill them. Like a salesperson that uses the word "honestly" most often when he isn't telling the truth, the offering of an oath to support our words is in itself evidence of our own doubts. The "evil" that Christ is referring to is our own doubts.

On another level, this line is also a warning to us about our need to suspect deception from others. Words are just words. When people swear, it doesn't prove anything about their honesty. As a matter of fact, it should make us suspect their honest.

However, on a deeper level, the true evil here is a mistaken viewpoint of reality. From our viewpoint, we are the most important person in the world. Perspective means that everything close to us is big and everything far away is small. We are the only consciousness we are directly aware of. From our own unique perspective, we are each the center of the universe.

From this perspective, it is easy to swear on other thing in the universe that we have no control over. What right do we have to swear on heaven or earth, anyway? We don't control heaven or earth and our swearing doesn't affect either. As Christ points out, we really aren't even in control of the hairs on our own head. This sense of control is false, coming from our false sense of universal self-importance.

So what Christ is telling us here is that an objective reality exists. We do not control it. It is wrong and evil to think that reality is a subjective experience. When we do this, we raise ourselves up to the level of God, the true center of the universe and the true seat of consciousness.