To Be-lie the Truth.

“If you were raised with Christ . . .”

“Stop lying to one another.” Even in a strongly worded passage, this imperative leaps off the page. “Stop lying to one another.”

There are many important reasons to call for an end to lying. It sows division, it causes confusion, it undercuts community. For the one who lies, it is personally destabilizing; the one who lies begins a cycle that feeds on itself.

Sometimes it seems we cannot help lying—the truth will hurt us, or it will hurt someone else. The child who is constantly criticized has no recourse except to lie, even if certain he will be found out. In the limited horizon of this child or teen, the truth has no purchase; it is impossible to bear. Conversely, in adulthood, lying to ourselves may seem like the right thing to do. It is the only way to keep going. And the mark of adulthood, if nothing else, is to keep going. But the endurance itself becomes a lie. We only seem to endure; we are in fact eating the seed corn of our integrity.

The author of Colossians has an even more profound point: lying ignores who we, who have taken on the Christian life, really are. To lie is to be-lie the truth of our new creation. And in that lie, our vision is so warped that we do not so much deceive others as we do not see them at all, viewing them only through categories that deny their humanity.

Lying seems like a strategy for “reality.” In fact, it is a denial of that which is most real: the cleansing fire that renews our lives, our community, and all creation in Christ.

Nancy Dallavalle. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Nancy Dallavalle is associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.