Testing for Truth

​A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, March 2nd, 2025:
Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

---

Sirach
27.4-7

​When a sieve is shaken, the refuse appears; so do one’s faults when one speaks. The kiln tests the potter’s vessels; so the test of the just person is in tribulation.

Its fruit discloses the cultivation of a tree; so a person’s speech discloses the cultivation of the mind. Do not praise someone before they speak, for this is the way people are tested.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Now, I don’t wish to be crude, but this reflection is going to put the “scat” in “eschatological.” 


According to a reputable Bible translation site, the sieve Sirach refers to here is much like a sieve we would know – metal mesh for sifting material like grain. But the materials the ancient Hebrew people would have been sifting would have been their harvested grain, and the “refuse” here is the cow dung coming off the crops.

So, um, Sirach is literally talking about BS.

When you speak, your bubble soap shows, as it were.

It’s sort of comforting to think that BS was as much an issue in 180 BC as it is today. And it made me wonder what exactly differentiates BS from straight out lying. It seems the commonly accepted delineation is that when you lie, you are knowingly suppressing or concealing the truth. Meanwhile, when you BS, the truth is basically irrelevant – you’re just saying whatever is advantageous in that moment. If anything, you don’t know the truth, but you’re speaking as if you do; you also probably don’t intend to seek the truth in any meaningful way as soon as this act of BS has achieved your end.

So, it seems to me, the act of BSing isn’t so much the sin of lying, but the sin of cheapening  or growing lazy in the radical pursuit of truth (the Truth) we’re all called to. 

Jesus is unequivocal about His mission: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). This is why He was born. Doesn’t get much more important than that!

Our old pal Saint Augustine explains that those “who belong to the truth” are “listening with the inward ear.” That is, they have been given the grace to hear, believe, and obey God. Augustine reasons that though every person was created by truth and for truth, God isn’t going to give it to us without us asking for it. Clearly, having the truth spoken to them plainly, in their actual ears, wasn’t enough for some people.

“A man then is not of the truth, because he hears His voice, but hears His voice because he is of the truth. This grace is conferred upon him by the truth,” Augustine says.

So BSing might seem fairly innocuous (if annoying) when compared to more overt forms of deceit or cheating. But it’s a step in a very dangerous direction. For the more comfortable we get with the BSer’s “I dunno, sounded good in the moment” mindset, the less raw and urgent our hunger for the real truth gets. Then we forget to ask for the grace to hear God. And then we become one of those “not of the truth” anymore.

For all the flack that Pilate gets for his question “What is truth?” (John 18:38), at least he’s asking! Maybe he’s not so full of oxen dung as we thought.




Kate Mosher

---