The Benefit of the Doubt is a Greater Benefit to Give

I was going through piles of news items the other day about the financial crisis besetting the world. The picture being painted was growing dismally depressing with each news item when comic relief injected itself through the following item I read:

“The financial crisis has reached unprecedented proportions. In spite of continuous clamor from employees for more benefits, companies across the country are saying that the only benefit they can guarantee to give at this point is the benefit of the doubt.”

It distracted me from my train of thought but as I pondered on this nugget of humor, I realized that the “benefit of the doubt” is something that we might summarily dismiss in the course of daily human interaction but which in fact can be an important aspect of Christian personal relationships.

Gossip for one, can be greatly averted if people would just take an extra layer of perseverance in exercising Christian charity by extending the “benefit of the doubt” to their neighbor. Unfortunately, when a juicy bit of conversation floats within our radar of consciousness, human frailty makes it so much easier to believe the bad being said about our neighbor. Sometimes it becomes even more tempting to embellish the item a bit and make it an even juicier conversation piece and make the passing of it more compelling.

When we hear something bad about another person and especially if previously we already have an initial bad impression about him, we can easily fall prey to accepting the bad being said about him as a justification of our own initial assessment. We feel vindicated about our initial feelings and rush headlong into acquiring secondary evidence as our own truth.

Giving the benefit of the doubt requires a temporary suspension of judgment in the face of a unilateral presentation of supposed evidence. It requires the assumption of what is best about our neighbor and the presumption of his innocence amidst the absence of a personal knowledge on our part regarding the bad thing that is being said about him. It necessitates putting our self in our neighbor’s shoes and realizing that we would not want judgment rendered unto us without hearing our side.

The “benefit of the doubt” is a good exercise in Christian charity because it does not benefit the recipient only but the giver as well. If we were to assume a posture of rash judgment and rush headlong into a conclusion of guilt purely on what was passed on to us, we run the risk of being guilty of slander and ending up being the one in sin.

To immediately believe what we hear and more gravely, passing it on to others in the guise of looking after their welfare because we would not want them to be “caught unaware” can become an occasion of sin against the eighth commandment. An unverified accusation against our neighbor can very well become a “bearing of false witness” against them. In his book “The Faith Explained”, author Leo Trese reminds us that “there are many other ways besides slander in which we can sin against the virtue of truthfulness and against charity in speech and action.” It may perhaps be a "careless whisper" of a different kind but potentially of an even more dangerous nature.

Christian charity requires the exercise of cautious restraint in the way we conduct ourselves in our personal relationships. One such area where this can be achieved is to always be ready to give the benefit of the doubt to our neighbor. It does not only benefit our neighbor but as the giver of the benefit, we benefit from it as well.

PRAYER:
Almighty God, may our quest for the exercise of true Christian charity bring us to a realization that we should always be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to our neighbor. No matter how seemingly sure we may be of our “facts”, may we be always reminded that our “facts” may be tainted by our own prejudices and biases. Help us to restrain ourselves from being a party to the destruction of our neighbor’s reputation by becoming an unwitting conduit in the passing of malicious rumor. Always remind us that if there is nothing good to say about others, then it may be to our best conduct that we very well say nothing at all.

Amen.