Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly
Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)
We use the word
“perfect” in all sorts of ways, don’t we?
Sometimes we mean “excellent,” or “great,” or “Just what I wanted or
needed.”
On the other hand, we
are often quick to say, “nobody’s perfect,” or “only God is perfect.” And we know instinctively that is right. Perfection may be something for which we
strive, but only the most arrogant among us would ever say that they have
arrived at the destination of perfection.
Yet here it is: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is
perfect.” If only Jesus had said “Strive
for perfection, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” But he simply said “be.” What do we do with
that, other than ignore it?
Well, it turns out that
the Greek word here translated as “perfect” is just as slippery in meaning as
the English word is. Telios (τέλιος) is sometimes translated as “whole,” as doing the
“whole” will of God, or “unblemished,” as in the kind of sacrifice God
requires, or “undivided or unrestricted” in regards to God’s love, and, yes, it
can mean “perfect.”
Now wouldn’t it be
interesting if a modern-day translation translated verse 48 as
Be whole as your heavenly Father is
whole.”
What would that mean?
To try to answer that
question, let’s look at the context, because this is one of those verses of
Scripture that can be misunderstood or even dangerous if you take it out of its
context.
We are in the middle of
the Sermon on the Mount. Earlier Jesus
has said that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.
(5:17) Ah, right there, the Greek
concept of fulfill and the Greek concept of perfect have something to do with
each other, and actually that statement and the “Be perfect…” statement are
bookends to his argument.
Having said that he came
not to abolish the law, Jesus goes on to give examples of what he means by
“fulfilling” it. Each one starts,
You have heard that it was said…but I
say to you…
He does this six times; we only have the last two this morning, but
it’s enough with which to work, in fact, let’s just take the last one.
You have heard it was said, “You shall
love your neighbors and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you, so you may be children of your Father in
heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain
on the righteous and the unrighteous.
What is normal behavior
for human beings, for you and for me?
Love those who love me, or at least for whom I have respect, and have as
little to do as possible with those who trouble me. We would not want to go so far as to say
“hate them,” but Jesus is here to tell us that anything less than love is hate.
Most of the people Jesus
was talking to at the time, and, I dare say, most of the people I am talking to
here at this time (including myself) would have agreed with the proposition
that God loves those who love him and hates evildoers, you know, the really bad
ones.
No, Jesus says, you are
quite wrong. Turn what you think about God upside-down. God does not treat the good and the evil
differently. And he wants us to see that
to fulfill God’s desire for us, we have to love our enemies as ourselves and
seek the good of those who persecute us.
That, Jesus says, is how
God is perfect, by loving in an undivided, unrestricted way.
That is hard for us,
extraordinarily hard. It is neither our
instinct or, by and large, how we have been nurtured. In truth, when I contemplate it, I cannot see
how it even works.
But “how it works” is
clearly not important to God. How did loving
his enemies as much as his friends work for Jesus? It got him taken advantage of, betrayed, and
murdered by his enemies.
It is the rather bizarre
Christian story that the perfection of God is shown in the failure of God. And we cannot get away from this by quickly
jumping to the resurrection. The
resurrection does not undo this bizarre upside-down perfection of God, it, to
borrow a word from Jesus, fulfills it.
Remember the risen Christ eternally bears the wounds of his humiliation,
so that the failure can never be forgotten.
St. Paul remembers a
time when Jesus himself spoke to him this simple truth. In 2 Corinthians,
chapter 12,
…but [the Lord] said to me, “My grace is
sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
So what does this mean
for our daily living?
First of all, for
perfectionists like me, I have to let the testimony of Jesus completely undo my
sense of how God and the world works. I
have to resist the mighty temptation to seek God only in my victories or
successes, but to be ready to be found by God in my losses and failures, and,
in the end, it is thus being found that is important.
Second of all, our
awareness of the dangers of human notions of perfection, might open up in us
the chance to listen to those who differ from us. In our current political climate, there may
be nothing so important. But it is
equally true for our daily relationships, particularly with people who rub us
the wrong way, or who do or think things that we find troubling or even repugnant.
We are encouraged in
this world to think of those with whom we differ as foes whose dangerous ideas
must be defeated. And they must be
defeated because only we know the way that is perfect, or at least great.
The way of God, however,
which we are called to walk, is for our enemies to be the object of our love,
which I think at the very least means to stay in relationship with them,
because the love of God is stronger than any political ideology, or, indeed,
anything that separates us one from another.
In the end, being
perfect like God is perfect, is being
whole as God is whole, committed to the wholeness in which we are all held in
spite of our sin, our differences of opinion, our failures, or anything else
that seems to separate us one from another in this world.
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