Perfection? HA!

One thing that has struck me over the last few years in our society is how so many of our relationships are now binary - you either buy wholeheartedly everything or, basically, you’re “ghosted.” I’ve seen more and more evidence that people are actually siloing themselves into groups of people who think alike. Every year as the holidays approach, I run across stories of families that are finding ways not to meet because things are so divisive because we are moving as a culture into a more puritanical view of our expectations for ourselves and others.

I’ve thought a great deal about how much we are allowing ourselves to be separated by ideological purity tests that pretty much demand perfection in belief and/or practice as I look at the sole verse for today’s reflection. This verse, ripped out of context, has caused a great deal of angst, frustration, and surrender over the years because it seems that Jesus is demanding of his followers something that is simply impossible.

Here’s Jesus as found in Matthew 5:48:

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

There’s simply no way. None. Jesus is crazy. Who amongst us can, much less is, perfect? 

Me? I’d agree with you as well, except for one small complication…we must not rip this verse out of context. He’s spent the last 20+ verses pointing us to a life where our relationships with others are turned on their heads for he takes things that have been commonly understood for centuries and basically says, “Think again.” He has led up to this by talking through things like how our anger towards another is the equivalent of actually murdering another, how looking at another person in the wrong way is the equivalent of committing adultery, how any part of our body that causes us to sin needs to go, how the old saying about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is not what it seems, how we should love those who persecute us, and more. Then he drops this little nugget our way.

What if we consider the idea that perfection here is not about action but attitude? What if the perfection we are to pursue is about a perfect love for God that is manifest in how we look at and treat one another - even those that we might naturally think are our enemies?

You see, in all those things leading up to verse 48, what Jesus is showing us is how God loves. God loves all, period. Even (especially?) those who sin against God are loved - although it may be hard, they are loved. Jesus is also pointing us to understand that as recipients of complete, total, and unconditional love of God, love that is not in any way earned, love that is given not because of but in spite of how we love God or others.

Instead of, “Perfection? Ha!”, maybe instead we might find something truly transformative when we pursue a perfection of love towards others in the same way that God’s love is perfect towards all not because of what we or they do, but because it is God’s nature to love perfectly. It’s easy to love those who appeal to us. God shows us how perfect love is not situational or transaction but rather eternal.

Grace and Peace,
Lamar