“Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” -Matt. 5:48This command of Jesus has often produced in me a sinking feeling of discouragement.
Me? Perfect? C’mon, Jesus -- you know me better than that.
It seems an impossible command.
Then I begin to wonder: would Jesus ask something impossible of me?
There becomes a temptation to qualify his words. Well, maybe he meant “try” to be perfect, or “strive” for perfection.
But that’s not what he said. The words of Thomas Aquinas (translated by G. M. Hopkins) come to mind here: “What God's Son has told me, take for truth I do; Truth Himself speaks truly or there's nothing true.” Now, certainly there are certain things that Jesus said that we can wonder about. When He says that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, we can wonder what He means by that. There is a wealth of fruitful interpretations of parables.
In this case, though, coming at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for interpretation. And any attempt to dilute the text feels uncomfortably like eisigesis, imposing my own meaning on Jesus’ words in order to make them more comfortable for me to hear.
My hearing of this Scripture totally changed this summer when I heard it presented during my Catechesis of the Good Shepherd training.1 In one type of lesson, a saying of Jesus (called a maxim) is presented and reflected upon. The second maxim given in the schedule of presentations is “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” One of the first questions our instructor asked after reading the above maxim was, “have you ever been perfect?” My first response in my head was, “no, of course not,” but someone else chimed in, “yes--at our Baptism!”
WOAH. Of course! Now, it certainly wasn’t a revelation to me that we become perfect at our Baptism, that we are totally cleansed of original and committed sin, that we become a new creation in Christ. But I had never before connected this reality with Jesus’ command about perfection.
Maybe I’ve been approaching this passage wrong all along. Maybe the perfection Jesus is calling me to is not something that I achieve if I work really, really hard. Maybe, rather, this perfection is a gift that I receive, not through my own effort, but through the Lord’s totally gratuitous love. Maybe the perfection does not originate in my own merit, but is completely received from the One Who perfects all things.
And being a part of the Body of Christ, I am, already, a “saint” in a true, though yet imperfectly realized way. 2 The Church is, paradoxically, both unfailingly holy and constantly being sanctified. I think what I too often forget is that this process of sanctification is not a work of man, but wholly a work of grace.
With our culture’s constant emphasis on doing, there is an impoverished sense of being and receiving. There is a tendency to think that everything rests on our shoulders and that the work of our salvation is something we have to do. Perhaps the only doing we need is to become what we are.
1 I’ve written about CGS previously on this blog. You can also get more information about it here.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment