“Be perfect,
therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
From the Gospel for today, the
Gospel according to
Matthew, chapter 5, verse 48.
In
the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
We have in today’s Gospel what may be the
most impossible
of Jesus’s teachings.
From not resisting evil, to not fighting
back, to settling for more than we
were sued for, to going
farther than is requested of us, to giving to everyone who
begs of us, to lending to everyone who wants to borrow from
us, to loving our
enemies, and finally, to the demand, on top
of all that, that we be perfect, as
perfect as God, we have a
list of requirements that probably no human being
except
Jesus himself has ever achieved, or even attempted.
Even the saints
were, are, likely not capable of all of these,
not all at the same time anyway.
What are we going to do with
this list of impossible requirements?
The least we can do is understand what
Jesus is saying
here, what Jesus is describing, what situation we are in
from
Jesus’s point of view. He is describing the Kingdom,
and what personal
relations would be like there. And
he’s describing what would be the state of
mind, the consciousness, the psychology of the individual
and the group, in the
Kingdom, what it takes to get there,
and what it takes to stay in it.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye
for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an
evildoer.” Jesus is here renouncing violence of any
kind. In Jesus’s earthly
life, this meant, among other
things, renouncing violence against the Roman
power.
One commentator suggests that this may have been why
Judas abandoned
Jesus; it is possible that Judas wanted
Jesus to be the nationalist Messiah
that many hoped for, and
was disappointed when Jesus would not accept the role
and its inevitable violence. Paul the Apostle affirms this
teaching of Jesus
when he writes in his Letter to the Romans,
“Do not repay anyone evil for evil,
but take thought for
what is noble in the sight of all.”
And this means renouncing economic
violence as well.
Jesus teaches us to be generous, and more than generous,
when
he says that we should settle for more than we are sued
for, and give to those
who beg from us, and lend to those
who want to borrow. The core idea here is freedom
from selfishness and abuse and exploitation and
financial manipulation of
others. The core idea, in other
words, is an economy not at all like the
economies we know
about. The cure for this is the free generosity which
Jesus
is advocating. His teaching in its literal meaning is
very radical, of course. And
we need to be reminded,
frequently, just how radical Jesus’s teaching really
is. In
our current economy it is hard, maybe even impossible, to
be so radical,
but it is possible to turn ourselves in the
direction of the free generosity
which will bring us closer
to the Kingdom.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You
shall love your
neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love
your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Well,
here it is again, another
radical injunction from Our Lord.
This is another declaration, another version,
of
Jesus’s renunciation of violence, a
variation on his
command not to resist an evildoer.
What is Jesus quoting when he says, “You
have heard
that it was said,” and so on. This is not an exact
quotation of
anything in the Scriptures, although there are
lines in Psalm 139 and in the
Book of Sirach, which
mention hatred of enemies without actually exhorting
us
to imitate the state of mind of the writers. But Jesus is
referring to
something that evidently his hearers were
familiar with, an idea common to the
time and place. And
we are familiar with it too. Hatred of enemies is a
common
attitude, a dangerous, deadly one, in tribal cultures
past and present. We see
the murderous effects of this
attitude in many places in the world today. And
it is this
tribal consciousness, or rather, tribal unconsciousness, that
Jesus
is calling us to leave behind. The “eye for an eye”
mentality, the selfishness
which motivates so much
economic activity, and mindless hatred of the other,
the
so-called ‘enemy,’ are all typical of a primitive, not fully
conscious tribal
state of mind which we are being called to
leave behind. Jesus is calling us to
a new state of being, to a
new life free of these ancient limitations, a new
life in God.
And this life we call the Kingdom.
“But I say to you, Love your enemies and
pray for those
who persecute you, so that you may be children of your
Father in
heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil
and the good.” Here Jesus
acknowledges that ancient
and perplexing problem, the problem of evil. Why does
God
allow evil to exist? Jesus’s response to the problem of evil
is to admit
its reality, and to say, “Don’t add to it.
Don’t perpetuate it. Choose the good,
even in the face of
evil.” Jesus is putting this choice before us, a choice
that is
always available to us. Choice, in other words, a choice to
free
ourselves from the primitive tribal instinct to hate the
enemy, is always
available. The choice to step out of
tribal unconsciousness is always available
to us. I know that
there are hard cases, and our world is full of them, in
which
choice appears to be between one evil and another. But
God “sends rain on
the righteous and the unrighteous.” In
other words, God’s grace is always
present, even in the
most difficult of situations. The call out of
unconsciousness
is a call to free choice, to act in a way that brings the
Kingdom a little closer.
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly
Father is perfect.”
One commentator describes this text as the most abused
text,
at least in English-speaking countries, in the whole
of the New Testament. The
problem, as we know, is that
little word “perfect.” It conjures up for us a
connotation of rectitude and righteousness which are
impossible to achieve. We
have met people, I’m sure, who
attempt this, or, worse, people who think that
they have
achieved it. We all know how inhuman, how lacking in
realism,
empathy, such an attitude can be. There is a lot of
it in many places today. In
the end, it can get a lot of people
killed, and damage the survivors. This is
not the perfection
that our text is talking about.
The Greek word behind this erroneous
translation
means something like “brought to completion” or “brought
to the end
state.” The Greek root is “telos,” “end.” We’ve all
heard the word “teleological,”
referring to the end state
of the world. When Our Lord tells us to be, like
God,
“teleios,” he is telling us to be open to the end for which
we are made,
which is life in the Kingdom. This life is
typified by freedom, the freedom to
be generous, the
freedom from an unconscious tribal mentality, freedom to
love,
freedom to choose the good. That is the perfection to
which we are called, for
which we are made.
So these impossible teachings of Our Lord
are
really descriptions, pointers to the end state, pointers
to the Kingdom. We
begin to live in the Kingdom, we
bring it a little closer, when we choose the
freedom in God
which Our Lord is putting before us. We are not to stay
in, or
revert to, the old morality, but are to choose the
morality of love, of
freedom, of life, in the Kingdom.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. (III.14. Adv.)
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