Matthew 5:48
Third Sunday in
Lent
When I was a boy I believed that God
expected me to be perfect. I’m not sure how I came to think this this way, but
it emerged early in my life. I’ve spent a lot of time and money over the years
in psychotherapy and analysis trying to get at the source of this idea, to
understand it. A child’s image of God is often shaped by parental
relationships. My parents weren’t authoritarian or unusually demanding. I have no memory of them ever saying to me, “Kenny,
you have to be perfect.” I never felt I had to measure up to high, unrealistic
expectations. But this feeling, this thought was there. God wants me to be perfect, perfectly good. Errors, faults, mistakes were
unacceptable. God will judge me every
time I miss the mark. That’s what sin is, as I learned in church school; to sin
is to miss the mark. It’s an old archery term for missing the bullseye, for missing
the “gold” at the center of a target. To miss the target is to sin. I had a
very legalistic view of God and the world, and a moralistic view of
Christianity. A Christian must follow
the rules, never mess up. I remember boasting to a friend, I was around 11
years old, that I had kept all Ten Commandments, that I never broke one. That’s
what I thought it meant to be a Christian. Following the rules. Being a good
boy. Pleasing people, pleasing God by never making a mistake.
Such a fool. How naïve. Sad, really, to be
burdened with this kind of expectation.And then I read in my Bible, “Be
perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." There it is: I must be perfect—the Bible tells me so. To a child there’s nothing ambiguous about
the word “perfect.” I knew it meant never making mistakes, being
morally upright, pure, sinless, beyond reproach. The hearing of this verse distorted a lot
of things. It hindered my ability to
hear anything about God’s love. I had no understanding of grace. Looking back
now, I see that my psyche coopted this text and then used it to reinforce,
justify, even “sanctified” my skewed perspective of things.
Looking back now at age 55, I wish I knew
then what I know now, that there is nothing holy about living this way. Today, I can’t go back and change anything,
and, contra Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), there are limits to how much we can
discern about the origins of our personalities. Sometimes it doesn’t help to
know the cause or try to issue blame. I agree with Carl Jung (1875-1961), who
questioned Freud’s approach; today I know that that kind of thinking doesn’t always
serve me. Instead, I’ve come to see that
my wrestling with these issues is part of my life-task, it’s the summons of my
soul, it’s the call of the Spirit. This struggle has shaped my personal and
theological development and growth as a pastor—especially when people expect
pastors to be perfect.
I have come to see that the desire
to be perfect, as well as expecting others to be perfect, and perfectionism
itself, are often masks for a deeper anxiety.
I have come to believe that there’s nothing holy or sacred or even “Christian”
about being perfect—it might be anti-Christian, even anti-Christ. A lot of
damage has been done by imposing this expectation on God’s people. I agree with writer and fellow-Presbyterian,
Anne Lamott. “Perfectionism,” she said,
“is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you
cramped and insane your whole life, ....”[1]
“Perfectionism is not the same thing has striving to be your best. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. It’s a shield. It’s a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from flight.” [2]
“Perfectionism is not the same thing has striving to be your best. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. It’s a shield. It’s a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from flight.” [2]
So what do we do with this verse? Do we cut it out from
the Sermon of the Mount, like Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who took a scissor
to the passages in the Gospels that he didn’t like? It’s known as The Jefferson Bible
(1820). He cut out all the miracle
stories, the birth stories, the resurrection accounts. Should we just ignore this verse? Did Jesus
get this wrong? Are you going to tell him he got it wrong? Should we really expect
Jesus to be a psychologist?
Maybe.
In fact, what if Jesus was, psychologically-speaking,
very astute? And what if this verse has
nothing to do with perfection? And what if the word “perfect” is a terrible
translation of what is, in fact, there in the Greek?
I can’t tell you how liberating it was for me to learn,
when I in seminary and read this text in Greek, that “perfect” is a poor rendering
of what’s in this verse! The word “perfect” doesn’t fully reflect the richness
of the Greek word in the text. And that word—that beautiful word—is teleios. Teleios is an adjective derived from the Greek word telos, meaning “end” or “purpose” or
“goal” or “fulfilment” or “realization” or “fully grown” or “complete”—and only
in this sense does it mean perfect, as in lacking nothing.
Teleios, the adjectival form of telos,
doesn’t mean moral perfection, but describes completeness, or living an
undivided life. Or, better, teleios
means—and this is what matters most—wholeness.
Jesus is not saying, “be perfect,” he’s calling his disciples and the crowd, he’s
summoning us to follow in his way, the way of wholeness and wholeheartedness, a
life of greater integrity.
When Jesus said, “Be teleios,
therefore, even as your heavenly Father is teleios,”
the crowd would have heard echoes of what God said in the Hebrew scriptures,
“You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2; 20:26). The
call to teleios-ity found throughout
the Sermon on the Mount is essentially the same call to be holy, and holiness
does not mean moral perfection, but wholehearted orientation toward God.[3]
As we have seen the past two weeks, the Sermon on the
Mount is a call to human flourishing. Our text, Matthew 5:48, is a summation of
everything that comes before it. Jesus wants for us what God wants for us, and
what God wants for us is to be whole, with hearts that are in the right place. The heart is
more than an organ that pumps blood through our bodies. In first century
Judaism, the heart symbolized the totality of one’s being, the total self, all
that we are: thought, feeling, and action. Jesus
is concerned about the health of our hearts.
To be whole means that our inner life is aligned with our outer life.
Jesus summons us to be whole and complete, just as God is whole and
complete—for how can God not be whole?
God’s heart is not divided, but whole in its desire to love and to save.
Jesus invites us to live out our end or purpose, just as God fully lives out
God’s end or purpose. Just as God is undivided in God’s intention to love, so
Jesus summons us to live undivided in our intention to love. The call to wholeness is essentially a call
to integrity. Jesus doesn’t want us to
be at odds or at war with different parts of ourselves. He knows the dangers of
living with a divided heart.
When Jesus judges the practices of the Pharisees in Matthew’s Gospel
he’s not judging or rejecting Judaism—Jesus remained a Jew throughout his life
and he certainly wasn’t Christian. However, Jesus was troubled by the way many were
practicing their faith, living out the requirements of the Jewish Law in an
obsession with external obedience, purity, and ritual cleanliness. It was too
one-sided; they were preoccupied with outward behaviour, outward religious
piety and practice. What about the inner life?
What about the heart? That’s
why Jesus calls the Pharisees white-washed tombs. On the outside, they look pure and holy, but on the inside,
they’re rotting away (Mt. 23:27).
It’s in love
that Jesus said this to the Pharisees, it’s love that Jesus speaks to the crowd
listening to the Sermon, because he knows what happens when we live divided
lives. Having a disordered, divided heart is extremely dangerous, it’s destructive—for
oneself and for the wider society. And it makes one neurotic. Neurosis is
essentially a split in the soul where we are at odds with ourselves, when our
inner and outer lives are not aligned, or when we are at odds with different
parts of ourselves. Living a divided
life makes us sick—as I painfully know in my own life.
Living a divided life is costly. We might be
righteous (or appear to be so) on the outside, but inside we’re seething with
hate and jealously. We might act in ways that appear kind, loving, and just and
nice in the church or community, but inside we’re full of rage, judgment, and self-loathing
toward our neighbour or toward ourselves. We might appear “holy” or “religious”
or “devout” or “Christian,” but inside we’re an anxious sea of conflict and confusion.
The result is a split in our personality, a split in the heart, a lack of
integrity. We Christians say we value grace and compassion, but do we extend
the same grace and compassion toward ourselves? And if w don’t—there’s the
split, there’s the division.
What about “in here,” in us? What about the heart? Jesus wants us to view our lives holistically. This,
for me, is the Christian life, and it’s the work of a lifetime. Jesus wants us to live whole lives, where our
inner life is in harmony with our outer life. And when the inner and outer parts
of our lives are whole, when we have moments, glimpses of that happening in us,
when we sense that our hearts are aligned with the heart of God—do you know
what happens then? The doors of the kingdom fling open wide before our eyes,
and we discover we’re in new and wondrous place; we are standing on holy ground! That’s teleios! That’s when we discover what a flourishing life looks like and feels like. But woe to
us when our hearts are divided, when are hearts are not behind our actions, when
we lack intention, when our hearts are not aligned with God’s vision for us,
when our actions do not flow from the heart. “Where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also” (Mt. 6:21).
The only other place in Matthew’s Gospel where we find the word
“perfect” or teleios is in Matthew
19. It’s the story of the young man who
went to Jesus asking, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?”
(Mt. 19:16). Jesus tells him to keep the commandments. The young man says, “I
have all kept all these; what do I still lack?” Then Jesus goes straight to the
heart of the matter. “If you wish to be perfect,” Jesus said, “go,
sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have
treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt. 19:21). Note that the young man
never asked to be perfect, but Jesus knew what his problem was. Jesus knew what
was missing in his life. Jesus said, “If you want to be teleios”—if you want to be whole—“go sell your possessions, and
give the money to the poor….”
Given the way things turned
out for the man, we might think this is a warning against materialism, against
accumulating things, and having wealth. It’s not. Yes,
there is a danger when an obsession with things and wealth takes over our
lives. This might have been
the case for the man, we don’t know. Jesus does go on to say, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich
person to enter the kingdom of heaven…it is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God”
(Mt. 19:23-24). Jesus says
this, not because being rich or having wealth is necessarily bad or evil. The issue,
as Jesus knew, is that many rich and wealthy people have a heart problem. The problem for the young man was not that his heart
was, like the Grinch, “two sizes too small.” It wasn’t a question of size. There’s a deeper issue. He had a divided heart. It was split.
Jesus was a great psychologist—a true physician of
the soul. He knew what our souls long for,
he knew what calls us to life, and he knew what we crave: we were born to be
whole. It was psychologist Carl Jung, who
stood in the shadow cast by the brilliance of Christ, who said, “Wholeness is
not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the
contraries.”[4]
We could also say Jesus was a great cardiologist
because he came to heal our divided, broken hearts, to lead us toward wholeness,
toward a life that is flourishing in the Kingdom. “Flourishing are the pure in heart because
they will see God” (Mt. 5:8).
Jesus doesn’t expect us to be perfect, but whole, one, complete. I’m not
called to be perfect—which is gospel, good news for my soul. Jesus wants me to
be whole; he has shown me and given me a still more excellent way.
God wants us to be whole, and shows us the way to live wholeheartedly.
And then can live the way we really want to live, giving all of ourselves, not
part of ourselves, all of ourselves to the faithful living out of our lives—with
joy, with integrity, with single-hearted
devotion, and a passion for God’s kingdom!
So, may this, then, be our prayer as we follow Christ:
Give me a whole heart, O God, an undivided heart.
Make me whole.
* * *
This sermon is part of a six-week Lenten series:
Following Jesus: The Sermon on the Mount
March 10: Are You Flourishing?
March 17: Becoming Salt & Light
March 24: Wholeness, Not Perfection
March 31: Matters of the Heart
* * *
This sermon is part of a six-week Lenten series:
Following Jesus: The Sermon on the Mount
March 10: Are You Flourishing?
March 17: Becoming Salt & Light
March 24: Wholeness, Not Perfection
March 31: Matters of the Heart
Image: Kintsugi "golden joinery" pottery, a Japanese art form in which breaks and repairs are treated as part of the object's history.
[1] Ann Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing
and Life (Anchor, 1995), 28
[2]Brené Brown, Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are (Hazelden Publishing, 2010), 56.
[3] Jonathan T. Pennington, The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 78. I am grateful to Pennington’s excellent exposition on teleios, and the centrality of wholeness as a theme running through the Sermon on the Mount, 69ff.
[2]Brené Brown, Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are (Hazelden Publishing, 2010), 56.
[3] Jonathan T. Pennington, The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 78. I am grateful to Pennington’s excellent exposition on teleios, and the centrality of wholeness as a theme running through the Sermon on the Mount, 69ff.
[4] Parker J. Palmer, who was
influenced by Jung, makes a similar claim: “Wholeness does not mean perfection;
it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an
Undivided Life (Jossey-Bass, 2004)
