Being Whole

The Gospel for this week caused me a lot of spiritual confusion for a long time.  It was of a particularly dangerous sort.

Jesus said, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  (Mt. 5:48)  One of my particular spiritual weaknesses is perfectionism.  It can do a lot of damage.  And these words of Jesus appear at first to confirm rather than challenge that perfectionism.  They appear to suggest that perfection is something attainable if only one expends enough effort.  Fortunately along the way, I came to realize the fallacy of that. 

I had always taken perfect to mean perfect as in a moral sense.  I suspect that made me a particularly difficult person to live with.  It wasn’t doing me any good, either. 

The light went on when I realized that perfect had another meaning.  It also means whole, complete, healthy, at peace.  This is what Jesus hopes for us—wholeness more than perfection in the way we normally mean it.  It’s the Hebrew concept of shalom.

Wholeness, though, is not somehow effortless.  I’m afraid it has no small amount of hard work, too.  And that is what Jesus has been talking about in the verses leading up to what he had to say about being perfect.

For example, just before the verse about being perfect, Jesus had been teaching about love.  Loving those who love you is relatively simple.  Not all love is reciprocated, though.  Sometimes love is met with indifference; sometimes, with hatred; sometimes, with harm.  That’s when love is difficult.  But anything less than love is also less than whole.

Love is not complete in the way God’s love is complete when it discriminates even between those who are evil and those who are good, the righteous and the unrighteous.  Love cannot be whole if there are any it refuses to reach.

That’s why Jesus said, “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.”  (vv. 43-44)  Love that includes some and excludes others is necessarily incomplete.  Love that is less than all is also less than whole.  Love that holds back cannot be fully at peace.

Perfection is in loving as God loves, even when it is difficult, especially when it is difficult.  It’s not that it’s a matter of morality.  It’s that it’s a matter of being whole.

Peace,