MY BIRTHDAY WORD

 The gospel passage assigned for the date of my birthday, August 16, was the story of the rich youngman (Matt 19:16-22). The rich young man, you remember, asks Jesus, "What do I still lack? (Matt. 19:20)" His question made an interesting meditation on my birthday. I reflected on this idea: God has done God's part, showering me with so many great gifts all through my life, and so whatever may be lacking to me and keeping me from being the Albert that God created me to be, will have to be supplied by me. So I made the young man's question my own:  "What do I still lack?"

"If you wish to be perfect..."

If that's the young man's question, Jesus's response begins "If you wish to be perfect..." Wait a second, now! How am I supposed to be perfect? I asked myself. Then I remembered writing about how this call to "perfection." works. The rest of this post is cobbled together from excerpts from a chapter in my book "Walking in Valleys of Darkness." 

There was this troublesome command of Jesus, “You must be perfect – just as your heavenly father is perfect" (Matt 5:48). I knew that only God was perfect, so Jesus couldn’t have been asking me to be perfect. Fine, that was what he had not meant; but then just what had he meant by his curious command? 

The problem lay with the Greek adjective teleios that was being translated as "perfect." Teleios, you see, is based on the noun telos “an end or goal,” and so actually means “having attained its end or purpose, complete.” Often in the New Testament it simply means “mature” as opposed to “immature,” as it does, say, in the verse “You need milk, not solid food…. solid food is for the mature [teleios] " (Heb 5:12-14). 

Teleios has a dynamic feel

Teleios has a dynamic feel and suggests a process of growth and development, of striving toward the goal (telos) of fullness and moral maturity. In any case there’s nothing here about a frozen state of “perfection.” 

 Look at the verses immediately preceding this sentence in the Sermon on the Mount. Evidently many Jews at the time of Christ had been ignoring the precepts laid down in Exodus concerning obligations toward foreigners and enemies and had narrowed their interpretation of the command, “love your neighbor” to include only their fellow Jews, and surely not their enemies. In the Sermon in the Mount Jesus challenges their way of thinking:

‘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, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. (Matt 5:43-45)

The heavenly Father, instead of setting limits on divine love, "makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust," and our love must imitate God’s way of loving. It is at this point that Matthew concludes with a summarizing sentence, the notorious “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” 

The command “Be teleios as your heavenly Father is teleios” urges us to keep striving to achieve our innate goal of being conformed to the image of God in us, a God who loves everyone with no limits and no conditions. The New Jerusalem Bible’s free translation of the command captures this point nicely: “You must set no bounds on your love just as your Father who is in heaven sets no bounds on his love" (Matthew 5:48 NJB).   

The command to set no bounds on my love may be very challenging, but it is neither impossible nor discouraging. It calls me to keep on striving and growing along with all of my imperfect brothers and sisters until that day when we all attain "the full stature of Christ" in heaven. It calls me to think of myself as a work in progress and to be patient with others who are likewise works in progress.

So, my birthday meditation challenged me to keep striving to be fully myself by learning to love as God loves – without boundaries. The fact that I’m sometimes not very good at it simply shows that I am not yet in heaven, where all of us will one day be perfected. I just turned 79 and I'm still here, so God is obviously not finished with me yet.