Sermon: 3rd Sunday before Lent 2011 ......."Be perfect"
Matthew 5.38-48 "........Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
"Be perfect" Jesus says.
What a terrible thing to say! I
hope none of you teach your children or grandchildren that they have to be
perfect. You don’t send them out to
school in the morning saying get 100% in all your tests, or don’t bother coming
back. Good parents make their children
know that they are loved and accepted for who they are, and that they will still be loved even when they foul
up. I hope none of you thinks that your
main goal in life should be to avoid making mistakes, because that is a
terrible waste of time and energy. If
you try to be perfect in that sense, you are going to miss out on a lot of
life, because so much of life is messy, unpredictable, imperfect and a lot of
people are messy, unpredictable and imperfect.
Look around you or look in front of you and you will see what I
mean. To live sanely and abundantly we
have to come to terms with the imperfections in ourselves and in others.
So why does Jesus say be perfect? The simple answer is he doesn’t.
Our Gospel this morning is again taken from the sermon on the mount,
that great compendium of Jesus’s teaching in chapter 5 of Matthew’s
Gospel. Jesus of course wasn’t speaking
English, but Aramaic. And his words have
come down to us in the Greek of the Gospel writers. The Greek word translated here as perfect doesn’t
mean, flawless, mistake-free, 100% with no black marks. Rather its emphasis is on completion,
it's about realising a goal, about integrity and wholeness. In other words Jesus’ command to us is be
completely, be perfectly yourself, as God is completely Godself. David be as completely David as you can be,
Sylvia be as completely Sylvia as you can be, Reg be completely Reg as you can
be and so on.
Perhaps this sounds too easy.
Be yourself, instead of be perfect could be a cop out, or a recipe for complacency. But remember the context. These words are addressed to us as
Christians, as people who are blessed by God, (remember how Jesus began his
sermon blessing us 9 times over in the beatitudes). As Christians we have a new identity as a community whose life is rooted and grounded in
God’s love, and as people who can be salt and light to the world around us. We may be small in number, but if we are true
to ourselves, true to our blessedness, then we can transform lives.
But the challenge is to remain true to our Christian identity,
to remain rooted in God’s love, in a world in which there is so much evil and
violence and greed. It is that challenge
that the rest of our Gospel reading addresses.
Jesus speaks of turning the other cheek, going the extra
mile, loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you. None of these are about being a doormat and
giving in to evil. None of these mean
that if you are being abused you should stick with it and tolerate the abuse. On the contrary they are all about resisting
evil, but doing so in a way that robs evil of its most dangerous power, which
is the ability to provoke a response from us which is itself evil. That is how the contagion of evil spreads,
that is how it can drag us away from our identity and integrity as Christians,
and once it does that we are beaten.
Jesus shows us a better way.
Not giving into evil, but challenging evil with love and integrity. Jesus says if you are struck on the right cheek,
offer the left cheek. A blow to the
right cheek was a backhanded blow, and that is an insult, it is how a soldier
would strike a prisoner or a slave, a non-person, someone with no status. To respond to such a blow by offering your
left, is firstly about refusing to meet violence with violence, but it is also
insisting that the person hitting you sees you as a person, as an equal. Your assailant is treating you as an object,
but you insist on connecting with them as a person. Hatred and disconnection are where evil
thrive, love and relationship are God’s way, and the only way that is strong
enough to overcome evil.
Cynics would say that the way Jesus teaches, this sort of quietly
subversive non-violence, is idealistic and impractical. The evidence shows the reverse is true. Whether it is Gandhi’s campaigns of
civil disobedience in India, or Martin
Luther King’s struggle for civil rights in the USA, or the protestors in Tahrir
square bringing down President Mubarak, people who have resisted evil without
resorting to evil achieve so much more than those who allow themselves to be
drawn into a cycle of violence.
We may never find ourselves in situations as dramatic as these, but every day of our lives we will encounter little unkindnesses, little
hurts, little injustices. And we will
have to choose how we respond, whether we are unkind or cold to the person who
has hurt us, or whether we treat them with love and respect, whether we are
self-righteously angry about some injustice, or whether we are content to name
it for what it is, and then to move on.
These many seem trival matters in themselves, but cumulatively
they have a big effect, they shape who we are, and only one way is Christ’s
way, only one way is perfectly true
to our identity as children of God.