So, be perfect
“Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.”
Perfection conjures up images of a perfect diamond, a perfect gymnastic performance score, the perfect dinner, or the perfectly written reflection. Most of the time, perfection is beyond our reach due to limitations in our skills, training, opportunities, or determination.
What would perfection look like to God? In the strictest sense, one would have to be able to reply, “I am” to the question, “Are you the Christ?” This suggests that we will never attain perfection.
So, what can we do?
Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
2 Corinthians 8:1-9
Matthew 5:43-48
Today’s gospel is one of 25 distinct teachings from Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of the second year of his public ministry. These teachings include the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer, so there was a lot of information to wrap one’s thoughts around.
This section is often titled “Love of Enemies” and immediately follows the “Teaching About Retaliation” . . . you know, the one about “turn the other cheek.” So, a LOT of guidance is being presented, and hopefully, you are picking up the most important points.
Jesus starts this section by saying: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” [Matthew 5:43]
That seems right to me. Pretty much baked into the definition of enemy. Early Jewish teaching from Leviticus puts it this way: Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your own people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD. [Leviticus 19:18]
The unsaid and possibly implied corollary is that if your problem is not with your “own people” and not “your neighbor,” you are free to take revenge, cherish a grudge, and hate (not love) those who are not your neighbor.
Jesus has us considering a course correction in his next statement: “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” [Matthew 5:44-45]
He gives two examples of how light weight loving your own kind is: “For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?” [Matthew 5:46-47]
Jews pretty much hated tax collectors and pagans, but tax collectors loved those who loved them, and pagans would greet their own kind. The point Jesus makes is that one is not really going very far to show love only to those who love them or who are their brothers.
The final directive in the gospel reading is: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew 5:48]
How is this possible?
Perfection conjures up images of a perfect diamond, a perfect gymnastic performance score, the perfect dinner, or the perfectly written reflection. Most of the time, perfection is beyond our reach due to limitations in our skills, training, opportunities, or determination.
What would perfection look like to God? In the strictest sense, one would have to be able to reply, “I am” to the question, “Are you the Christ?” This suggests that we will never attain perfection.
I believe Jesus gave us a hint earlier in the reading. First, he offers himself up as the authority for what follows by asserting, “But I say to you...” Not, “it has been written” or “you have been told,” but this is my message to you.
Then he gives the new and improved commandment to “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” Before he gives some examples of God’s universal nature of sunrise and rain for all, Jesus finishes his sentence with the why part of the command, saying “that you may be children of your heavenly Father.”
This is the road to perfection. Be open to the will of God and accept his grace . . . be like children, innocent and trusting.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, known in English as the Little Flower of Jesus, or simply the Little Flower, was a French Carmelite who has been widely venerated in modern times. In her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, she wrote:
I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way – very short and very straight little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts [elevators] instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection ... Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow. On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less.
In her quest for perfection, she became more childlike, completely surrendering herself to Jesus. How do we do this today?
I found a more perfect reflection than my own, written by Fr. Peter John Cameron, OP, which can be found on the Aleteia website here:
The main trouble is that in trying to obey the Lord’s call to be perfect, we often go about it the wrong way. We buy into the lie that we become perfect by bringing our virtues to God, so that He can validate them. However, our attachment to our virtues prevents us from relying on God, the only one who can fulfill our capacity for perfection. That is the opposite of being perfect. When preoccupied with our goodness — “perfectionism” — we neutralize and nullify God’s goodness. We make mercy moot.
Then what should we do to become perfect? This: Bring God our weakness … our inability … our knowledge of our lack of goodness … our misery. Bring God the hopelessness we face apart from him. When we dare to stop trying to prove how good we are in ourselves … when we dare to rejoice in our very weakness, we are made perfect by God in the same knowledge of our imperfection. It is that humble acknowledgement of our real weakness which moves the Father to share his perfection with us.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s wisdom as a Doctor of the Church radiates in a poignant remark: Perfection seems simple to me: Perfection consists in doing God’s will, in being what he wills us to be. I see it is sufficient to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself as a child into God’s arms.
Just how is the heavenly Father perfect? St. Thomas Aquinas replies: The perfection of God consists in the most ample love of all people, both good and bad. It consists in gentleness, patience, moderation, and temperance of the appetites: the highest peace and tranquility of soul, so that no injury, wrath, or revenge can affect it; so that one is imperturbable and without passions.
We begin to be perfect when we believe that the Father loves us that way.
We are provided the perfect way to prepare for Holy Communion when at Mass we pray: Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed. And be made perfect.