Jesus’ preaching can be pretty hair-raising sometimes. Just looking at a woman lustfully is adulterous. Simply calling someone a fool is murderous. However, the line that has always spooked me the most is, “Therefore you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Good luck with that. I can’t even get to work in heavy traffic without calling someone (or lots of someones) a fool, so perfection ain’t happening. Why does it feel as if Jesus is calling us to do something impossible?
Illustration by Keith Negley
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About a year ago, my family and I moved to a new house from the little Cape Cod my wife and I bought as a starter home. The dogs probably got the biggest upgrade, going from a postage-stamp fenced yard to nearly an acre with lots of trees (and attendant squirrels to chase). Our sons finally got separate rooms, and my wife got a bathroom she no longer had to share with the boys. I got a wood-burning fireplace. I tell my friends that this has initiated the lumberjack phase of my midlife crisis. I now own an axe and use it often.
Chopping firewood is hard work. Over time, as you learn which logs are going to take some extra effort, you get used to swinging the axe with ruthless efficiency. But every once in a while, you’ll set a log on the chopping block and the axe flies through it like you’re slicing butter with a hot knife. The difference? That log was rotten. It looked good on the outside, but the inside made the wood useless. You might say the log had no integrity.
The idea of being one thing on the outside and something else on the inside is what caught my attention in Jonathan Pennington’s article “A Biblical Theology of Human Flourishing.” This is how he understands the call to be perfect:
One of the key ideas—if not the key idea—in the Sermon on the Mount is “wholeness,” “completeness,” or “singular devotion.” For Matthew “the disciple is he whose dedication to God is total, single.” This emphasis on singleness or wholehearted dedicatedness … finds its clearest principled version in the paradigmatic statement in Matthew 5:48: “Be teleios as your heavenly Father is teleios.” To say that we must be teleios as God is to say that we must be whole. We must be singular in who we are, not one thing on the outside but another on the inside. The call to telios-ness in Matthew 5:48 and throughout the Sermon is the same call to “holiness” that we see throughout the Old Testament (and the rest of the New Testament)—not moral perfection, but wholehearted orientation toward God.
This is good news for me and every other 21st-century American. We tend to think being “perfect” means we’re blemish-free, straight-A students who constantly execute no-runs-allowed performances. But the command to “be perfect” is more about our orientation toward God. And in our imperfect world, that means being an honest person who takes responsibility for his or her life, including missteps. It’s more about Jesus’ injunction against being whitewashed tombs than about following the law to the last jot and tittle, even in our thoughts. In other words, what’s worse than being a sinner? Being a sinner who acts as if he isn’t.
That’s one reason Jesus reminds us that our Father is perfect—He’s the same through and through. He doesn’t change, and He doesn’t put on a show of goodness to hide some sinister inner workings. God reveals Himself without deception, hiding nothing. Yes, He was and is without sin, and that’s crucial—but what Jesus really wants us to emulate is God’s integrity, because we can’t copy His performance.
For us, striving for perfection is actually (and paradoxically) less about being perfect and more about being honest about our imperfection. This means, for example, acknowledging when we’ve hurt someone, owning what’s our fault, and apologizing. Or it might mean choosing not to serve someone else because we’re interested only in what we’ll gain from the relationship or how it will help us keep up appearances. When we’re one way on the outside and another on the inside, no one benefits.
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I know we’re probably the only family this happens to, but we occasionally get into arguments when trying to get out of the house on Sunday mornings. Someone doesn’t hop up from the couch to get dressed as fast as someone else would like. Then someone else says something snippy, thinking it will cool things down when their words are actually more like pouring gasoline on a fire. By the time we get into the car, everybody’s feelings are a bit scorched.
Then we get to church, and other families are there in their best clothes, looking as if they didn’t fight an epic battle all the way out the door and halfway across town. We sit down in our pew feeling like the most dysfunctional family on earth. True blue-ribbon winners.
So yeah, sometimes on Sundays I find it extraordinarily difficult to worship.
Maintaining this facade of perfect Sunday-best Christianity is exhausting. There’s no integrity in it, and I for one would feel impossibly lonely if I had to keep it up week in and week out. I’d replay the morning’s arguments in my head, convinced I didn’t belong among the other families who seem to have it together. Thankfully, Jesus calls me to the better way and offers the medicine for my spiritual illness. I need to strive for honesty and to make sure every part of me is in alignment. Just as God reveals who He really is at all times, so should I.
Thankfully, we’re blessed to know other families at church, and when we get together, they talk about how their Sunday mornings (or Saturday evenings, school nights, or evenings after the kids go to bed) really go. Nobody I’ve met has a “perfect” family life. I’ll confess that I don’t always like doing it, but listening to those stories and telling someone else how things really are on the inside is an essential ingredient to integrity. That’s how the light gets in—and light is where healing starts. Whether it’s frightfully loud or deadly quiet, we’re all enduring sin and conflict in our own ways. We’re all relying on the Lord’s grace and mercy to abound, and doing that is so much easier when you’re not waiting alone.
I can report that, to date, confessing that I lost my temper with my kids has not healed me of my anger. I’m still more like that rotting log than I care to admit. On the contrary, sometimes it feels as if all the light does is show just how extensive the decay actually is. I have noticed, though— especially on the evenings when our small group gets together—that being around others who know our family and hear us out in our hurts and frustrations can completely turn a wretched Sunday around.
A true brother or sister doesn’t measure you by who you are on the outside or even on how authentically you reveal who you are on the inside. They don’t measure you at all because they know your integrity comes from the same place theirs does: from God’s mercy poured out through His Son. And each time I’ve received mercy from members of my small group, the weight of failure doesn’t feel so heavy in my heart. On those nights, I go home with far more peace than I showed up with.
