Okay, Lord, this one seems impossible. “Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect,” our Lord confronts us. Oh, boy. How are we supposed to be perfect? That’s a tall order, taller when we think about how our faith celebrates our shared brokenness.
I suppose perfection for us shouldn’t be seen as flawlessness, but rather a type of completion. It should sound to us “Be complete as your Father is complete or whole.” Our Lord dares us to love completely, and asks can we do it?
This idea of God’s wholeness fits well, especially compared with the earlier part of the reading. Check out God’s examples—I absolutely love the repeated line, “You have heard that it was said…”
We can’t compartmentalize our lives. Our faith must inform all aspects of our beliefs. How we feel about our neighbors, the food we eat, the things we buy, the people we vote for, all have to be informed by our shared and centralized faith. I’m not suggesting these are all of equal importance, but certainly we should strive for a wholeness that God models for us in His love. Jesus’ extreme examples of passivity in the face of violence and compassion at the foot of our enemies are tough but needed in a radical God-like love.
In 2011 the world was shocked when a white supremacist murdered 69 children and staff at a summer camp in Norway. Trond Henry Blattmann’s seventeen year old son, Torjus, was among the dead. In interviews Mr. Blattmann repeated his desire that the country not reverse their strict anti-death penalty ruling and allow the murderer to live imprisoned. The father and plumber by trade simply said that taking his son’s murderer’s life would bring him “down the ladder of humanity. I don’t have the right to kill” (BBC News, 2015).
This is the radical love God is proposing. The people most in need of our love are those who deserve least. To love our families can be difficult. To love our human family seems impossible that we almost have to be perfect to do it, to offer up the bruised cheek or hand over the finest of tunics. I’m pretty sure I don’t have that type of love in me, so I’m going to pray to the whole of God to get it.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot