“You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Mt 5:48
Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp to be opened. It was basically a forced labour camp. Today it is open to the public. In this memorial site, there are different churches and a synagogue that have been built. What impressed me most during my visit to the memorial site was the Church of Reconciliation. The peculiarity of this church is that its structure/architecture has no right angles. The irregular shape is a symbolic protest against the orderly layout of the camp in which all the buildings are set in perfect array. As I was leaving the memorial site, I thought, an exaggerated sense of order could be a sign of neurosis. And it could be life-threatening.
In the gospel text of today, as Jesus continues his ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ he reiterates, “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). In other words, Jesus is inviting us to imitate God himself, and in the words of the Evangelist Matthew: to be perfect! What does Jesus mean? What does ‘perfection’ mean?
It is so easy to mistake perfection for legalistic order. In an attempt to be perfect, many fervent people could become overly obsessed with maintaining order in themselves and in others. These are the ‘saints’ who are difficult to live with. Such people tend to become so intolerant of others in the Christian community; they pretend to know absolutely what Christian life is all about; and they reduce Christian life to a set of laws and disciplinary procedures. Actually, examining myself I see such tendencies in myself. And this is a temptation to reduce the deep principles proposed by Jesus to some easy rules and regulations.
One of the objectives of mathematicians and scientists throughout centuries has been to discover constants in the universe (like pi). These constants, including laws of nature, have been used to argue for the presence of predictable perfection in the universe. While this is true in many aspects of the physical world, random processes and unpredictability are also part of the nature of the universe we live in. (I do not want to go into the whole science of Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty!) In any case, these random processes are not disorderly and purposeless. For instance, the same random process in cell division that is responsible for triggering the multiplication of cancerous cells is also responsible for mutations that keep the process of evolution going. In other words, even in the physical world, perfection does not necessarily imply obedience to the so-called ‘laws of nature’. Beauty in nature is not always governed by symmetry and order. Most trees and flowers, (except those that are produced in the greenhouses in Kenya), defy perfect symmetry; and yet they are beautiful. When I look at the acacia trees in the savannahs of East Africa, I know, a sense of balance does not necessarily flow from symmetric shapes, but from being deeply rooted!
So what does perfection mean? What does Jesus mean when he invites us to imitate the perfection of his Father?
Perfection is holiness
In line with the Jewish tradition that the Gospel of Matthew is attempting to safeguard, while also proposing a development, Mt 5:48 could be better understood in the light of what we hear read in the first reading of today from the Book of Leviticus. Jesus seems to echo the words that are already found in the Torah: “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2). Perfection then can simply be understood as holiness. Simple enough! Rightly so, the 2nd Vatican Council spoke about “the universal call to holiness.” That is, holiness is a task and a gift extended not just to some special people in the church, but to all followers of Jesus. In other words, ‘call to holiness’ is a simple expression of the injunction of Jesus: “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
But what is holiness, anyway? Again, the understanding of holiness runs the risk of falling into the vicious cycle of discipline, order, and obedience to law. I would like to understand holiness in terms of wholeness, integration, health or wellbeing. God is holy, because he is complete and whole! While talking about the growth of Jesus during his adolescence, the Evangelist Luke would summarise it in a simple, but a deep, sentence: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man” (Lk 2:52). Here I see Luke talking about the growth of Jesus in the four aspects of the human person: intellectual, physical, spiritual and the socio-emotional dimensions. To me, growth in these four aspects is what human holiness consists in. And of course, this growth is a process and a life-long task.
Perfection is compassion
Closely related to this, and not much different from the understanding of perfection as holiness is what we see in the Lukan version of the injunction of Jesus that we are reflecting on: “Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate” (Lk 6:36, NJB) or as some other translations have it, “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6:36, RSV).
And what is the compassion of God? Matthew elaborates this in the gospel text of today: “for he causes his sun to rise on the bad as well as the good, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike” (Mt 6:45).
In the Kingdom of God that is built on compassion, there is a loving tolerance of disorder and even evil, at least until the right time: the weed is allowed to grow with the wheat (Mt 13:24-30); the tree that has not borne fruit yet is given another opportunity to grow and become fruitful (Lk 13:6-9). And people are rewarded in the Kingdom of God, not according to retributive justice, but on the basis of sheer generosity (Mt 20:1-16). The apparent randomness in this decision making process (where the last will be first) is only directed by compassion.
This is the perfection that we are invited to imitate. I would have found it easier to follow some clear-cut rules in my life. But Jesus tells me that perfection lies beyond rules, because compassion is life-enhancing. And I find this challenging!