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Introduction to Worship for 2/19/2017

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Matthew 5: 38–48

Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Some might take Jesus’ words to (wrongly) mean that perfection is a matter of gritting your moral teeth and “loving” a person who let you down or injured you so that God can heap blessings on your head for going so against your natural impulse to feel anger. However, in New Testament Greek, the term “perfect” here is teleios, meaning “unblemished, complete, finished, full-grown.” But how can we hear Jesus’ encouragement as anything but an insistence on the impossible?

The word perfection has many rich connotations throughout the Bible. Though the New Testament was written in Greek, Jesus used Aramaic, where the word for perfect (gmar) is closer to “ripe,” “fully flavored,” or “fully flowered.” Perfection involves a fulfillment of the potential a thing has within itself all along from the seed state. In Latin, the word means “completely formed or performed,” and the verb “to perfect” means “to bring to full development.” The Hebrew word for perfect, taman, also means something close to “mature,” “whole,” “complete.” In these older contexts, perfection is a dynamic process to which we surrender. We know we can’t bring about this maturity by ourselves, but have to be part of what constantly re-creates itself and moves toward balance and wholeness. Perfection could be redefined, then, as opening to the flow of the whole – which is the flow of divine love.

Let’s return, then, to what Jesus might have had in mind when he said to his disciples that they needed to love their enemies. God, who loves perfectly, sees “the enemy” as part of the field of awareness one calls oneself. Let’s try translating the phrase this way: “Be whole, be part of a loving motion toward completeness.” Or “Be in the flowing light of the Godhead,” or “Look at things from a perspective that intuits how all things are interconnected.” If we redefine the term this way, then love of the enemy might begin to issue from the heart without so much moral strain, and the enemy we are called to love could be ourselves.

Imagine a shift of consciousness in which we stop seeing the world in terms of self and other, me and you, them and us. If this perception could be sustained, then loving the enemy might not be a matter of just being nice to someone nasty. Jesus nudges his disciples to assume the viewpoint of a loving, all-compassionate parent. Such an act of identification with universal compassion is not impossible if in our deepest interiors we dwell in God and God dwells in us. Jesus’ statement, then, is that of a mystic, or one who has experienced directly this sort of oneness and begun to live out of it in a constant way.
—Susan McCaslin, from “Arousing the Spirit”, 2011, Copperhouse Publishing


Connecting Faith and Life

  • How does love issue from the heart of your faith community? 
  • How are you moving toward Christian maturity, showing compassion to all as God does?
  • What is needed for you to go beyond “what you have heard,” and live and be as Jesus teaches and embodies?
  • Where do you recognize the responses of your congregation to Jesus’ teaching?

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