‘Be purple!’ – and other unhelpful commands.
by Jarrod McKenna
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” -Matthew 5:48
Sitting with this text, what question arise for you? Here are some that I have heard after teaching and workshopping it with many people:
· When Jesus tells us to ‘be perfect’ are we commanded to be something we can’t?
· Is this some cruel trick from a mean god that sets us up to fail?
· Did Jesus have it all wrong about the God he called Abba and in fact when we ask for bread god does give us a stone?
· Is this just a punitive god having a laugh at the fact we are not created to be perfect yet we are commanded be so?
· Does this god just have dependency issues and this is his way of keeping himself in the picture by making us feel guilty that we weren’t created angels so we turn to him?
· Are we told to be perfect just to drive home the fact that we suck but god has ‘magic grace salve’ that can make us feel better about being created to suck?
· Would it have been just as useful if we were commanded “Be purple as your heavenly Father is purple?” because both are impossible?
The Logs in our Eye: The Impractical Paradigms
This kind of reading of Christ’s teachings, although exaggerated here, is more common in our churches than we might think. ‘The Impractical Paradigm’ I see falling into two camps. Both treat Jesus’ commands as ‘ideals’. I find it interesting reflecting on my journey and the different churches I’ve been a part of and which camp they are flavoured with: 1. The “must do” camp. The ‘must do’ camp read Christ’s teachings as legalistic must do to earn God’s love and show we are “real Christians”. This group is not restricted to quietist sects but can also be found in ‘social-justice-Christians’ types 2. The “can’t do” camp. The ‘can’t do’ camp reads Christ’s teachings as insufferable ideals that make us realise we need grace cause there is no way we can do what God asks. This group is not restricted to evangelicals but liberals as well (who some-times think Jesus mistakenly thought it was the end of the world and that’s why he said to live such unrealistic things that we can now disregard.)
Both of these readings produce fruit that is out of keeping with the good news of the reign of God:
a) Both these readings can lead to joyless, death-dealing burdens that make discipleship oppressive or irrelevant and both are impotent.
b) Leads to a distorted punitive image of God that looks nothing like our Lord Jesus.
c) They also can lead to self-focused Christians. The focus on both these readings is either my perfection or my depravity. It’s no wonder our churches are struggling with rampant consumerism. We’ve had Jesus sold to us as a product for, what Dallas Willard would call, ‘sin management’. We’ve been told the gospel is all about me(!) instead of the gospel being about God’s gracious deliverance in Christ by the in-breaking of the Kingdom.
d) Both readings are individual and not communal in focus. Both often see salvation as something separate from a people and don’t read the Sermon on the Mount primarily as the practices of a people supporting one another in the alternative to their former cycles and patterns of the world.
An alternative reading: The Grace Participation Paradigm
One of the first empowering things we can do is ask about the context of the passage, what’s the agenda of the writer of the gospel (cause it’s often not the agenda of the preacher). In the context in that part of Matthew 5 is Jesus’ teaching on enemy-love. Jesus is inviting us to proactively participate in God’s transformational love.
Jesus is saying God’s love is all inclusive not like those who only love their friends or family. Jesus is saying God’s love is unfailing in its action upon all our lives regardless of who we are or what we’ve done. Just as the sun is unfailing and indiscriminate in it’s rising on the evil and the good or the rain unfailing and indiscriminate in its falling on the just and unjust. So too is God’s gracious love acts upon us all. God’s love is so radically and actively inclusive and all embracing even while we were enemies of God, God has taken the gracious action of sending his Son that we can be reconciled. And we are empowered by the Spirit to participate in God’s ‘enemy love’ and therefore participate in the ‘Kingdom’; that is God’s revolution, which is nonviolently transforming not just us personally, but all of creation.
In relating to our enemies in the way God has related to us we faithfully witness to God’s chosen One and chosen Way, Jesus the nonviolent Messiah. If taken seriously this will mean not trusting in our enemy’s goodness but in the power of resurrection and God’s love that conquers all. As Lee Camp would say, “…this is not some naïve utopian dream that if we be nice to them they’ll be nice to us. That might work in Barney’s World (the purple dinosaur known for hugging kids and singing songs) but if we love with the very costly love seen in Christ we can expect to be treated by what has yet to be redeemed like he was.”
Not only has Jesus saved us from the vicious cycles of what has not been transformed, this grace empowers us to take part in God’s revolution “on earth as in heaven” which has broken into history in the person of Jesus. Black Baptist minister and Civil Rights hero Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his live witnessing to the nonviolence of Christ in striving for an end to the unjust war he was living through, an end to the poverty in slums of America and around the world and an end to the treatment of black people as second class citizens, used to repeatedly say, “no one is free if they fear death.” This is the irony of loosing our lives in the gospel. Now that we’ve faced our fate as people of God’s love in a world of violence, our lives are now free to be parables of God’s love. Particularly by the way we relate to those we might otherwise exclude.
Then we get to verse 48 in chapter 5 of Matthew’s Gospel. “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” For a Jewish audience it’s clearly a reference to Leviticus 19:2 “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy”. It is clearly a call to Imitatio Dei (To imitate God) but what is this God like that we are to imitate?
Many theologians have moved from reading Plato and Aristotle and have returned to verse 48 and have read into the word “perfect” the Greek idealism of the philosophers. Many liberal scholars today want to pass Jesus off as a wisdom teacher like the Cynics and say he’s teaching us to have the moral perfectionism of this stagnant Greek deity that functions as an ideal some where off in the distance. This however is completely foreign way of thinking about God for Jesus if we are going to take his context (remember “a text without a context is a sign your being conned”) and therefore his Jewishness seriously.
It would hardly make sense for Jesus to be criticising how pagans (non Jews) include only people like them in who they love in verse 47 and then in verse 48 to extol pagan ways of thinking! The word translated perfect in Matt.5:48 is teleios meaning ‘having reached its end’ or ‘complete’. This is why biblical scholars like Glen Stassen are suggesting Matthew 5:48 can more helpfully be translated, “Be complete [in love] as your heavenly Father is complete [in love]”. Not only is it practical it fits the context of the passage with much more integrity than any weird command to be something we can’t (like be purple!!). It also fits with Luke’s teaching on loving our enemies were the crescendo is “be merciful as your Father is merciful” or “be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.”
The Grace Participation Paradigm: A Pratical Holiness
For the Pharisees holiness was a matter of excluding. Excluding the prostitute, excluding the leper, excluding the tax collector, excluding the demon possessed and the unclean. Many of us have seen in churches today where people that are pushed to the margins of society are also kept at the margins of faith communities. Yet in Jesus we see a God who includes zealot and tax collector, Greek and Jew, slave and free, female and male. All that others excluded in the interest of “holiness”, Mathew and Luke both suggest that holiness is transfigured in Jesus. The practice of enemy-love is the practice of the holiness of God’s revolution or ‘Kingdom’, were outsides are not shunned but welcomed, held, and healed in transforming ways. Jesus provides for us a ‘grace participation paradigm’ were though we are sinners God’s unfailing love shines and rains on us and we are invited to live God’s grace in how we relate to all others, to be complete and all inclusive in transformational love just as our God is. Instead of killing, hiding, or suffo-cating what is impure, weak or dreaded by us in ourselves, our churches, in our communities and in our world, God holds all of it to be transformed. Even us. And we are not just saved from our old ways we’re saved into a people who by God’s grace are invited into the dynamic deliverance that is participation in God’s gracious reign, or Kingdom.
The good news of Jesus is that new life is found in not “must do” or “can’t do” but that “God does” though us what we were created for by God’s grace! Desperately our world living through this unjust war and the destruction of God’s good earth at a rate never before seen in history needs people who embody such a fearless, redemptive, “perfect” love.
Jarrod McKenna is the co-ordinator of EPYC –Empowering Peacemakers in Your Community. Jarrod says ‘The above are some frameworks EPYC has developed for Christians to unpack how they have experienced Christ’s teachings being taught. EPYC’s interactive workshops and retreats draw heavily on the biblical scholarship of a number of people including Lee Camp, Walter Wink and Glen Stassen all of which I recommend if wanting to explore this deeper. Here ends the ads’.
I love Walter Wink’s re-view of how the people of Jesus day would have understood the three forms of reacting to violence – to which you allude, Jarrod. I just search ‘Walter Wink and Matthew 5’ and get to see how many people are being turned on by the concept of Jesus third way, not fight not flight but active non-violence. I talk about it whenever I can and can see people who have willingly taken the sting on both cheeks starting to do a rethink.
And the real challenge for me has been to live this out in my own life – to everyone who touches me, whether their touch is light or heavy. It’s a different world, thankGod.