Perfectly Free To Be

“You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”    Matthew 5:48


What’s perfection? When something works, it’s perfect. The better it works, the more perfect it is.  

Perfection equals success.  But, success is relative, and certainly not permanent.  What’s perfect in one situation will not necessarily be perfect in another, and even the things that are perfect in that situation aren’t perfect forever.  

Look at Kodak.  Look at Blackberry.  Perfect business models that failed to adapt and evolved into a perfect mess.  

Perfection if it exists at all, exists as possibility and must continually evolve in response to ever changing circumstances.  

So, if God is perfect (I wonder how high a priority that is for God, really) it’s perfection on a sliding scale.

For example, God is perfectly free, and if God is perfectly free, God is perfectly free not to be perfect.  

Perfection is not an attribute that describes God as much as God defines and describes perfection.

So what in the world does it mean to be perfect as God is perfect?  Could you be? And would it even be worth it if you could?  

I think with some sadness for all the people who went home from church on Sunday deflated because they knew perfection like this was impossible, or worse, those who went home with insufferable people who thought it was not only possible but they’d already achieved it.  

If God is perfect, it’s only insofar as God is perfectly God.  And we are perfect when we are true to our highest selves, which is another way of saying being true to who God created us to be.  

What does that look like?  That’s what Jesus is telling us.  Not mindlessly following rules, or traditions, or doctrines.  Not judging others.  Not condemning those who are different.  Not demanding an eye for an eye.  Not even in striving to be perfect.  

It looks like turning the other cheek when struck.  Returning good for evil.  

Being perfect as God is perfect means clearing away the clutter, the pride, the ego, all the false ideas we have about ourselves.  Dropping all the baggage, all the posturing, all the brinkmanship and all the games that all too quickly come to define us.  

It means in short, renouncing everything that makes turning the other cheek so difficult and reclaiming the self that is the image of God, declared good in all its imperfection since the beginning of creation.  

This is who we truly are.  This is who we should strive to become.