Читать книгу Forgiven and Forgiving - L. William Countryman - Страница 13

Someone may be thinking, “Wait a minute. This is that New Age I'm-OK-you're-OK stuff. Doesn't Jesus say that we're supposed to be perfect in the way God is perfect?” Yes, Jesus does tell us to be perfect. Let's think a bit about what that means. What is your idea of perfection—the kind of perfection that Jesus might be summoning us to? Is your picture of perfection a kind of sculptured or crystalline beauty, with every molecule locked permanently in place? Or is it the more haphazard and fleeting perfection of a handsome tree or dog or deer or flower?

Human perfection has to be more like the latter—the organic perfection that grows over time and is never absolutely without flaw. Human beings aren't born full-grown. Even Jesus had to grow “in wisdom and stature and favor with God and with human beings” (Luke 2:52). As we've already said, that kind of growth doesn't happen without mistakes and missteps along the way. In fact, that's how much of our learning takes place. Human perfection is messy perfection; it's trial-and-error perfection.

Our standard of perfection needs to be appropriate to our human reality. It's pointless to expect human beings to exhibit the regularity of a perfect quartz crystal. We couldn't do it, no matter how much effort we poured into it. It's unnatural to us from the ground up. And even if we could achieve it by some incredible feat of will, it would be an odd and unsatisfactory sort of perfection, wouldn't it, if it had to be maintained at such a cost? You don't imagine that it's an effort for God to be perfect, do you? If it were, God wouldn't be perfect.

Our perfection must be something natural to us. Even if it is an effort for us to attain, it must not ultimately be an effort to maintain. Our perfection should ultimately fit us like an old shoe. It will be a state of perfect humanness, not a state of stressed-out, pseudoangelic overachievement. Our human perfection is something we grow into. It's our true maturity. In fact, in the New Testament, the Greek word that we translate as “perfect” (teleios) really means something more like “mature.”

If we look more closely at Jesus' call to perfection, we find that it actually focuses on something that may not have been central to our previous ideas of perfection—divine or human. It focuses not on being meticulously good or always in the right or unfailingly correct. There's not a word in it about inerrancy or infallibility. It focuses, rather, on love and generosity, even toward our enemies:

“You've heard that it was said, ‘You are to love your neighbor—and hate your enemy!’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become children of your father in the heavens, because he makes his sun come up over evil people and good and sends rain on righteous people and on unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you earned? Don't even the tax collectors do the same thing? And if you welcome only your kinsfolk, what are you doing that's special? Don't even the Gentiles do the same thing? So, you are to be perfect the way your heavenly father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:43-48)

That's the perfection Jesus calls us to—an overflowing of human feeling, of human generosity toward one another. And that generosity isn't even something we produce on our own. We get it from God—from the ultimate, transcendent generosity that created us in the first place and keeps befriending us even when we don't particularly deserve it and goes on forgiving us time after time. Human perfection, according to Jesus, means sharing in God's extraordinary, forgiving generosity.