Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

“So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Perfection.  The word is so infused with strong, positive idealism that Jesus’ call to be perfect seems rhetorical; no one can become perfect…..especially perfect the way God is perfect! The point is driven home in today’s gospel with the impossibility of the Jesus’ injunctions:

“You have heard that it was said,

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.

When someone strikes you on your right cheek,
turn the other one as well.
If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic,
hand over your cloak as well.
Should anyone press you into service for one mile,
go for two miles.
Give to the one who asks of you,
and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.

“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

Couple this with last week’s gospel where Jesus said it was enough to feel lust and anger in order to commit sin under the Law. Indeed, the point is clear: no one stands justified by the Law before God. How, then, could Jesus follow this up with an injunction to be perfect “as your heavenly Father is perfect”? Is this just another layer of impossibility heaped upon his earlier pronouncement?

This gospel is situated in a section full of Jesus’ ethical teaching that extends from the Beatitudes in chapter five to capping off the Sermon on the Mount in chapter seven.  Interwoven with Jesus’ ethical exhortations, is the admonition to focus on seeking God, to seek the righteousness of the Kingdom first in your need and what is truly needed will be provided.  It is Jesus pleading with his disciples to focus away from the Law and on the Giver of the Law: God.

The true Law is the law of love. Jesus proclaims that “in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”  A compelling corollary to Jesus’ reply to the Scribes as to what the greatest commandment of the Law: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Fulfillment of the Law is only possible if it originates in the heart, not from a book. In the readings for today’s baptism, Ezekiel the prophet recounts the promise of God in relation to the Law:

“I am going to take you from among the nations and gather you together from all the foreign countries and bring you home to your own land. I shall pour clean water over you and you will be cleansed; I shall cleanse you of all your defilement and all your idols. I shall give

you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from

your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead. I shall put my spirit in you, and

make you keep my laws….”

The ethical demands of Christianity do not come from a book as a source of fulfillment; the Bible is essential for foundational training and inspiration, but it cannot simply be followed without the gift of discernment given as a gift at baptism. We must learn by practicing all of our lives to submit to the Law of Love, of the compassion God showed for his creation by entering into our suffering and resurrecting it to new life. We then, freely enter into the world of those who suffer around us and enter our own suffering, with the sure hope of the resurrection.  Our fleshy hearts were remade from stone because we need to feel the world’s joy and the world’s suffering as part of our spiritual journey seeking God, together, as a people living in the Promised Land of the heart.