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.
Forgiving the Wrongs We Have Done to Ourselves
Don't be afraid to apply God's lavish forgiveness to yourself. Jesus, citing the words of the Torah, commanded us to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Now, if you do a bad job of loving yourself, your neighbor is not going to benefit much from that formula. That applies to forgiveness, too. If we are to have the resources to forgive others, we get them from God's forgiveness of us—and we do that by forgiving ourselves.
Extending forgiveness to ourselves is not a simple matter. Some of what we need to forgive is wrongs we have done to ourselves, and some of it is wrongs done to others. Some of the harm we have done was intentional and some of it was simply the awkwardness of a limited and blundering self that learns as it goes. Some of what we have done is easy to understand and forgive, some difficult.
Let's begin with the wrongs we do to ourselves. Part of our sinfulness consists in the fact that we forget to be loving toward ourselves. Sometimes that takes the form of deliberately denying ourselves what we most need: rest, friends, freedom to enjoy, to create, to be what God is calling us to be. We get the strange notion that God is somehow pleased by the sight of people rejecting the good gifts of the world around them—gifts that God created to be enjoyed. For a long time (since around the second century), Christians have tended to treat the created order as if it were primarily a problem or a temptation rather than a gift. There is something wrong with that. Self-denial shouldn't be the ordinary, everyday stance of a religion that affirms the goodness of the creation.
Sometimes, of course, we deny ourselves for some larger, overarching purpose. Jesus even encourages that: “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself and pick up his cross and follow me.” But he goes right on to say, “Whoever will lose his life for my sake and the sake of the good news will be saving it” (Mark 8:34–35). The larger purpose must be a life-giving one. Mere self-denial for the purpose of punishing or depriving the self is wrong.
Sometimes we use high-sounding excuses when in fact we are denying ourselves merely out of indifference or because we have no real sense of how wonderful is this creature of God that bears the name “I.” Sometimes we deny ourselves because we want to punish ourselves for perceived imperfections or unworthiness. Sometimes we act as if we alone in all the world were of no worth and deserved no kindness. (It can be very satisfying in a melodramatic kind of way, but it's really a rather arrogant and narcissistic little drama.)
Sometimes we reject and harm ourselves in less obvious ways, by substituting superficial and misleading goods for the deeper ones that the soul longs for. In a quantified culture, that's easy to do. We measure worth in currency. We may try to substitute possessions for the security of a quiet soul. We may try to substitute company for friends, detached sex for intimacy, information for reflection, career for life. The number of people who reach their middle years and suddenly discover themselves to be empty inside is a good index of how easy it is to substitute the minor pleasures of career or the shopping mall for the deeper pleasures of the soul and spirit—and also a good indicator of the fact that it won't work forever.
For all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways, we shortchange ourselves. Then we look back at some later time and think, “Why did I do that, and what do I have left to show for it all?” We may become angry with ourselves—or deeply sad. We become divided within, so that we are both victim and oppressor. If we remember God's forgiveness at this juncture, we shall try to deal as kindly with ourselves as God does. Otherwise, life can easily become a continuously renewed cycle of reproach.
This sounds bad enough, but there is a still worse option—to deaden ourselves so that we don't have to deal with those unpleasant feelings. We draw a curtain over our distress, blame others for our emptiness, and seek relief in distractions and drugs. The problem with that approach is that life loses its joys along with its sorrows. The mere shoving under or drugging of emotion seldom accomplishes much. In fact, rejected emotions have a way of coming back in poisoned form at a later date. It's better to acknowledge the ways we have harmed ourselves, even at the cost of some pain, and ask how we can move on to a kinder and more productive habit of life.
For we don't have to get stuck in the distress. God is still calling you into friendship. You are on your way somewhere. You've stumbled along the way? Welcome to the human race. The wonderful thing is that, through forgiveness, God is able to take even our failures and turn them into raw materials for future growth. Think of it as a kind of spiritual recycling. Nothing gets lost, ultimately. Through the miracle of forgiveness, even our failures become the means of our spiritual maturation and the foundation of a priestly ministry to one another. They give us understanding of one another's sufferings and uncertainties. They enable us to stand alongside one another in the presence of God.
They also give us, within ourselves, a new certainty of God's goodness. How many hymns celebrate precisely this experience of God's reclaiming us! John Newton's “Amazing Grace” is the most familiar, with its joyful cry, “I once was lost but now am found!” Another hymn by an anonymous author, begins:
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me.
This hymn continues by casting us in the role of stupid, awkward, impulsive, wrongheaded Peter