Blessed Imperfection

Scripture: Matthew 5

Chapter 5 of Matthew's gospel is a remarkable document.

Biblical scholars have said that it expresses Jesus's main ethical teachings. It includes the Beatitudes, in which Jesus declares the special blessings that fall upon the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who suffer persecution for their faith. It commands us to forgive and to be generous. It instructs us not to hide our light but to let it shine before others.

Chapter 5 is a densely packed text. It is so rich and relentless in its moral authority that some scholars have suggested that Jesus probably did not say all of these things on the same occasion. They speculate that Chapter 5 is a compilation of teachings that Jesus offered at different times. And, indeed, it is difficult to imagine anyone absorbing all of this ethical instruction in one sitting.

But Chapter 5 is remarkable not just for its richness and complexity but also for the dizzyingly high expectations it sets for us. Jesus tells us that it is not enough for us to refrain from killing; we must not even get angry at our brothers and sisters. It is not enough for us to follow conventional notions of generosity; we must give to anyone who asks of us. It is not enough for us to put aside our desire for revenge; we must offer our right cheek to the one who slapped the left.

Then, as if these commands were not overwhelming enough, Chapter 5 ends with this daunting directive: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Some contemporary philosophers of ethics--such as Kwame Anthony Appiah--have argued that if we want to develop a workable moral theory then we have to pay attention to human psychology. It does us no good, they contend, to formulate ethical principles with which real people cannot comply. On reading Chapter 5, we might wonder whether Jesus has fallen into the exact error that those philosophers condemn. After all, who among us never gets angry, never thinks a lustful thought, always gives everything away on demand, consistently goes the extra mile, and so on and so on? Who among us is perfect--or holds out any hope of becoming so?

In light of our conspicuous imperfections, we might wonder whether this text, with its extraordinary demands and aspirations, has any relevance for us. I think that it does. Indeed, I believe that this text has embedded within it two profound insights into human behavior that are critical to the success of our efforts to lead better lives.

The first insight is that, left to our own devices, we will tend to aim low and then wallow in self-satisfaction over having hit the easy target we set for ourselves.

In this respect, it is helpful to remember that in Chapter 5 Jesus is not just promoting a morality of high aspirations; he is also rejecting another, different kind of morality because he finds it insufficient. 

To understand what Jesus is getting at, it may be helpful to bear in mind a distinction made by the legal scholar and philosopher, Lon Fuller. Fuller distinguished what he called "the morality of duty" from what he called "the morality of aspiration."

The morality of duty, Fuller said, sets the minimum standards for behavior below which we may not fall. It tells us not to commit murder or to steal or to bear false witness. It is the ethics of the lowest common denominator, of regulatory compliance.

The morality of aspiration, in contrast, relates to the ideal behaviors toward which we should all strive. We might think of this as the morality of the Good Samaritan, who stops to help a stranger not because the law requires it but because his conscience compels him to do so. This is the ethics of the "better angels of our nature," to use Lincoln's words; it is the ethics of our farthest and most ambitious reach.

In Chapter 5, Jesus rejects the morality of duty as an adequate standard for behavior. Of course, satisfying the morality of duty matters and we should honor its prescriptions. But compliance with those expectations is a pretty modest demand to make upon ourselves. None of us hopes to have the eulogist at our funeral say, "He was a good man; he never killed or robbed anybody." We'd like to aim a bit higher than that.

In Chapter 5, Jesus draws us away from that legalistic, minimalistic, lowest-common-denominator, compliance-driven ethos and toward the ethos of God Himself. He calls out our complacency and self-satisfaction and unflinchingly tells us that they are not good enough. He pushes hard against the natural gravity of our hearts that pulls us down toward that comforting place called "the least we can do."  

Still, this leaves us with a problem. We might agree that we should try to exceed the basic requirements of the morality of duty. But why do we have to strive for perfection? Surely, some space exists between the extremes of "I never murdered anyone" and "I never even got angry at anyone." And isn't that the space where most of us spend most of our lives? In other words, wouldn't we do better to set our goals high but well short of perfection, where we're likely to meet with failure?

This brings us to the second great insight of Chapter 5, which is that the text does not appear to entertain the possibility that we will not succeed. Throughout Chapter 5, Jesus simply says "be these things" and "do these things," never accounting for the fact that we may fall short. Permit me to correct that: Jesus does not here account for the certainty that we will fall short, perhaps frequently, perhaps spectacularly.

It seems to me that there are only two ways to make sense of Jesus's silence on this point. One is to assume that Jesus was a giddy optimist who thought we could do whatever we put our minds to--an early iteration of those ridiculously buoyant self-help authors who offer us recipes made up of equal parts saccharine and denial. We can reject this out of hand as wholly inconsistent with the Jesus that we otherwise meet throughout the gospels.

The other possibility is that Jesus thought that there is some meaningful sense in which we will succeed even if we fail in our aspiration toward perfection. And I think this is, indeed, precisely what he had in mind. After all, the continual experiment of striving toward perfection and coming up short teaches us some things that Jesus clearly wanted us to know:

that we are not God;

that we must love ourselves despite our limitations;

that we are in no position to judge others because of their imperfections;

that the central component of our collective striving toward better hearts and a better world is forgiveness;

that in our imperfection and brokenness we will find things that might otherwise elude us: humility; meekness; mercy; compassion;

that it is in this striving that we become a blessing to others;

that is is in this striving that we are blessed.

Amen.