Further down the road, a young man who wasn’t around for the Sermon on the Mount will ask Jesus, “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And this isn’t just any young person, your average twenty-something off the street. The man who approaches Jesus and asks this question is well-dressed, composed, and pious. He’s the sort of guy who doesn’t have to be told to go to synagogue, or say his prayers, or keep his fasts. He works hard, he pays his taxes, he makes his sacrifices at the temple. He’s exemplary, but Jesus doesn’t cut him any slack. “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?” the man repeats. Jesus looks at him, pauses, and shrugs: “You know just as well as I do. Keep the commandments: don’t murder, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t lie … you get it.” So the young man comes back at him, “Yeah, I get it. I know all that. I do all that. But isn’t there something big I could do – something that’ll put me head and shoulders above the rest – something that’s really hard to accomplish.” “Oh,” Jesus nods his head, catching on, “I see. Well, if you want to be perfect, you can sell everything you own, give it to the poor, and follow me.” And the young man is crushed. He turns and walks away. We have no idea what he ends up doing – but we do learn something else about him. The young man is crushed because he does, in fact, have a lot of possessions.
This story sticks, and it goes down in history as part of Jesus’ teachings on wealth. But Jesus hasn’t actually made a blanket statement here about what everyone should do with their things. What he’s done is put his finger on something that’s going to be hard for a person like this to do: give up his possessions. And to me, the interchange between Jesus and this guy is about much more than things. Just look at what the guy is asking Jesus – what more can I do? This is a story about success, accomplishments, striving to be the best. It’s a story about perfection.
When Jesus hits the nail on the head and asks the young man, “So you want to be perfect?” you’ve got to hear echoes of today’s Gospel reading and the baffling statement at its conclusion, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The type of perfection that Jesus is talking about here, in keeping with the whole Sermon on the Mount, is a kind of moral perfection, a term that most of us register and probably don’t have too hard of a time shaking off. We think about the morality we learned as kids: murder and theft we’re good on, but we don’t always honor our elders, or tell the truth, or refrain from gossiping or playing cards, or eating and drinking to excess. And those things, as troubling as they can be, don’t really keep us up at night. We understand that mistakes like that happen.
If you’re anything like me, though, there’s another kind of morality that you learned when you were growing up. Alongside not smoking and not swearing, you may have learned to excel. You may have learned to get good grades and be involved in good activities and make good connections in order to be rewarded with good opportunities. You may have learned that if you wanted something, all you had to do was try – and if you didn’t get it, you had to try harder. And some of us, like this young man here, learned to never stop, to never be satisfied. Once you accomplish something, you push on to the next level – our own version of ‘going the second mile.’ You could call this type of morality perfectionism, a whole movement in the direction of excellence, only perfection denotes a completeness, a maturity and wholeness and rest that is not a part of the young man’s morality.
Now, should we be 100% against this sort of striving for what is best? Well, yes and no. Personally, I enjoy working hard, and trying to improve. And I’m thankful for having accomplished certain things. I even know people who wish they’d been pushed more to succeed in life, or to develop high standards. A lot of you spend your time in communities where achievement and drive and accomplishment are the norm. And so you know that striving for perfection – or striving in general – can make people creative and productive, and can open the mind to new thoughts and new experiences. It can have a positive impact on the whole world. One researcher’s striving for perfection, for instance, might result in a vaccine or a miracle drug.
So what’s wrong with perfectionism? Well, like in the young man’s story, it can be the thing that trips us up. It can be the thing that gets between us and God. Because unlike wealth, it’s a lot harder to take away behavior that becomes so ingrained in us. Even if we had the most gracious parents in the world, we learned to settle for nothing less than perfection in school, in peer groups, in the workplace, even at church. And its drawbacks are serious.
For one thing, it makes the world a pretty unforgiving place to live in. We find ourselves always thinking, always doing, always working toward. Again, this can be exciting. But it doesn’t allow us to be still, to listen, to notice where love is and where love needs to be. It doesn’t allow us to make mistakes. And it causes us to forget that we are already holy, and that being holy is our chief purpose in life. We are created to house the flame of God’s love within our hearts and tend that one fire, the fire of God’s Holy Spirit. We are meant to experience the creative, productive, exciting freedom of grace, which cannot be achieved because it’s already been given to you, for nothing.
Furthermore, the kind of moral perfection we’ve been taught to seek is not the sort of perfection that Jesus is talking about. Jesus’ ‘perfection,’ is nothing that we can attain on our own. It belongs to God – be perfect as God is perfect – and it consists in loving as God loves. It’s not a morality of perfection, but of love. This love is marked by humility: love your enemies, love people you don’t know, pray for those who hurt you, give unconditionally. And frankly, humility – complete self-giving – is a hard thing to come by when you’ve been trained to be perfect. Because there’s a lot of pride, a lot of competitiveness, and a lot of dependence on self that you’ve got to cultivate in order to accomplish certain things in this world. But just as Jesus asks the young man to give up his possessions, God asks us to di-vest ourselves of … our selves … and start looking at our lives not as projects, but as these holy temples, these sacred havens of God’s spirit, these chosen subjects of God’s love.
The young man walks away from Jesus, hanging his head, because he can’t imagine what happens after he gives up his morality. He doesn’t know how to be a holy temple, and he’s not sure he wants to figure it out. Jesus’ friends watch this poor guy go and turn to him, asking, “What was that about?” Jesus says these famous words, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for someone with a lot of things to enter the kingdom of God.” And you can hear him saying what we’ve just talked about. The young man’s particular challenge is going to be how he can disentangle himself from the trappings of his achievement, of his idea of perfect, in order to receive God’s perfect love. Jesus’ friends, knowing that they’ve got their own problems, their own entanglements, look about as optimistic as the young man did. And so he speaks again, more famous words, “You don’t do it on your own. You ask for help. For people to be free, for people to love like this is impossible. But for God all things are possible.”
Sermon preached by the Rev. Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on on Sunday, Feb. 20, 2011 at 8:00am, 11:00am, and 5:15pm.
(photograph from the town of Perfection, NC found at this blog:http://bydianedaniel.wordpress.com/)
