A Year-Long Exploration of the Sermon on the Mount: Week 24

Chapter 24 – Perfect Love

 

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matt 5:48)

 

Thanks for the pressure, Matthew. God is perfect, so we must be perfect. There’s no way we can live up to that! We know we aren’t perfect; we will never be perfect. To err is to be human. Isn’t that how the saying goes? Do we really think that Gods expects us to be perfect? No. But God does expect us to love.

 

In this chapter, Addison Hodges Hart writes about the false idea that “perfect love” means we need to feel love for everyone. (p. 150) She discusses the impossibility of that idea but asks us instead to consider that God wants us to do good to all people, regardless of how we might feel about them. Not that this is an easy task to do, either. Being prepared to do good to all means having to acknowledge our prejudices and then put them aside for the needs of others, and to do good anyway. I cling to the hope that this is how people will act, especially if they are in any sort of position of leadership. I want to have hope that those in power whom I know to have bigoted ideas are able to compartmentalize their opinions from the person standing in front of them. We all have prejudices, but if we can’t even see the humanity before us, how will we ever learn to love perfectly?

 

In conjunction with these thoughts from Hart, Chiara Lubich reminds us that God’s love is free. (p. 152) Unlike the world’s love that is transactional in nature, expecting something as payment for being loved, God requires nothing from us to be loved and desires no payment of any kind. God doesn’t love us because we are good and perfect and deserving. God loves us even when we are not good and perfect and deserving. Ultimately, God’s love is transformational. If we allow ourselves to be loved without expectation, we can learn to love others in the same way.

 

This is the path to perfect love.