Be mature, therefore, as your heavenly Father is mature. Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward. (Matthew 5:48-6:1)
Perfection is a Greek concept, evoking the Platonic ideal. It suggests something unreachable, unattainable, unchanging, and removed from the mess of life. “Be ye perfect,” says Jesus, and when I hear this a little something within me dies. Perfectionism, self-flagellation and hypercriticism run deep in my family story, and so I wasted years worrying that I am not good enough, or doing enough, for God.
It led to all sorts of false pieties: because everything I did was for the sake of being seen to be good, right and true. These impulses were driven by a translation that told me to be perfect, and there was no reward at all. Instead, I became defensive and anxious.
Because I knew that, no matter how hard I tried, I could never be perfect. Perfection means flawlessness. Plastic is perfect, with no defects, no irregularities, no cracks. Yet I’ve always been eccentric; a bit cracked, some might say. I’ve often made mistakes and even hurt people at times. I’ve had to repent and fix things again and again; I’ve had to make hard choices about how I conduct myself and what I focus on. What, then, was I to think about Jesus telling me to be perfect?
It changed when I learned that the Greek word teleios, or ‘perfect’, can also be translated as ‘mature’—a very different concept. Maturity is interesting to me. I think about Jesus, and how he ‘grew in wisdom and stature, and in divine and human favour’ (Luke 2:52). He wasn’t dumped on the planet fully formed, delighting God with an eternal perfection that we can never emulate. Instead, being fully human, he lived and learned and grew and changed throughout his life.
To paraphrase Jenny Brown’s Growing Yourself Up, maturity looks like this:
- Keeping our emotions in line with our principles—“What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.” (Mt. 15:18)
- Focusing on our own behaviours rather than the actions of others—“Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, and not notice the log in your own?” (Mt. 7:3)
- Letting other people take responsibility for their own lives—“What do you want me to do for you?” (Mt. 20:32)
- Staying in relationship with people we disagree with—“Love your enemies.” (Mt. 5:44)
- Resisting pressure to change ourselves in order to be accepted—“Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt. 16:23)
Of course, none of us achieve these levels of maturity in every situation, and that’s fine. Maturity is not an end point, but a process and something to aim for. It comes about when we grapple with our principles, our tendencies, and our histories, and make choices about how we conduct ourselves. Maturity doesn’t produce brittle plastic people, but people who are grounded, who take responsibility for and know themselves, and who give others the room to grow. Mature people come in many shapes and sizes, ages and stages, but all are committed to lifelong growth.
“Be mature,” says Jesus; and these days I think of a nice, ripe cheese. A bit wrinkly on the outside, softening on the inside, responsive to time and the conditions around it. Something rich, aromatic, with distinct personality; something nourishing; something to share. A gift, perhaps, to the world. And I reckon that this is a metaphor worth living into: over time, to become deepened, softened, more complex, more loving, and ever more fully ourselves.
Shalom,
Alison
Emailed to Sanctuary 23 August 2023 © Alison Sampson, 2023. Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash.
Alison and the whale 