Trying to Be Perfect?
Matthew 5:48 In Context
After I gave the man this explanation, he began to weep as he experienced, for the first time since he had been a child, the freedom that the text was meant to give. Benjamin C. Shin is a hermeneutics professor at Biola University.
You mean I don’t have to be perfect?” That was the statement of shock and surprise an older man blurted out to me. “That’s what I said, brother. This verse needs to be seen in its proper context, and then it can be correctly understood.”
The man stood there, shaken by the new insight and, at the same time, very relieved. The statement in question was found in Matthew 5:48 which reads, “Therefore, you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (NASB). He had understood this verse all of his life to mean that we have to be flawless or sinless. This interpretation seems to be the plain meaning of the text, and yet it also seems unbelievable and unachievable. What this man was experiencing was a feeling of continuous failure and defeat. But could it be that all of this was unnecessary due to the fact that this may not have been the meaning of the text at all?
This verse is contained in a larger unit of the Gospel of Matthew known as the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5-7. In this section, Jesus is teaching the disciples about a new kind of living that shifted the focus from the externals of religion to the internal reality of their relationship with God. These Jewish people were very familiar with, and bound by, the teachings of the Old Testament Law. Yet, Jesus astounds them with his statement in Matthew 5:20: “unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees, ... you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus’ masterful teaching hooks the audience with a familiar quotation from the Law, and then he shocks them with a deeper and newer meaning. For example, in verse 21, Jesus begins with this familiar statement: “you have heard the ancients were told, you shall not commit murder ...” This statement grabbed them because it was a direct quotation from the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:13. But then Jesus goes one level deeper as he says in verse 22, “but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty in the court.” This probably shocked the people because now they all felt incriminated by the fact that they had all been angry before. Jesus was not concerned with the external of the law, but was more concerned with the heartfelt attitude that would be equal to the intent of the Old Testament quotation.
This lesson was followed by other important topics such as adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation and, finally, loving one’s neighbor. These teachings all follow the same pattern of a quotation from the Law that leads to a twist in which Jesus addresses a heart attitude. This brings us to our contextual problem of Matthew 5:48.
The antithetical teaching began in verse 43 where Jesus says, “you have heard that it was said, ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” He is quoting here from Leviticus 19:18, which was familiar to the Jewish audience. He then spins the lesson again by asking them to love their enemy!
This is where 5:48 comes into play. When Jesus asks them to be perfect, He wasn’t asking them to be sinless. He was asking them to be fully loving in their approach to those who might be enemies. A closer look at the word “perfect” shows us that it can also convey the idea of being complete. Jesus was trying to teach these Jewish people to be perfect or complete in their love for their enemies (i.e., the Gentiles) and thus reflect the total love that God has for people. He was simply asking them to consider how God loves all people as seen in the examples of verse 45 in which it says that “He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” God is not biased against people but “perfectly” loves people — even those who may be unlovable or considered to be enemies.
After I gave the man this explanation, he began to weep as he experienced, for the first time since he had been a child, the freedom that the text was meant to give.
Benjamin C. Shin is a hermeneutics professor at Biola University.
© Biola University 2005